EASTERN AFRICA, HISTORY OF

history of the area from ancient times through the 20th century. Additional reading J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver (eds.), The Cambridge History of Africa, 8 vol. (197586), contains useful chapters on eastern African history, with comprehensive bibliographies. The contributions in UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, General History of Africa (1981 ), are also informative. The Editors of the Encyclopdia BritannicaThe history of East Africa is explored in Bethwell A. Ogot (ed.), Zamani: A Survey of East African History, new ed. (1974), is still the best single-volume survey. Roland A. Oliver et al. (eds.), History of East Africa, 3 vol. (196376), constitutes the most ambitious account so far. P.L. Shinnie (ed.), The African Iron Age (1971), contains authoritative articles on archaeology by H.N. Chittick, The Coast of East Africa, ch. 5, and by J.E.G. Sutton, "The Interior of East Africa, ch. 6. Azania (annual), issued by the British Institute in Eastern Africa, includes authoritative precolonial articles. G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The Medieval History of the Coast of Tanganyika (1962), although subject now to correction, is still valuable. C.S. Nicholls, The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy, and Trade on the East African Littoral, 17981856 (1971), is a very full study. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (1977), provides an excellent socioeconomic study of Zanzibar and Kenya in the 19th century. R.M.A. Van Zwanenberg and Anne King, An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda, 18001970 (1975), concentrates on the years after 1900. D. Anthony Low The Editors of the Encyclopdia BritannicaThe only book to deal with the history of the Horn of Africa is John Markakis, National and Class Conflict in the Horn of Africa (1987). Since there is no established historiography, the history of the entire Horn must be constructed from such works devoted to Somalia and Ethiopia as Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (1994), the only modern general history of Ethiopia from Australopithecus afarensis to the fall of the Derg in 1991; and I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa, rev., updated, and expanded ed. (1988), a comprehensive treatment of the political history of affairs in all the Somali territories. I.M. Lewis (ed.), Nationalism & Self Determination in the Horn of Africa (1983), discusses the rival ethnic nationalisms of the Horn, including those at the centre and periphery of Ethiopia. Works on the history of the Somali-Ethiopian conflict include Tom J. Farer, War Clouds on the Horn of Africa: The Widening Storm, 2nd rev. ed. (1979); and Robert F. Gorman, Political Conflict on the Horn of Africa (1981), which highlights the Ogaden war of 197778. Harold G. Marcus The Horn of Africa The history of the Horn of Africa has largely been dominated by Ethiopia and has been characterized by struggles between Muslim and other herdsmen and Christian farmers for resources and living space. The Christians mostly spoke Semitic languages and the Muslims Cushitic tongues. Although these languages were derived from the same Afro-Asiatic stock, the more apparent differences between the peoples often were excuses for war, which, by the end of the 20th century, was waged under the banner of nationalism and Marxism-Leninism. Aksum When the Ethiopian empire of Aksum emerged into the light of history at the end of the 1st century AD, it was as a trading state known throughout the Red Sea region. Its people spoke Ge'ez, a Semitic language, and they mostly worshiped Middle Eastern gods, although here and there a traditional African deity survived. Its port of Adulis received a continuous stream of merchants who offered textiles, glassware, tools, precious jewelry, copper, iron, and steel in return for ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold, silver, slaves, frankincense, and myrrh. Aksum, the capital, was five days' march from the coast onto the Tigray Plateau, from which position it dominated trade routes into the south and west, where the commodities originated. By the 4th century Aksum had become a regional power and an ally of Constantinople, whose language and culture attracted the ruling elites. Sometime around 321 Emperor Ezana and the Aksumite court converted to the monophysitic Christianitya belief that Christ had one nature that was both divine and humanof Alexandria's See of St. Mark. During the next 200 years Christianity penetrated the masses, as foreign and native-born monks proselytized the interior, building churches and establishing monasteries wherever they found pagan temples and shrines. Through the first half of the 6th century Aksum was the most important state in the Red SeaIndian Ocean region and even extended its power over the kingdom of the Himyarites on the Arabian Peninsula. In the Horn, Aksum dominated Welo, Tigray, Eritrea, and the important trade routes to and from the Sudan. The capital's stone buildings, monuments, churches, and 20,000 inhabitants were supported by tribute and taxes extracted from vassals and traders. In 543 Abraha, the general in charge of Himyar, rebelled and weakened Aksum's hold over South Arabia. This event marked the end of the empire's regional hegemony, allowed Persia to assume supremacy, and forced Constantinople into an overland trade route with India and Africa. Aksum's international trade diminished, a shift reflected in the debasement of the state's coins. The rise of Isl am in Arabia a century later almost completely devastated Aksum, as Muslim sailors swept Ethiopian shipping from the sea-lanes. Aksum lost its economic vitality, and Adulis and other commercial centres withered. State revenues were greatly reduced, and the government could no longer maintain a standing army, a complex administration, and urban amenities. The culture associated with the outside world quickly became a memory, and Ethiopia learned to exist in local terms. The Christian state moved southward into the rich, grain-growing areas of the interior, where the rulers could sustain themselves. There, they and the local Cushitic-speaking population, the Agew, worked out a new political arrangement for Ethiopia. The economy The economies of the eastern African countries are closely related to their natural resources. The great majority of the population is directly dependent upon agriculture or pastoralism for its livelihood, and most exports are of primary agricultural products. A substantial portion of agriculture is on the subsistence levelthat is, the raising of foodstuffs necessary for maintaining a livelihood, with no planned surplus left over for trade. Agriculture Intensive cultivation Rainfall is the dominant influence on agricultural output and, hence, on the densities of population. This basic resource varies greatly among the countries of eastern Africa. Without irrigation, arable agriculture requires a reliable annual rainfall of over 30 inches (750 millimetres). In four years out of five, this total may be expected by 78 percent of Uganda and 51 percent of Tanzania but only by 15 percent of Kenya. (The proportion of Somalia that receives this total is negligible, and in Ethiopia the range of elevations makes such totals not significant.) A large area of high-intensity agriculture is shared by the three East African countries in the Lake Victoria basin, especially in an arc from western Kenya through Buganda to Bukoba in Tanzania. Food crops here include the banana, sweet potato, taro, and yam, with Robusta coffee and cotton important cash crops. Along the East African coast, between Malindi and Dar es Salaam and including Zanzibar and Pemba, is another closely settled zone with an economy and culture enriched by a thousand years of trading with Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent. Other intensively cultivated areas are in the uplands and mountains, where precipitation, increased by the raised landforms, is made more available for plant growth because the cooler temperatures reduce evaporation. In many cases, as along the Great Rift Valley, the highlands are of volcanic origin, with weathered lava forming the basis for fertile, easily worked, and moisture-retentive red loams. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, cultivation has spread upward in such highlands with the introduction of temperate crops (in part furthered by European settlers), including especially the Andean, or Irish, potato, cruciferous vegetables of the genus Brassica, temperate species of peas and beans, and wheat and barley. The lower slopes are suited to Arabica coffee and the higher ones to tea and pyrethrum. This ascending wave of cultivation has pushed back the boundaries of the montane forests, which are now usually protected in forest reserves or national parks. The presence of distinct agricultural zones at different elevations is most marked in Ethiopia, where the distinctive false banana, or ensete, is grown at medium elevations in the forest belt of the south, Mediterranean fruits and vines are grown at higher elevations, and barley, wheat, and the indigenous cereal teff are grown in plowed fields on the high plateau. The land Relief Escarpments of the Great Rift Valley rising above the plain north of Samburu Game Preserve, central The physical basis of eastern Africa is a platform of ancient resistant rocks that has been contorted and inset with granites but worn down by prolonged erosion to extensive plains. Its present outlines derive from the splitting apart of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland, of which Africa forms a part. In eastern Africa the straight coastlines of Eritrea and northern Somalia were created by the drifting away of the Arabian Peninsula, which opened up the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and the smooth shorelines and deep waters along the eastern coast mark the departure of India and Madagascar. Too rigid for folding to take place, the platform on which eastern Africa rests has been buckled by subterranean forces into broad basin-and-swell structures hundreds of miles across. Associated with these tensional forces, extensive faulting has raised and lowered vast blocks of land, leaving prominent escarpments between them, and extruded lavas have formed elevated plateaus and have spread across the plains as well as forming numerous volcanoes. The most striking of these features is the East African Rift System, of which the main branch, known as the Eastern Rift Valley or Great Rift Valley, extends from the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, crosses the summit of two centres of uplift in Ethiopia and Kenya, and enters northern Tanzania, where it largely disappears only to reappear in the south of that country in the Lake Nyasa trough (Lake Nyasa is also known as Lake Malawi). The Western Rift Valley curves along the western border of Uganda and Tanzania, where it is marked by Lakes Albert and Tanganyika, and is aligned through the Lake Rukwa trough with the head of Lake Nyasa. Although not entirely continuous or uniform, the rift valleys are typically some 35 miles (60 kilometres) across and, where they cut through highland, may have inward-facing scarps of 1,500 to 3,000 feet (500 to 1,000 metres) in elevation. The two most striking highlands, found in Ethiopia and Kenya, are formed of lava flows piled on top of areas of uplift on either side of the Great Rift. These fundamental geologic factors are reflected in the major physiographic regions of eastern Africa. The Ethiopian highlands, for example, are formed from lava flows that have created extensive plateaus at elevations of 6,500 to 10,000 feet. The plateaus are separated by deep, river-worn gorges and are marked by isolated summits rising to over 12,000 feet. The northern end of the Rift Valley is a region of confused relief, characterized by downfaulting to below sea level in the Kobar Sink and by active volcanoes and hot mineral springs. The Kenyan highlands are constructed by lava flows piled upon a broad, uplifted dome that is dissected by the Great Rift Valley. There the shoulders of the Rift highlands rise to nearly 12,000 feet, but of greater height are giant extinct volcanoes on the outer edge of the volcanic provinceMounts Elgon and Kenya and Kilimanjaro, the latter, at 19,340 feet (5,895 metres), the highest mountain in Africa. In southern Tanzania the continuation of the Great Rift Valley is bordered by the Southern and Nyasa highlands, which overlook Lake Nyasa; and the Western Rift is bordered by the Ufipa Plateau, which lies above Lake Rukwa. In Uganda the Western Rift Valley is flanked by high ground in Kigezi and Karagwe and by the upfaulted block of the Ruwenzori Range. Between the arms of the two Rift valleys lies the Central Plateau, an extensive, eroded surface comprising most of Uganda and western Tanzania. Lying mostly at 3,000 to 4,500 feet, it is a major example of a peneplain created by long periods of erosion but bearing isolated ridges and hill masses of more resistant material called inselbergs. East of the Great Rift, the surface is further diversified by faulting and then gives way to a coastal zone of sedimentary stratified rocks; this creates a gently varied relief of plateaus, escarpments, and riverine plains. In the Tana River basin of eastern Kenya and in most of Somalia, the original land surface has sunk thousands of feet below sea level; this has been covered by more recent sediments, which have resulted in extensive and very complete plains. Drainage Rivers and lakes The Great Rift Valley is the centre of a remarkable line of inland drainage basins; radiating outward from its bordering highlands, other waters drain to the Indian and Atlantic oceans and to the Mediterranean Sea. The area of inland drainage extends from Lake Abaya in southern Ethiopia through Lake Rudolf (or Lake Turkana) in Kenya to the strongly alkaline lakes of Natron, Manyara, and Eyasi in northern Tanzania. Lake Rukwa is the centre of a separate basin of inland drainage. There is little drainage in the arid coastlands of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but the strongly seasonal Shebele (or Shabeelle) and Jubba rivers manage to carry runoff from the summer rains of Ethiopia across Somalia to the Indian Ocean. The Tana and Athi-Galana systems from the Kenyan highlands are more reliable, as are those of eastern Tanzania, notably the extensive RufijiKilomberoGreat Ruaha system. The Nile has its headwaters in the eastern African highlands and plateaus, forcing Egypt to maintain an interest in dams built in Ethiopia and Uganda. (Actually, it is the Blue Nile, or Abay, River and the Atbara and Sobat rivers that bring seasonal floods to The Sudan and Egypt, while the more regular flow of the White Nile is derived from Lake Victoria.) Another great river, the Congo, receives contributions from the southern portion of the Central Plateau through the Malagarasi River, which debouches into Lake Tanganyika. This lake is some 400 miles long but has an average width of only 30 miles. Also, although it has a surface elevation of some 2,500 feet, its bottom reaches to about 2,200 feet below sea level. The people East Africa European knowledge of the peoples of the interior of East Africa began only in the second half of the 19th century, although knowledge of the coastal fringe had begun earlier, in the years after the Portuguese first made contact with Mombasa in 1498. Since the penetration of the interior most people, whether Europeans or East Africans, who have attempted to improve their comprehension of East African peoples have been struck and confused by the number of different named groups that make up the total population of the area. There are no reliable figures for the population of East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, but, since there has been a very rapid increase since 1920, it is likely that the population in 1900 was less than 10 million. This population, however, was divided unequally among more than 160 distinct peopleswell over this figure if a less conservative method of counting them is employed. Identifying and classifying peoples Although there is no complete agreement among ethnological specialists as to how a people or ethnic group is to be defined, there is substantial agreement among Africa specialists as to the vast majority of the identifiable groups in East Africa. For the purposes of this discussion, a people or ethnic group is a group of human beings who recognize their own identity and unity, have a name for themselves, and do not feel that they lose that identity in a larger grouping. Some groupings that now have the appearance of peoples, such as the Kalenjin of western Kenya, have come into being since 1960 by a conscious fusing together of older and smaller peoples. This series of fusions had not begun as early as 1900, although it is a safe speculation that most, if not all, of the peoples of that time also owed their existence in part to fusions of smaller groups at some earlier stage. For the purposes of this discussion, the year 1900 will mark the time by which East African peoples had retained practices long enough to be considered traditional and had not yet been disturbed by contact with Europeans. Despite the fragmentation of the population into so many subdivisions, the different peoples of East Africa traditionally shared much of their cultures in common, thereby forming a smaller number of types, each type distinct in its characteristics. Africa scholars have attempted to identify and classify these types according to criteria of varying usefulness. The criteria discussed here are the following: descent, religion, language, habitat, subsistence, and political organization.