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Post by raharris1973 on Oct 9, 2024 3:02:47 GMT
Your challenge is to have Islamic colonization, possibly by the Swahili culture, reach further than OTL's southern limits of Sofala and Mak-Mak in Mozambique, and extend further, all the way to Capetown by 1400 AD. Progress in this direction can start as early as 800 AD if you wish.
Bonus points if the East African coastal trade links are dense enough that Mediterranean crop packages end up transplanted eventually to the suitably "Mediterranean" climate of the southern Cape of Africa from the Islamic Levant/Mashriq/Shams or Maghreb, despite the non-suitability for most of Africa and Arabia in between.
Further bonus points for enough settlements and development that some of the precious metal and diamond deposits of South Africa are found and exploited.
What could make this plausibly happen through gradual or rapid successive expansion "leaps" down the coast? The climate and vegetation mix of southern Mozambique and Natal is not too terribly different from that of the Swahili coast in northern Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya to the north. West of the Great Fish river on the eastern Cape, the Cape climate starts to turn to a Mediterranean semi-arid but friendly for agriculture pattern.
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Post by raharris1973 on Oct 9, 2024 3:04:58 GMT
Presuming Islamic city states exist on the southern African coast as far as Capetown and the southern edges of the Namib desert by 1400, how is the experience of Portuguese contact and Indian Ocean exploration altered?
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Post by Max Sinister on Oct 9, 2024 9:31:23 GMT
A settlement colony... it seems to make sense, but am I wrong or did the Islamic world not have things like that?
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Post by raharris1973 on Oct 10, 2024 3:17:11 GMT
A settlement colony... it seems to make sense, but am I wrong or did the Islamic world not have things like that? Islamic merchants settled on the East African coast, as individuals, or companies or teams, not mass migrations or families, taking local wives, and attracted converts. They gave rise to the Shirazi and Swahili cultures, interacting economically with surrounding animist Bantus and forming a hybrid language, but staying a bit culturally aloof, and in later generations, making a big deal out of any Persian or Arab ancestry they had, often overstating it. I can imagine Islamic traders continuing on southwest with this expansionary technique. |
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Post by Max Sinister on Oct 11, 2024 22:16:41 GMT
A settlement colony... it seems to make sense, but am I wrong or did the Islamic world not have things like that? Islamic merchants settled on the East African coast, as individuals, or companies or teams, not mass migrations or families, taking local wives, and attracted converts. They gave rise to the Shirazi and Swahili cultures, interacting economically with surrounding animist Bantus and forming a hybrid language, but staying a bit culturally aloof, and in later generations, making a big deal out of any Persian or Arab ancestry they had, often overstating it. I can imagine Islamic traders continuing on southwest with this expansionary technique. That's true and everything, but I was thinking about colonies for agricultural settlers. That's why I asked. Also, if the Cape area was mostly unsettled because they're lacking the right crops - why should merchants go there, with no potential customers? |
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Post by raharris1973 on Oct 13, 2024 17:19:38 GMT
Islamic merchants settled on the East African coast, as individuals, or companies or teams, not mass migrations or families, taking local wives, and attracted converts. They gave rise to the Shirazi and Swahili cultures, interacting economically with surrounding animist Bantus and forming a hybrid language, but staying a bit culturally aloof, and in later generations, making a big deal out of any Persian or Arab ancestry they had, often overstating it. I can imagine Islamic traders continuing on southwest with this expansionary technique. That's true and everything, but I was thinking about colonies for agricultural settlers. That's why I asked. Also, if the Cape area was mostly unsettled because they're lacking the right crops - why should merchants go there, with no potential customers? You raise good points. Merchant motives to go a little further down the Mozambique coast, wherever it could interact with trading partners of some of the more advanced Bantu groups like Great Zimbabwe, could be found, get purely commericial motives for colonies for agricultural settlers, yes that is harder. I feel like I would need to contrive some sort of push factor from the Middle East (to get ideal crops) or wider Muslim World (to get settler colonists at all) all the way to the Cape. The ideas that come to mind are possibly refugee losers of dynastic/sectarian struggles in the Muslim Mediterranean, or Sufi or other mystical sects (since Islam does not have monasticism) motivated to go to remote regions for religious reasons, but not averse to agricultural production and family life. Or, from the Levant and Syria in particular, refugees from the harshness and danger of Frankish Crusader and Mongol invasion times, who find their first stable refuge of the traditional Swahili coast, but when contacting the environment of the Cape for hunting, prospecting, exploring, slaving expeditions, they find its climate more congenial and 'homelike' than Africa's more equatorial parts? |
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