The Zimba and the Abrahamic faiths
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- 9 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Portugal arrived in East Africa (modern day Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia) in 1496 as part of their larger plan to take control of the Indian Ocean and so the spice trade. They quickly conquered the existing states of the Swahili coast, installed puppet rulers and built bases. From there they attacked India, Malaysia and Arabia, raiding up the Red Sea to threaten even Mecca itself. And from there they essentially ran a blockade of Islamic trade in the Indian Ocean, reducing how much traffic could flow into Islamic ports and diverting a lot of that trade to themselves instead.
By the 1540s, they were powerful enough in East Africa to save the Ethiopian Empire from destruction at the hands of the Somali Adal Sultanate (as discussed here) but their own position was relatively weak due to both a lack of men and resources and their massive unpopularity among their multi-faith subjects due to their Christian fundamentalism. Nonetheless they held most of the port towns in East Africa throughout the 16th centuries and 17th centuries, putting down any revolts against them. They even successfully defended their ports against both the Dutch in 1607 & 1608 and the powerful Malawi-based Maravi Empire in 1629. It was only the arrival of the Imamate of Oman in the 1690s (itself once a Portuguese subject) that saw the Portuguese forts destroyed and a new Muslim Empire rise from its ashes, what would become the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
But before all that, in the 1580s, Portuguese East Africa was faced with two major crises that threatened its existence. The first was a long rumbling one and the second seemingly came out of nowhere.
But before all that, in the 1580s, Portuguese East Africa was faced with two major crises that threatened its existence. The first was a long rumbling one and the second seemingly came out of nowhere.
The first was appeals by their Islamic and Jewish subjects for Ottoman assistance, which happened in Africa, India, Arabia and Southeast Asia. This had been happening since almost the first arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and had doubled when the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt in 1516 and then Yemen in 1527, thus giving them a route to the Indian Ocean. From there they aided the Muslim powers who opposed Portugal both in terms of rebels and neighbouring states, lending men to the Adal Sultanate in their attempted conquest of Ethiopia, to the Muslim states in India in their battles with the Portuguese in Diu and to Aceh in Indonesia.
But none of this was actually successful. Infighting between the Ottomans and their local Muslim allies marred both the campaigns in Ethiopia and India, meaning the two armies didn’t remain united and the Christians took advantage to win. The Ottomans were more successful at extending their own power, capturing Massawa in Eritrea and Basra in Iraq while the Portuguese were distracted. But their own offensives were unable to remove the Portuguese from the Persian Gulf with their major fortresses at Bahrain, Hormuz and Muscat remaining intact until the Persians and the Omani were able to capture them in the mid-1600s.
Whenever the Ottoman Empire had to choose whether to give more resources to the Indian Ocean front or the European front or fighting in Persia, it always chose the latter two. Ottoman troops in the Indian Ocean were working on a shoestring most of the time, not the least because most of their ships were in the Mediterranean and any ships in the Indian Ocean had to be built there. There were three major 16th century Ottoman proposals to construct what become the Suez Canal but it would have been an incredibly ambitious project and it was unlikely to ever happen. And given the famously tempestuous Ottoman court politics, politicians who did wish to push for more resources in that region often only had limited time before they were replaced by someone who didn’t.
Because of this, a lot of Muslim and Jewish requests for help against the Portuguese went unanswered by Istanbul. They were much keener on a peace with Portugal (though that hope died when the Spanish King took the Portuguese throne in 1580) than investing in war for the benefit of other Islamic states. Ottoman traders and corsairs operated in the Indian Ocean but normally only in small numbers. They didn’t need to invest more in it, even with the Portuguese holding a lot of land in the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman trade in spices and luxury goods was still larger than the Portuguese one because Muslim traders preferred to deal with them than Portugal. The Corsairs couldn’t defeat the Portuguese armadas but they didn’t need to, they just needed to draw them away from being able to embargo the existing Islamic trade.
It is with this agenda that Mir Ali Beg was sent to the Swahili Coast to undercut the Portuguese there. In 1581 he was given orders by the Pasha of Yemen to use his corsair fleet, (based in Yemen) to distract the Portuguese, while the Ottomans were fighting a brutal twelve-year war against Persia. He, like most Ottoman corsairs, was no match for the Portuguese Armada but used stealth to avoid them and attack their ports, sacking Muscat in 1581 and then sailing into Mogadishu in 1586 where, by displaying the Ottoman flag, he won the town’s alliance and its fleet. He then repeated this trick throughout 1586 in Mombasa, Pate, Lamu and Jugo, until of all of Kenya, only Malindi remained loyal to Portugal, and with his new fleet he captured a bunch of Portuguese merchant vessels.
Mir Ali Beg was not however, whatever he said, an agent of Istanbul. He was an agent purely of the Pasha of Yemen, and Istanbul had not only not been informed of their actions but had been flat out lied too with their fleet promised to only be used defensively. Like a lot of later European empires, Ottoman governors far away from home often ended up fighting wars without asking for permission to do so.
The problem with turning this loyalty among the Portuguese Islamic subjects in East Africa into conquest is corsairs could raid ships and then disappear, but if they wished to hold land they’d need to actually defeat a Portuguese Armada. And Istanbul couldn’t send reinforcements for that aim, as Yemen hadn’t told them this was happening and were instead lying about Portuguese attacks on Yemen to justify more support to them rather than to the front lines in Persia.
In 1587, the Portuguese returned in force to the Swahili coast and sacked the towns of Mombasa and Pate for their disloyalty before removing their fleet to their base in Hormuz to prevent the Ottomans reinforcing Yemen from Basra. In 1588, with the fleet elsewhere, Mir Ali returned to Kenya with the aim of fortifying Mombasa and turning it into an Ottoman base. He hoped to bring enough artillery and men to Mombasa that the Portuguese fleet could not break it as other Ottoman garrisons in the Red sea had successfully driven off Portuguese naval attacks in the past.
In March 1589, the Portuguese Fleet, still the largest and most powerful navy in the region, arrived at Mombasa to wipe out Mir Ali’s fort. There, surprisingly, they found that Mombasa was already under attack and the Ottomans were losing and didn’t have the men spare to focus on the Portuguese. The result was a quick victory for the Portuguese and the end of the Ottoman threat.
This surprising, and somewhat anticlimactic, result was because of the second major threat to Portuguese Power in East Africa in the 1580s. The Zimba.
The Zimba are something of a mystery in African history. They are a tribe of blood thirsty cannibals mentioned in João dos Santos book Etiopia Oriental for two major campaigns in the 1580-90s, after which they are never heard of again. Who they were, and what they did next has never been established, with some historians even doubting they existed, though I see no reason why the Portuguese would make them up. According to dos Santos, a small Zimba force marched up the Zambezi valley into Tanzania in 1589, where they sacked the Island of Kilwa (the capital of the pre Portuguese Swahili empire, the Kilwa Sultanate), ate its citizens and then continued into Kenya. In Kenya they attacked Mombasa, and forming a brief alliance of convenience with the Portuguese, wiped out Mir Ali’s Yemeni force there, before being turned back by the Portuguese when they tried to attack loyal Malindi. Three years later, a much larger force attacked into Portuguese Mozambique in 1592, where they won three major battles, killing and eating their Portuguese captives, before agreeing a white peace and retreating back into the interior in 1593 never to be heard of again (outside of a skirmish in 1597).
So who were they? Why did they launch these attacks in 1589, and why where they not heard of again after the 1590s? And what happens if they didn’t attack then?
Well, there’s two possibilities for that last one. Either the Portuguese fleet wins the siege of Mombasa, in which case nothing really changes or they don’t, in which case as soon as they leave Mombasa is going to take Malindi and secure an independent Swahili coast, thus preventing the Swahili inviting in Oman. This then makes Mozambique increasingly vulnerable; without reinforcements from Tanzania, the Dutch probably take it in 1607, which then removes both the Dutch campaign on Angola and, more significantly, the Dutch Cape Colony. So there’s no Boers, no Zanzibar, a much less successful Ana Nzinga, and a possibility that someone else is the first Europeans in South Africa. It would be a very different world. In the much shorter term, I would be curious as to how long Yemen could hide its new conquests before Istanbul worked out they existed and what the consequences of that would be.
Is that result likely, though? Probably not. The Portuguese had a good record in the Indian Ocean for a reason, it would be a closer thing without the Zimba but they still had a number advantage and loyal forces nearby in Malindi. Mir Ali's success was by avoiding the Portuguese, defeating them is a very different thing.
And if we are talking about a world without that Zimba campaign, we need to know how likely that is. So, who were they?
The general agreement is they were a people from Malawi. In 1967, Edward Alpers, Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, first proposed that the Zimba were probably a force from a sub-chief of the Maravi Empire, which would attack Portuguese Mozambique in 1629 and so the Zimba should be seen as the first signs of that upcoming storm. MDD Newitt, in 1982, went a step further and argued that the Zimba were one of a number of tribes to migrate into the region during the 1590s as part of a series of upheavals due to famines (this was after all during the Oromo migrations into Ethiopia) and that they probably all joined together to found the Maravi Empire. Jan Matthew Schoffeleers, in 1980, argued further that the upheaval in the area was a direct result of the Portuguese attempt to conquer the gold mines in the African interior from the Mutapa Empire in 1569, which stirred up the Maravi and led to their expansion and consolidation as an empire. According to Schoffeleers, the Zimba raid should be seen as less of an arrival of a new force into the region, such as the Europeans, and more of a sleeping giant waking up by Portuguese aggression against their old trading partners. He proposes that maybe the Zimba were escaped slaves or refugees who had offered themselves to the Maravi as troops during this time of conflict.
Eric Allina argued in 2011 that the reports of Zimba cannibalism should be seen within the framework of being appeals to the Portuguese from their African subjects for aid as they raided Portuguese subjects. Given this, there is reason for them to emphasise the new and terrifying aspect of these raiders, even if at least the Mozambicans among them were already familiar with them.
It’s hard to prove either way, but whether the Zimba were a people newly arrived in East Africa or one newly consolidating, they probably ended up as part of the Maravi Empire. And because of that, the date of 1589 does seem to be easy to change by changing the internal disputes within the Maravi as we know elements of that government were pro peace with Portuguese until 1622.
If the Zimba arrive later, due to more hesitation to approve the raid, the battle for Mombasa is complete and there is less defence at Malindi and if they arrive two years earlier, they engage with the Portuguese and weaken the forces of Malindi shortly before Mir Ali arrives to reinforce Mombasa, for that matter.
But the Zimba had greater ambitions in themselves then just acting as a spoiler for the war between Christianity and Islam in Kenya. Could they have been the ones, not the Ottomans, to turf out the Portuguese?
Well, the reason why that would be significantly tougher can be summed up by the reactions of the other Kenyan polities to the Ottoman attack of Malindi, where the other towns switched sides to the Turks, and the Zimba attack, where the same states sent armed men to support the Portuguese. The sophisticated Islamic city dwellers of the Kenyan coast were not keen on being run by tribesman from Malawi. This is the exact problem that the Maravi had in 1629 when they made a full out attack on Portuguese position in Mozambique, the Portuguese had more support then they did among the local Africans.
The Omani and the Ottomans posed a threat to the Portuguese position in Tanzania and Kenya in a way African polities in the interior never could, because the Swahili traders wanted Islamic rulers, but would rather a Christian than a Pagan.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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