74-511: The Shirazi people , also known as Mbwera , are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting the Swahili coast and the nearby Indian ocean islands . They are particularly concentrated on the islands of Zanzibar , Pemba and Comoros . A number of Shirazi legends proliferated along the East African coast, most involving a named or unnamed Persian prince marrying a Swahili princess. Modern academics reject
148-541: A Shirazi. The Muslim Shirazi settlements on the Swahili coast maintained a close relationship with those on islands such as Comoros, through marriage and mercantile networks. According to Tor Sellström, the Comorian population profile has a large proportion of Arab and African heritage, particularly on Grande Comore and Anjouan and these were under Shirazi sultanates. The contact of Shirazi people with colonial Europeans started with
222-513: A healthy regional trade network by the 8th century C.E. The upsurge in Indian Ocean trade after the 9th century C.E. brought an increase in Muslim traders and Islamic influence, and beginning in the 12th century, many elites converted. These elites constructed complex, often fictive, genealogies that connected them to the central Islamic lands. Since Persian traders were dominant in the early centuries of
296-551: A large supplier of these slaves to the colonial era European plantations and various Sultanates. According to August Nimtz, after international slave trading was banned, the Shirazi community was economically crippled. The arrival of Islam with the Persians and Arabs affected the Shirazi identity and social structures in many ways. According to Helena Jerman, the word "Sawahil" among the Shirazi people referred to "free but landless" strata of
370-466: A publication now in the public domain : Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). " Hottentots ". Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company. Kilwa Chronicle The Kilwa Chronicle is a text, believed to be based on oral tradition, that describes the origins of the Swahili city-state of Kilwa , located on an Indian Ocean island near the East African coast. It recounts
444-717: A quintessential Muslim aristocracy. This demanded fictive or real genealogies that linked them back to early Muslims in Arabia or Persia, something seen in many parts of the Islamic World. It was also common for Arab, Persian, and Indian traders to "winter" on the coast for up to six months as the monsoon winds shifted. They would often marry the daughters of Swahili traders, passing on their genealogy through Islam's patrilineal descent system. The archaeological record firmly refutes any supposition of mass migrations or colonization but evidences extensive trade relations with Persia. Trade links with
518-436: A rapid decline of the Shirazi towns which thrived and depended primarily on the trade. In parallel to European competition, non-Swahili-speaking Bantu groups began attacking Shirazi towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, the Shirazi sultanates faced war from sea and land, leading to a rapid loss of power and trading facilities. The Omani Arabs re-asserted their military in the seventeenth century, and they defeated
592-521: A result of these interactions. The Bantu migrations, and centuries later the Indian Ocean slave trade, brought Bantu influence to Madagascar , the Malagasy people showing Bantu admixture, and their Malagasy language Bantu loans. Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Sultanate of Zanzibar . With the arrival of European colonialists,
666-833: A significant clustered variation of genetic traits among Bantu language speakers by region, suggesting admixture from prior local populations. Bantu speakers of South Africa (Xhosa, Venda) showed substantial levels of the SAK and Western African Bantu AACs and low levels of the East African Bantu AAC (the latter is also present in Bantu speakers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda). The results indicate distinct East African Bantu migration into southern Africa and are consistent with linguistic and archeological evidence of East African Bantu migration from an area west of Lake Victoria and
740-436: A vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect" , it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in
814-479: A vast genomic analysis of more than 2,000 samples taken from individuals in 57 populations throughout Sub-Saharan Africa to trace the Bantu expansion. During a wave of expansion that began 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations – some 310 million people as of 2023 – gradually left their original homeland West-Central Africa and travelled to the eastern and southern regions of the African continent. During
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#1732877045349888-472: Is likewise completely lacking". The Shirazi are notable for helping spread Islam on the Swahili Coast, their role in the establishment of the southern Swahili sultanates like Mozambique and Angoche , their influence in the development of the Swahili language , and their opulent wealth. The East African coastal area and the nearby islands served as their commercial base. There are two main stories about
962-471: Is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not an ethnic group . People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms, which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for the larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as "people" or "the true people". That is, idiomatically
1036-469: Is spoken on Mayotte , and has an estimated 136,500 total speakers. Shimwali is spoken on Mwali, and has about 28,700 total speakers. Speakers of the Comorian languages use the Arabic script as their writing system. The Shirazi people have primarily been a mercantile community, thriving on trade. Initially, between the 10th and 12th centuries, it was the gold producing regions of Mozambique that brought them to
1110-485: Is the fact that Iran at the time was majority sunni not shia. There are also several different versions of stories about the settlement of Shirazi along the Swahili Coast. The Shirazi people have been linked to the Lamu Archipelago – islands in the Indian Ocean close to north Kenya, which oral traditions claim were settled by seven brothers from Shiraz in south Iran. The Lamu archipelago descendants then moved south in
1184-854: The Baganda people of Uganda (5.5 million as of 2014), the Shona of Zimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), the Zulu of South Africa (14.2 million as of 2016 ), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010 ), the Sukuma of Tanzania (10.2 million as of 2016 ), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1 million as of 2019 ), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (9.6 million as of 2011), batswana of Southern Africa (8.2 Million as of 2020) and
1258-495: The Chronicle exist: the Kitāb al-Sulwa in Arabic and a Portuguese version that is a section of the book Décadas da Ásia by the historian João de Barros . The genealogical account is similar in both versions, but other details vary substantially. This article about a book on Africa is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about African studies
1332-888: The Congo rainforest by about 1500 BC and the southern savannas by 500 BC, while the eastward dispersal reached the Great Lakes by 1000 BC, expanding further from there as the rich environment supported dense populations. Possible movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region could have been more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, because of comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas farther from water. Recent archeological and linguistic evidence about population movements suggests that pioneering groups would have had reached parts of modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa sometime prior to
1406-667: The Indian Ocean slave trade . The Swahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the many Afro-Arab members of the Bantu Swahili people . With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania – a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast – the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loanwords as
1480-676: The Kingdom of Matamba the Kuba Kingdom , the Lunda Empire , the Luba Empire , Barotse Empire , Kazembe Kingdom , Mbunda Kingdom , Yeke Kingdom , Kasanje Kingdom , Empire of Kitara, Butooro , Bunyoro , Buganda , Busoga , Rwanda , Burundi , Ankole , the Kingdom of Mpororo , the Kingdom of Igara , the Kingdom of Kooki , the Kingdom of Karagwe , Swahili city states , the Mutapa Empire ,
1554-521: The National Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies of apartheid . By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethnic-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speaking Africans , at about
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#17328770453491628-494: The Pedi of South Africa (7 million as of 2018). Abantu is the Xhosa and Zulu word for people. It is the plural of the word 'umuntu', meaning 'person', and is based on the stem '--ntu', plus the plural prefix 'aba'. In linguistics, the word Bantu , for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans" . It
1702-570: The Zulu Kingdom , the Ndebele Kingdom , Mthethwa Empire , Tswana city states , Mapungubwe , Kingdom of Eswatini , the Kingdom of Butua , Maravi , Danamombe , Khami , Naletale , Kingdom of Zimbabwe and the Rozwi Empire . On the coastal section of East Africa, a mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab and Persian traders, Zanzibar being an important part of
1776-554: The ulama while the latter were designated "Zanj." In Kilwa, then, Islam was still largely limited to the patrician elite. Battuta also described its ruler as often making slave and booty raids on the African idolators as he described the Zanj country. Of the loot, "a fifth was set aside for the family of the Prophet, and all distributed in the manner prescribed by the Koran". Despite these raids against
1850-402: The 10th and 11th centuries. This is contested and the opposing view states that the Shirazi legend took on new importance in the 19th century, during the period of Omani domination. Claims of Persian Shirazi ancestry were used to distance locals from Arab newcomers. The emphasis that the Shirazi came very long ago and intermarried with indigenous locals is revisionist politics that attempts to fuse
1924-412: The 3rd century AD along the coast and the modern Northern Cape by AD 500. Cattle terminology in use amongst the relatively few modern Bantu pastoralist groups suggests that the acquisition of cattle may have been from Central Sudanic , Kuliak and Cushitic -speaking neighbors. Linguistic evidence also indicates that the customs of milking cattle were also directly modeled from Cushitic cultures in
1998-512: The 7th century, and is the oldest mosque in the city. In the late 9th century, Al-Yaqubi wrote that Muslims were already living along this northern littoral. He also mentioned that the Adal kingdom had its capital in the city. Ibn al-Mujawir later wrote that, due to various battles in the Arabian peninsula, Banu Majid people from Yemen settled in the central Mogadishu area. Yaqut and Ibn Said described
2072-718: The 7th century, the coastal areas frequented by the Persian migrants were inhabited by Africans. By the time of the Persian settlement in the area, these earlier occupants had been displaced by incoming Bantu and Nilotic populations. More people from different parts of the Persian Gulf also continued to migrate to the Swahili coast over several centuries thereafter, and these formed the modern Shirazi. However, East African and other historians dispute this claim. According to Gideon S. Were and Derek A. Wilson, there were Bantu settlements along
2146-795: The 9th and 15th centuries, Bantu-speaking states began to emerge in the Great Lakes region and in the savanna south of the Central African rainforests. The Monomotapa kings built the Great Zimbabwe complex, a civilisation ancestral to the Shona people. Comparable sites in Southern Africa include Bumbusi in Zimbabwe and Manyikeni in Mozambique. From the 12th century onward, the processes of state formation amongst Bantu peoples increased in frequency. This
2220-624: The African Zanj coast, Sofala and Waq-Waq. Ibn Battuta would later visit the Kilwa Sultanate in the 14th century, which was at the time ruled by a Yemeni dynasty led by Sultan Hasan bin Sulayman. Battuta described the majority of inhabitants as being "Zanj" and "jet-black" in color, many of whom had facial tattoos. The term "Zanj" was used to distinguish not between Africans and non-Africans, but between Muslims and non-Muslims. The former were part of
2294-514: The African interior, and textiles, ceramics, and silver from the Indian Ocean. These slaves were sourced from interior Africa, such as those around Malawi the Democratic Republic of Congo , and the Mozambique . Arab geographers from the twelfth and later centuries historically divided the eastern coast of Africa into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants. According to
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2368-562: The Bantu expansion, Bantu-speaking peoples extirpated and displaced many earlier inhabitants, with only a few modern peoples such as Pygmy groups in Central Africa, the Hadza people in northern Tanzania, and various Khoisan populations across southern Africa remaining in existence into the era of European contact. Archaeological evidence attests to their presence in areas subsequently occupied by Bantu speakers. Researchers have demonstrated that
2442-476: The East African coast by 500 AD, with some of the settlements taking the form of "highly organised kingdoms governed by ruling classes with well-established traditional religions". The second theory on Shirazi origins posits that they came from Persia, but first settled on the Somalia littoral near Mogadishu. In the twelfth century, as the gold trade with the distant entrepot of Sofala on the Mozambique seaboard grew,
2516-614: The Khoisan of the Kalahari are remnants of a huge ancestral population that may have been the most populous group on the planet prior to the Bantu expansion. Biochemist Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues found that the Khoisan population began a drastic decline when the Bantu farmers spread through Africa 4,000 years ago. Before the Bantu expansion had been definitively traced starting from their origins in
2590-471: The Limpopo river; and Waq-Waq , the shadowy land south thereof. However, earlier geographers make no mention of Sofala . The texts written after twelfth century also call the island of Madagascar al-Qumr , and include it as a part of Waq-Waq . Islam was introduced to the northern Somalia coast early on from the Arabian peninsula, shortly after the hijra . Zeila 's two- mihrab Masjid al-Qiblatayn dates to
2664-582: The Persian Gulf region to conquer and colonize the trading coast of East Africa. It also mentions the establishment of the Shirazi dynasty by Madagan and Halawani Arab merchants, whose identity and roots are unclear. According to R. F. Morton, a critical assessment of the Book of the Zanj indicates that much of the document consists of deliberate falsifications by its author Fathili bin Omari, which were intended to invalidate
2738-552: The Persian Gulf were especially prominent from the 10th to 14th centuries, which prompted the development of local mythologies of Persian or Shirazi origin. According to Abdulaziz Lodhi, the Iranians and Arabs called the Swahili coast Zangistan or Zangibar , which literally means "the Black Coast", and the Muslim immigrants from South Asia (modern Pakistan and India) to southern Arabian lands such as Oman and Yemen identified themselves as
2812-531: The Portuguese in 1698, at Mombasa. The Portuguese agreed to cede this part of Africa, and a fresh migration of Arabs from Oman and Yemen into the Shirazi people settlements followed. Some towns and islands have had a much larger concentration of Shirazi people. For example, in 1948, about 56% of the Zanzibar population reported Shirazi ancestry of Persian origins. In local elections, the Shirazi voted for whichever party
2886-520: The Shirazi identity ( Washirazi ) was born after the arrival of Islam, in the 17th century. Their traditional Bantu lineage names were gradually abandoned and substituted with Arabic family names (e.g. Wapate became Batawiyna), new origin legends and social structures were imagined into folklores, and the societal structures were adopted from Persian and Arab settlers from nearby societies in Asia. The Shirazi rulers established themselves on Mrima coast (Kenya) and
2960-415: The Shirazi origins theory with Swahili heritage according to this view. Dismissing the ancestral claims of the native people as fictions, some contemporary scholars assert that both the Swahili and Shirazi people are the descendants of Bantu-speaking farmers who migrated to the East African coast in the first millennium C.E. They adopted maritime tools and systems, including fishing and sailing, and developed
3034-495: The Shirazi society has been "fractured by the caste implications of race and class". As the Arabs who arrived from Persia and Arabian lands became slave owners and traders, they considered their slaves as inferior and unfit for Islam. The slave girls were concubines, who bore them children. The male offspring were considered Muslims, but the female offspring inherited their slavery and their non-Muslim heritage. Even in post-colonial society,
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3108-532: The Sultan of Kilwa who identified himself as a Shirazi, overthrew the Omani governor in 1771. A French visitor to this Sultanate, named Morice estimated that about a tenth of the population was Swahili-speaking Arabs and Shirazi, a third were free Africans, and the remainder were African slaves. Both Shirazi and non-Shirazi sultanates on the coast served as trade centers for ivory, ambergris, slaves, gold, and timber coming from
3182-702: The Swahili language. According to G. Thomas Burgess, Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad, many Africans "claimed Shirazi identity to obscure their slave ancestry, to mark their status as landowners, or to gain access to World War II rations distributed by the colonial state along ethnic lines." Shirazi consider themselves as of Persian ancestry primarily, and more consistently regard themselves as neither Arabs nor recent labor migrants from mainland Africa. Bantu peoples The Bantu peoples are an indigenous ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages . The languages are native to countries spread over
3256-549: The Zanzibar Sultanate came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili Coast, leading eventually to the fall of the Sultanate and the end of slave trading on the Swahili Coast in the mid-20th century. In the 1920s, relatively liberal South Africans, missionaries, and the native African intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native". After World War II ,
3330-555: The area. Cattle terminology in southern African Bantu languages differs from that found among more northerly Bantu-speaking peoples. One recent suggestion is that Cushitic speakers had moved south earlier and interacted with the most northerly of Khoisan speakers who acquired cattle from them and that the earliest arriving Bantu speakers, in turn, got their initial cattle from Cushitic-influenced Khwe-speaking people. Under this hypothesis, larger later Bantu-speaking immigration subsequently displaced or assimilated that southernmost extension of
3404-467: The arrival in Kilwa sultanate of Vasco da Gama , the Portuguese explorer, in 1498. A few years later, the Portuguese and Shirazi people entered into disputes regarding trading routes and rights particularly about gold, a conflict that destroyed both Kilwa and Mombasa port towns of Shirazi rulers. The Portuguese military power and direct trading with India in the beginning, followed by other European powers, led to
3478-438: The authenticity of the primarily Persian origin claim, although recent genetic evidence points towards noticeable Persian admixture. They point to the relative rarity of Persian customs and speech, lack of documentary evidence of Shia Islam in the Muslim literature on the Swahili Coast, and instead a historic abundance of Sunni Arab -related evidence. The documentary evidence, like the archaeological, "for early Persian settlement
3552-564: The city as another important center of Islam, which actively traded with the Swahili-speaking African region to the south of it. The thirteenth century texts also mention mosques and individuals with names such as "al-Shirazi" and "al-Sirafi" and a clan called "Sirafi at Merca", suggestive of an early Persian presence in the area. To the south of the Barbar region, Al-Masudi mentions seaborne trade from Oman and Siraf port near Shiraz to
3626-441: The coast of Africa. Later the trading in African slaves, ivory, spices, silk and produce from clove, coconut and other plantations run with slave labor became the mainstay of the trading activity. These African slaves were captured during inland raids. Their presence in Swahili towns is mentioned in fourteenth and fifteenth century memoirs of Islamic travelers such as that of the fourteenth century explorer Ibn Battuta. The Shirazi were
3700-453: The established oral traditions of local Bantu groups. The Kitab' s ascription of Arabian origins for the founders of Malindi and other settlements on the Swahili coast is also contradicted by recorded 19th-century clan and town traditions, which instead emphasize that these early Shirazi settlers were of Persian ancestral heritage. Swahili elites, many of whom had extensive trade connections with Arabia, Persia, and India fashioned themselves as
3774-404: The existence of Persian admixture. They point to the relative rarity of Persian customs and speech, lack of documentary evidence of Shia Islam in the Muslim literature on the Swahili Coast, and instead a historic abundance of Sunni Arab-related evidence. The documentary evidence, like the archaeological, "for early Persian settlement is likewise completely lacking." However an important thing to note
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#17328770453493848-688: The fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into a designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"." Bantu languages derive from the Proto-Bantu reconstructed language, estimated to have been spoken about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago in West / Central Africa (the area of modern-day Cameroon). They were supposedly spread across Central, East and Southern Africa in
3922-752: The forces that drove the Middle Eastern gene flow to the Comoros". Today, most Swahili follow the Shafi'i branch of Sunni Islam . Like most of the Swahili people , the Shirazi speak local dialects of the Swahili language as a mother tongue. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family. However, the dialects of Swahili language is best described as a syncretic language, that blended Sabaki Bantu, Comoro, Pokomo, Iranian, Arabic and Indian words and structure reflecting
3996-480: The genealogy of the rulers of the Kilwa Sultanate , following the foundation of the city by Persians from Shiraz and Hormuz in the tenth century until the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Subsequent ancient DNA studies have confirmed much of the basis of these stories to be true. However, even with the DNA studies, some have said that these works were modified for political gain. Two sources of
4070-411: The incorporation of Khoekhoe ancestry into several of the Southeast Bantu populations ~1500 to 1000 years ago. Bantu-speaking migrants would have also interacted with some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast (mainly Cushitic ), as well as Nilotic and Central Sudanic speaking groups. According to the early-split scenario as hypothesized in the 1990s, the southward dispersal had reached
4144-404: The inland African populations, a symbiotic relationship also appears to have existed between the Africans and the coastal people. Another set of records are found in the Book of the Zanj ( Kitab al-Zanuj ), a likely compilation of mythical oral traditions and memories of settled traders on the Swahili coast. The late 19th-century document claims that Persians and Arabs were sent by governors of
4218-483: The mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa , or roughly 5% of the total world population ). About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g.the large majority of West Africa, notably the most populous African nation Nigeria , Rwanda , Tanzania , Uganda , Kenya , Burundi (25 million),
4292-417: The origins of the Shirazi people. One thesis based on oral tradition and some written sources (ie: the Kilwa Chronicle ) states that immigrants from the Shiraz region in southwestern Iran directly settled various mainland ports and islands on the eastern Africa seaboard beginning in the tenth century, in an area between Zanzibar in the north and Sofala in the south. According to Irving Kaplan, prior to
4366-782: The range of Cushitic speakers. Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded: Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of the Sahara , amid the Kiffian period at Gobero , and may have migrated southward, from the Sahara into various parts of West Africa (e.g., Benin , Cameroon , Ghana , Nigeria , Togo ), as a result of desertification of the Green Sahara in 7000 BCE. From Nigeria and Cameroon, agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began to migrate , and amid migration, diverged into East Bantu peoples (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo ) and West Bantu peoples (e.g., Congo, Gabon ) between 2500 BCE and 1200 BCE. Irish (2016) also views Igbo people and Yoruba people as being possibly back-migrated Bantu peoples. Between
4440-1117: The reflexes of * bantʊ in the numerous languages often have connotations of personal character traits as encompassed under the values system of ubuntu , also known as hunhu in Chishona or botho in Sesotho , rather than just referring to all human beings. The root in Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as *-ntʊ́ . Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba- ) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as bantu in Kikongo , Kituba , Tshiluba and Kiluba ; watu in Swahili ; ŵanthu in Tumbuka ; anthu in Chichewa ; batu in Lingala ; bato in Duala ; abanto in Gusii ; andũ in Kamba and Kikuyu ; abantu in Kirundi , Lusoga , Zulu , Xhosa , Runyoro and Luganda ; wandru in Shingazidja ; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele ; bãthfu in Phuthi ; bantfu in Swati and Bhaca ; banhu in kisukuma ; banu in Lala ; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga ; batho in Sesotho , Tswana and Sepedi ; antu in Meru ; andu in Embu ; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda and bhandu in Nyakyusa . Within
4514-460: The region between Cameroon and Nigeria, two main scenarios of the Bantu expansion were hypothesized: an early expansion to Central Africa and a single origin of the dispersal radiating from there, or an early separation into an eastward and a southward wave of dispersal, with one wave moving across the Congo Basin toward East Africa, and another moving south along the African coast and the Congo River system toward Angola. Genetic analysis shows
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#17328770453494588-460: The remaining maternal clades associated with Southeast Asia ( B4a1a1-PM , F3b and M7c1c (10.6%) and M(xD, E, M1, M2, M7) (4%)) but no Middle Eastern lineages. According to Msadie et al., given that there are no common Middle Eastern maternal haplogroups on the Comoros, there is "striking evidence for male-biased gene flow from the Middle East to the Comoros", which is "entirely consistent with male-dominated trade and religious proselytisation being
4662-443: The residual dynamics and distinctions of a racial caste system have remained among some Shirazi people. According to the sociologist Jonas Ewald and other scholars, the social stratification is not limited in the Shirazi society to racial lines, but extends to economic status and the region of origin. The Shirazi culture is Islamic in nature, identifying largely with its Persian and Arabic roots. There are also Bantu influences, such as
4736-450: The same time that the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all non-European South Africans (Bantus, Khoisan, Coloureds and Indians ). In modern South Africa, the word's connection to apartheid has become so discredited that it is only used in its original linguistic meaning. Examples of South African usages of "Bantu" include: [REDACTED] This article incorporates text from
4810-409: The second millennium, many Swahili patricians adopted Persian cultural motifs and claimed a distant common ancestry. The Kilwa Chronicle , a medieval document written in Arabic and Portuguese versions, indicates that the early Shirazi also settled in Hanzuan ( Anjouan in the Comoros Islands ), the Green Island ( Pemba ), Mandakha, Shaugu and Yanbu. According to the anthropologist Helena Jerman,
4884-465: The settlers are then said to have moved southwards to various coastal towns in Kenya, Tanzania , northern Mozambique and the Indian Ocean islands. By 1200 AD, they had established local sultanates and mercantile networks on the islands of Kilwa , Mafia and Comoros along the Swahili coast, and in northwestern Madagascar . Some contemporary academics reject the authenticity of the primarily Persian origin claim, although recent genetic evidence confirms
4958-413: The so-called Bantu expansion , comparatively rapid dissemination taking roughly two millennia and dozens of human generations during the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, together with a broad international consortium, retraced the migratory routes of the Bantu populations, which were previously a source of debate. The scientists used data from
5032-467: The society who had adopted Islam, then a new social category on the Swahili coast. Among the Muslims, this was the lowest social strata of free people, just above the slave strata. Along with the Wa-shirazi strata, there were other strata, such as the Wa-arabu , Wa-manga , Wa-shihiri , Wa-shemali , and the noble pure Arab ruler category called Wa-ungwana . The social strata of the Shirazi people came with its own strata taboos and privileges. For example,
5106-404: The syncretic fusion of people from diverse backgrounds that form the Shirazi people. Comorian is divided into two language groups, a western group composed of Shingazidja and Shimwali, and an eastern group, composed of Shindzwani and Shimaore. Shingazidja is spoken on Ngazidja, and has around 312,000 total speakers. Shindzwani is spoken on Ndzwani, and has roughly 275,000 total speakers. Shimaore
5180-485: The twelfth century geography of Al-Idrisi, completed in 1154 CE, there were four littoral zones: Barbar ( Bilad al Barbar ; "land of the Berbers") in the Horn of Africa , which was inhabited by Somalis and stretched southward to the Shebelle river; Zanj ( Ard al-Zanj ; "country of the blacks"), located immediately below that up to around Tanga or the southern part of Pemba island; Sofala ( Ard Sufala ), extending from Pemba to an unknown terminus, but probably around
5254-421: The upper strata Waungwana (also called Swahili-Arabs ) had the exclusive right to build prestigious stone houses, and Waungwana men practiced polygynous hypergamy , that is father children with low status and slave women. The ritual and sexual purity of the Waungwana women were maintained by confining them to certain premises within these houses, called Ndani . According to Michel Ben Arrous and Lazare Ki-Zerbo,
5328-465: Was first introduced into modern academia (as Bâ-ntu ) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858 and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. The name was said to be coined to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *ntʊ̀ - "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person" abantu "people", Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people"). There
5402-915: Was politically expedient, whether the ethnic minority-supported Zanzibar Nationalist Party or the mainland Tanzania-associated Afro-Shirazi Party. Genetic analysis by Msadie et al. (2010) indicates that the most common paternal lineages among the contemporary Comorian population, which includes Shirazi people, are clades that are frequent in sub-Saharan Africa ( E1b1a1-M2 (41%) and E2-M90 (14%)). The samples also contain some northern Y chromosomes, indicating possible paternal ancestry from South Iran ( E1b1b-V22 , E1b1b-M123 , F*(xF2, GHIJK) , G2a , I , J1 , J2 , L1 , Q1a3 , R1* , R1a* , R1a1 and R2 (29.7%)), and Southeast Asia ( O1 (6%)). The Comorians also predominantly bear mitochondrial haplogroups linked with sub-Saharan East African populations in East and South East Africa ( L0 , L1 , L2 and L3′4(xMN) (84.7%)), with
5476-449: Was the result of several factors such as a denser population (which led to more specialized divisions of labor, including military power while making emigration more difficult); technological developments in economic activity; and new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualisation of royalty as the source of national strength and health. Examples of such Bantu states include: the Kingdom of Kongo , Anziku Kingdom , Kingdom of Ndongo ,
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