The villages of the Zanj, according to al-Mas’udi, stretched for 700 parasangs (2,500 miles) along the coast; an accurate estimate of the distance from the entrance of the Red Sea to the mainland facing southern Madagascar. Although he twice visited East Africa, he does not say if he travelled as far south as Sofala, but is quite definite that a king of the Africans ruled in that distant region, and had many lesser chiefs subject to him. This matches what is known from archaeology, that embryonic African states were taking shape at that time in the hinterlands of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Since merchants travelled regularly up and down the coast, it would have been easy, even in Qanbalu, to learn about the cattle-keeping kingdoms of the distant south.
Horses and camels were unknown there, writes al-Mas’udi, but the people owned great numbers of cattle, which were used as beasts of burden. The king had ‘300,000 horsemen’; this is an odd statement, set alongside his assertion that horses were unknown, until it is recalled that the warriors of southern Africa were the guardians of great herds of cattle, and rode on oxen.
The king of the Zanj, he says in a summary of knowledge on Africa, is called the Waflimi. This is his version of Wafulme, the plural of an African name for a paramount chief. The king is descended from a ‘Great God’ named Mulkendjulu (Mukulunkulu). He asserts that some Africans were cannibals, who filed their teeth to points. The interior of the continent is ‘cut up into valleys, mountains and stony deserts’.
The most common creature of all on the mainland was the giraffe, but the animal most hunted was the elephant. One way of catching elephants, says al Mas’udi, is by laying a bait of leaves containing a poison that completely paralyses them. He drily remarks that most tusks were sold in India, which he had visited, and China. That was why ivory was so scarce in Arabia. The Zanj were also good hunters on the ocean, and he vividly relates how they chased whales and harpooned them.
But voyaging to Africa was perilous. ‘I have sailed on many seas, but I do not know of one more dangerous than that of Zanj.’ He lists the captains with whom he has travelled. All had been drowned, paying the ultimate price for venturing to Africa.6 Every successful journey in the flimsy craft of the Indian Ocean (called the Abyssinian Sea by al-Mas’udi) was a gift from God.
Qanbalu was a thriving place which minted its own coinage, although the Arab gold dinar was the main currency used in the Indian Ocean ports. Al-Mas’udi tells of sailing there with a number of Omani shipowners from Sohar. Traders also sailed to Qanbalu from Siraf, home of the story-writer Captain Buzurg. Al Mas’udi knew of Buzurg’s work – they were contemporaries, and had both grown up in or near Basra.
However, al-Mas’udi was to spend his later years in Cairo, a tolerant city where he probably felt safer, since his religious opinions were unorthodox. Only one work survives out of the thirty volumes he is known to have written on geography, medicine and natural history. His world encyclopaedia, Murnj al dhahab, (The Meadows of Gold), exists in a draft form, and his knowledge was at times flimsy: when he describes the Atlantic Ocean he says that ‘Britanya’ is towards its northern end and consists of twelve islands. On the other hand, he is the first Muslim writer to identify Paris, which he called Barisa, as the capital of the ‘Franks’, and is able to assemble an accurate list of French kings. (At that time, in the mid-tenth century, nobody in western Europe could have been remotely as well informed about Arabia or India. When medieval Christian scholars did begin describing the world, they clung to the belief that the three continents were a trinity, with the Holy City in the centre; they knew nothing of China, but said the East was where four great rivers flowed from an Earthly Paradise.)
While al-Mas’udi is the solitary eye-witness of life in the tenth-century Zanj, several of his contemporaries collected what facts they could about it.7 The information available to a renowned geographer, Ibn Hawqal, was scanty. The Africans, he had learned, were ‘not much inclined to the cultivation of the arts and sciences’. But also living in ‘Zingbar’ were white people ‘who bring from other places articles of food and clothing’ (undoubtedly a reference to Arab merchants from the Gulf). The anonymous Persian geography, Hudud al-Alam (Regions of the World), written towards the end of the tenth century, could only say that the ‘country of Zangistan’ was opposite India, and full of gold-mines. For the rest, the author relied on hearsay and prejudice. The Zanj people were ‘full-faced, with large bones and curly hair’, and extremely black. The people of Abyssinia were lazy, but obedient to their king.
At the time these accounts were being written, the merchants of southern Arabia were also establishing settlements on the south-west coast of India, which they called Malabar, the Land of Mountains, since the hills rose steeply behind the coastal plains. They were also starting to control the cinnamon exports of Ceylon. Many similarities were to be found between the Muslim communities of East Africa and Malabar, including the creation of a unique locally-based language, written in Arabic. Both traded widely throughout the densely-populated regions of the Indian Ocean, their ships going regularly to China.
Most intriguing of all the Islamic geographers is al-Biruni (sometimes written Alberuni), a learned Persian born in 973 near the Aral Sea. Known as ‘The Master’, he was also a mathematician and astronomer. One of his achievements was to calculate the earth’s circumference with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved before; he was only 70 miles out. Taken to Afghanistan as a prisoner, he spent much of his life there and in the Punjab, compiled a Chronology of Ancient Nations, and travelled through India, of which he wrote a history, Tahqiq al-Hind (An Inquiry into India). Typically, al-Biruni has little favourable to say of the Africans: ‘The Zanj are so uncivilized that they have no notion of a natural death. If a man dies a natural death, they think he was poisoned. Every death is suspicious to them, if a man has not been killed by a weapon.’
Turning to geography he is bold enough to criticize Ptolemy (whose work he had before him in translation) and offers his own assessment of Africa’s shape and size. Looking at the continent from a northern perspective, he had decided that it protruded ‘far into the ocean’, passing beyond the equator and the ‘plains of the negroes in the west’. It went much further than the Mountains of the Moon and the sources of the Nile – ‘in fact, into regions which we do not exactly know’, where winter prevailed during summer in the northern hemisphere. The sea beyond ‘Sofala of the Zanj’ was impossible to navigate, and no ship which ventured there had ever returned to give an account of what it had seen. Elsewhere he seems to contradict himself. ‘This southern ocean is navigable. It does not form the utmost southern limit of the inhabitable world. On the contrary, the latter stretches still more southward.’
One ultimate geographical puzzle – where Africa ended – intrigued al-Biruni. He was not content with the Ptolemaic convention that it swung to the east, joining up with a long sliver of land along the southern limits of the Indian Ocean which eventually reached all the way to China. Instead, he believed there was a sea route round Africa, linking the Atlantic with the Indian Ocean: ‘One has certain proofs of this communication, although one has not been able to confirm it by sight.’
Almost five centuries later, he would be proved right.
Let me tell you next of the personal appearance of the Great Lord of Lords whose name is Kubilai Khan. He is a man of good stature, neither short nor tall but of moderate height. His limbs are