Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/498

 434 ^'^^ Bantu Ele^nent in Sivahili Folklore.

Their usages may differ slightly in detail, but on the whole they are the same, and they draw a clear distinc- tion between themselves and the tribes inland of the narrow strip of coast to which they themselves are con- fined, these tribes being, in the north, the Wazegeju and Wadigo, and then, as we proceed southward, successively the Wazigula and Wabondei,Wadoe,Wazaramu,Wangindo, and Wayao. The Arab settlements along the east coast of Africa date from very early times. Whatever may be the truth about pre-Islamic settlements, the Sultanate of Kilwa was founded in the tenth century, and about the same time a Persian colony established itself at Lamu. (Sir H. H. Johnston places the arrival of the first Mohammedan colonists about A.D. 720.) The Arabs im- ported their religion, commerce, industries, arts, language, and literature, and, up to within the last fifty or sixty years, Arabic was the sole medium of culture accessible to the coast-dwellers. Swahili became a written language, (although the x\rabic character is not perfectly adapted to it), and developed a literature of its own, and even a system of prosody, with results by no means contemptible, though of course Arabic was always looked upon as the vehicle of the higher scholarship. It is therefore natural that the Swahili language should abound in Arabic words, but its grammar has not been affected to so great an extent. It is true that it has lost many of its charac- teristic inflections, and that at Zanzibar the influx of Indians and other foreigners has tended to produce a very corrupt jargon ; but the first English writer who mentions it, (Sir Thomas Herbert in 1677), fell into a grotesque misconception, perhaps not altogether extinct at the present day, when he called it " a mixture of Arabic and Portuguese." Even at Zanzibar, however, a distinction is drawn between good Swahili and that spoken in the bazaars, and the language spoken at Mombasa and Lamu is far less Arabicized. Moreover, it