MAFIA HISTORY

Mafia has a rich history going back 2.000 years, along with the other islands lying off the east coast of Africa, has shared in the long and interesting history of the area. The East Coast forms a part of the Indian Ocean littoral, and the peoples of this region have been traders and sea-farers for centuries. It is an area exceptional in Africa because it is mentioned in written accounts which go back as far as two thousand years.

The earliest is a Greek text, the Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, which is dated around A.D. 110 and describes a well established trade route, linking Arabia with Azania, as the east coast of Africa was known in the Greek-Roman era. The book was probably written in Alexandria by Greek author in the First Century, and is a guide to the ports and trade of Arabia, East Africa, India and the connecting route to China and comprises the first eye-witness written account of the coast of Azania. Claudius Ptolemy was also an Alexandrine Greek and composed Geographia in approximately AD150. The text includes Mafia and is regarded as a compendium of all known and written information for sailors of that period.

Most subsequent accounts, up to the arrival of the Portguese on the coast in the fifteenth century, were written by Arab geographers.

There are Early Iron Working sites on Mafia from BC300-AD300 that have produced Greek-Roman beds, glassware and pottery from the Mediterranean World. It is now believed that there was contact between Azania and Arabia from well before Christ, with Phoenicians, Egyptians (a BC600 expedition sent by Pharaoh Necho) and Ethiopians.
There is clear evidence in Mafia of contacts in the Greek-Roman period from about BC200. Early writers (e.g. Pliny and the Periplus) describe cave-dwellers and the exciting finds on Juani Island the last years, may be a link with this period. All of the trade goods from that period are represented in the sites and we now have skeletons that can be dated and ethnic origin determined from bone samples. Rome controlled the Red Sea and the Azania trade at this time, but like the Portuguese conquerors much later, their role was tenuous and could not compete with the Bantu-Arab links already in place, including inter-marriage.

By the end of the first millenium A.D. there had been established a number of Islamic city-states based on trade the most important of which were initially on Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. By the thirteenth century, however, the chief settlement on the coast was Kilwa Kisiwani, a small island lying about 80 miles to the south of Mafia. Kilwa owed its prosperity mainly to the fact that it controlled the gold-trade from Sofala (now in Mozambique).
One of the earliest documents relating to the coast is the Kilwa Chronicle, of which two versions survive, one in Arabic and the other in Portguese. In this book, Kilwa is said to have been founded by the sons of a sultan from Shiraz in the Persian Gulf, who migrated in the tenth century A.D. The Kilwa Chronicle goes on to record that some of the sons of the first Kilwa sultan settled on the southwestern tip of Mafia Island, which is today called Kisimani Mafia.
The period between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries was the hey-day of the coastal civilisations of Muslim city-states: their rulers and merchants built mosques, tombs and palaces, and minted coinage; they also imported pottery and other goods from most of the known world, including China. These towns were inhabited by a mixture of Africans and traders coming from elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, particularly the Persian Gulf region.

The Portuguese arrived in April 1498, when Vasco da Gama first sighted Mafia off to starboard on his way northwards, but the first Viceroy did not arrive to establish control and depose Arab rule until 1505. Portugal formally annexed the east coast of Africa in 1515 after the Papal bull of 1514 divided the known World between the warring Portugal and Spain. Portuguese control in Azania was always erratic and brutal and tenuous, at best, in Mafia.
In 1588 Kilwa was sacked by an African army of cannibals referred to as "Zimba" or "Muzimbe", believed to be from central Africa. This put an end to the remainder of Kilwa's declining supremacy as a trading port and to its control over Mafia, for the cannibals literally devoured the inhabitants. From this time Zanzibar became the epicentre of trade in Azania, especially with the rise of power of the Omani Arabs.
Control of Mafia changed hands frequently in the 16th and 17th Centuries, as Portugal's fortunes declined, Oman's interest waxed and waned, and the influence of other world powers played their part, The defeat of the Portuguese by Oman in Mombasa in 1698 ended what had been a troubled and cruel Portuguese rule and gave the Sultan of Oman control of the coast from Lamu to Kilwa.
In 1829 the town of Kua on Juani Island was destroyed by Sakalava cannibals from Madagascar and in 1872 the remarkable town of Kisimani Mafia was lost in a cyclone. By then the seat of power had moved to Chole Island, a more convenient and productive location. The arrival of the Sakalava prompted the Sultan of Zanzibar to send a punitive expedition that included some of his personal Baluchi regiment. Descendents of these Pakistani people are still to be found settled mainly in the area of Kitoni near Kismani Mafia. There is also evidence for minor settlement of Mafia by Madagascans, Chinese, Malay and Indonesian peoples (who first settled in Madagascar about 1,500 years ago). Pottery and coins indicate trade took place from, at latest, the 8th Century and new finds may help to prove theories of a much earlier active trade.
The Portguese were eventually ousted by the Omani Arabs who dominated the coast and much of the interior from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century when the British and Germans colonised Kenya and Tanganyika respectively. During the Omani period, the most important settlement on the coast was Zanzibar Town, the seat of the Sultan of Zanzibar. During this period links between the coast and interior were strengthened, based largely on the trade in ivory and slaves. This expansion of trade carried Swahili, by now a well-developed language with a rich written literature, into the interior of the continent.

Under a treaty in 1890 Germany took control of Mafia and in 1892 the first German Resident arrived and constructed the buildings still evident on Chole. Germany paid Sultan Syed Ali ben Saad of Oman DM 4 million for Mafia and part of the mainland coast. In January 1915 Mafia was taken by British troops as a base for the air and sea assault on the cruiser Konigsberg. It was not until late 1922 that control of Mafia passed from Zanzibar to Tanganyika Territory, ending the martial law of World War I.
The population of Mafia was 33,000 at the last census in 1988 and is now thought to exceed 40,000 persons, located in fishing and farming villages and homesteads all over the main island, and Jibondo, Juani and Chole islands. Mafia is now part of the Coast Province of the Republic of Tanzania and is governed from the mainland (not Zanzibar) and Tanzania's first marine park stretches from north of Chole Bay around to the town of Kilindoni.