Five - The Hinterland of Zanzibar

Summary

The economy of Zanzibar, as we saw in Chapter 4, depended for threequarters of its value on commodities coming from a vast hinterland that extended halfway through middle Africa by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While we cannot here attempt a comprehensive exposition of the development of commodity production and trade throughout this region, it is necessary to define the extent of the hinterland of Zanzibar, and some of the factors and processes by which this area was commercially integrated with the coast and, through it, with the international economic system.

In the euphoria over what T.O. Ranger termed the ‘discovery of African initiative’ during the 1960s, African history was made to make a full swing from the pre-existing‘ external initiative’ interpretation of the colonial school. As regards the development of long-distance trade routes between the interior and the coast, E.A. Alpers went so far as to assert that they were established ‘exclusively through African initiative'. He himself examined the role played by Cisi ironsmiths among the Yao who may have pioneered the linkage between the regional trading network which had developed in the interior for the distribution of iron hoes, with that which had developed behind Kilwa, with the initiative naturally coming from the interior.1 A.D. Roberts proposed a more neutral theory which associated the development of regional trade in commodities of immediate usefulness in the subsistence economies of the interior with the fact that the raw materials, such as iron and usable salt, are fairly localised and scarce, and sometimes required specialised technology to exploit them.2 It is possible to postulate from this a series of such regional trading networks that could at various times and places be linked under different stimuli. Such an expanded network could have permitted the infiltration of specific exotic objects, as well as information about the demand for certain commodities, over long distances through a sort of relay system. Such a stage may have preceded the development of single trading parties venturing across the whole length of the route.