Archaeologists and historians of the Swahili coast have warned for the past decade that scholars’ overt focus on urban areas and overseas connections may cause them to overlook more prosaic but equally important connections to mainland African societies. Western interest in what is deemed “cosmopolitan” in African history frequently overdetermines oceanic approaches to the Swahili. These scholars have urged that we pay closer attention to the social and material aspects linking the coastal cities to a variety of cultures and societies living to the west of the coastal towns in the vast interior of east central Africa.
Historian Philip Gooding responds to this historiographical challenge for nineteenth-century African history by exploring the history of Lake Tanganyika, a major interior water body near the center of the African continent, whose borders touch four modern-day African countries. Gooding’s focus is on the lake and its peoples over a sixty-year period in the nineteenth century, when the region became an important transit point for the ivory trade from the eastern Congo region of Manyema to the Swahili coast and the broader Indian Ocean world. Coastal traders, mostly of Swahili and Omani Arab origin, brought social and cultural influences from the world of the Indian Ocean littoral to the communities around Lake Tanganyika, changing boat technology, social habits, building styles, dress, worship and sacrifice traditions, and more. Gooding is interested in what we can learn from the historical record of encounters between these traders and the farmers, fishers, traders, transporters, and rulers native to the lake.
Gooding’s most important methodological contribution is to integrate rainfall and temperature data into his analysis—which allows him to contextualize the agricultural revolution occurring on the lake, within a relatively wetter 1840–75 period. During these decades, some Lake Tanganyikan societies shifted the basis of their subsistence to commercial agriculture, with many farmers beginning to sell maize and rice to the settlements of the coastal traders. Slave labor was increasingly employed by both interior societies and coastal traders; slave-produced agriculture allowed some societies to devote time to long-distance trade with the coast. In short, a wetter environment made it possible for the local agricultural sector to transition from subsistence to the production of a surplus to be sold to the traders. The resulting inflow of wealth allowed some lake towns to successfully transition their economies from subsistence and integrate them into the commercial structure linking Lake Tanganyika with the Indian Ocean world.
The book is organized thematically, beginning with the expansion of trading emporia in Chapter One and the growth of new crops for sale to the traders in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, Gooding argues that imported coastal maritime technology altered local spiritual traditions. In Gooding’s narrative, coastal traders brought significant new technology and changed the economic basis of lake societies, but could not dominate the lake region. Their maritime technology (boats built of sawn planks instead of carved from a single tree), their commodities (beads and cloth), and their architectural styles all had social impacts on life around the lake.
While these new imports introduced a variety of new social dynamics between established residents and newcomers, internal conflict between coastal traders (particularly that between Arabs and non-Arabs) prevented them from unifying to politically dominate the region. In Chapter Four, Gooding turns to the delicate dynamics of conflict and alliance within and among coastal traders, showing how the tensions between members of trading caravans reflected contestations of status between Arabs and Swahilis at the coast. Moreover, the commercial goods brought by the traders were not a straightforward path to external economic domination. Gooding shows the dynamism of lake societies by demonstrating their ability to domesticate coastal commodities to their own benefit.
In Chapter Six, Gooding subtly analyzes slavery, formulating a unique argument that incorporates contemporary lake peoples’ perspectives on slavery’s history. This subtle reading of sources is also applied to Chapter Seven’s topic: the spread of Islam around the lake in the nineteenth century. Gooding is able to incorporate contemporary perspectives from oral histories and place them into dialogue with his nineteenth-century sources. Whereas Islam and slavery were deterministically linked in the discourse of nineteenth-century Christian abolitionists, Gooding links them in a different way, demonstrating the agency of the enslaved in adopting Islam as a form of self-fashioning and internal contestation of their status.
The instability of the trader’s control is further reflected in the manner in which Islam spread among the peoples of Lake Tanganyika. Gooding observes that Islam spread around the lake in the absence of a centralized state, and in the absence of a conscious drive for mass conversion by Muslims from the coast. Many of the bondspeople of the traders—in Islamic terms their “mawla”—were the basis for the conversions of locals, a dynamic he argues reflected the agency of the enslaved within their sphere of control. Islam allowed those in bondage to renegotiate terms, create clientship, and to make claims to status on the urban space of coastal towns (even when some urban residents looked down their noses at these claims). This is a very insightful argument building on Gooding’s final two chapters, though it could have been further nuanced by attention to experience of enslaved women converts.
In his conclusion, Gooding argues that developments in the lake region were directly linked to the 1880s upheaval on the coast. In particular, he argues that the rebels in the coastal towns in 1888–90 were from the lake regions. Gooding argues convincingly that the rebels “were asserting the validity of an identity loosely based on coastal cultural norms that was forged in the interior” and were laying claim to a patrician “ngwana” identity, contested by town elites (219).
Gooding’s contributions to nineteenth-century East African historiography are multiple. He makes a compelling case for thinking of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika as an extension of the Indian Ocean world, both commercially and ecologically. Moving beyond dependency theory, he offers a new way to think about the complexity of social relations, not only between coast and interior peoples, but among each group. And he provides a model for writing a religious history of the region, with his subtle attention to the role of shrines, and his analysis of conversion to Islam. Gooding’s source base ranges across nineteenth-century travel accounts, global climate data, ethnographic interviews, missionary archives in Italy and the UK, and the national archives of the UK and of Zanzibar. Gooding also uses European travel accounts in a judicious way. He supplements these local missionary correspondence and reports. The author was a bit surprised to see no mention of John Wilkinson, The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa, but Gooding has consulted some of the same sources as Wilkinson from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium.
Gooding’s book is a very original work, integrating a wide variety of sources, that could be adopted for use in an African history survey or seminar, an environmental history course, or a course on the Indian Ocean world.
