Afr Archaeol Rev (2018) 35:147–149 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-017-9275-x

BOOK REVIEW

Lynn Harris (Ed.): Sea Ports and Sea Power: African Maritime Cultural Landscapes Springer, New York, 2017, 133 pp., ISBN 978-3319469843 Edward Pollard

Published online: 24 January 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2017

It is not an easy task to combine the vast maritime history of Africa into a SpringerBrief (short treatments of new research and applications) on underwater archaeology. The short length of the book applies a major constraint on thematic and regional coverage, which perhaps should have been addressed through concentration on a narrower topic or geographical area. As it stands, the geographical range is not as diverse as it should be for the scope of the series or a title alluding to the African continent, with five of the nine papers being on southern Africa (and four of those about to the Cape), while North Africa is not mentioned. Chronologically, only one paper considers the precolonial period, while the underwater archaeology theme of the book series is also underplayed. The editor of this volume, Lynn Harris, has approached this broad field by bringing together a selection of authors under a title that could be at least two separate topics and perhaps two different volumes—‘ports’ and ‘maritime cultural landscapes.’ The first chapter differs from the others in its concentration on an era before Western maritime contacts with Africa. Elgidius Ichumbaki’s contribution is the most controversial and is a response to the Fleisher et al. (2015) article in American Anthropologist discussing the question of when the Swahili became a maritime society. The topic is a hypothesis that relates to Africanist and Indian Ocean perspectives of resource exploitation, trade, and social activities and involves identification of E. Pollard (*) The Discovery Programme, 6 Mount Street Lower, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]

the development of activities associated with the sea. Such activities include shell gathering, mangrove harvesting, boat-builiding and sailing technology, fishing, trade, settlement location and port architecture, as well as the society’s religious practices, language, poetry, and music. Fleisher et al.’s proposal is that there was a dramatic transformation in coastal lifeways in the early second millennium CE based on long-distance eastern African navigation, leading to substantially increased wealth reflected in coral and lime architecture. Ichumbaki, by contrast, defines maritime more broadly to cover all interactions with the sea, while Fleisher et al. define it more specifically to refer to the use of maritime space by boat, sailing routes, the gathering of sea resources, and topographical naming. This hinders comparison, as the two definitions of ‘maritime’ inevitably lead to two different answers. A second difference in definition between the papers is in the description of the Swahili. Fleisher et al. refer to the ancestors of the Swahili appearing in the first millennium CE, whereas Ichumbaki considers the Swahili to be the inhabitants of the coast since the earliest known settlement c. 30,000 BP. Arguments regarding the maritime nature of Swahili society are often circular, insofar as the Swahili only become Swahili when they become maritime, as that is one of their defining characteristics. Ichumbaki refers to maritime Stone Age sites along the coast and cites the excavations at Kuumbi Cave on Unguja (Zanzibar) to show interaction between the island and mainland. However, this is of limited value in that, during the Stone Age, there were periods of lower sea level when people could simply have walked to Unguja.

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Ichumbaki refers to Classical works to prove that the inhabitants of the Swahili coast interacted with other world economies, but ‘interacted’ is not the same as maritime under Fleisher et al. definition. The development of a pottery tradition (Tana Tradition or Triangular Incised Ware) along the whole Swahili coast in the seventh century and of ports such as Manda (Lamu) and Kaole (near Bagamoyo) displaying large concentrations of imported pottery, indicates a developing maritime identity in the late first millennium CE. Again, the question needs to be asked if this can be considered maritime, as the evidence for eastern African ceramics crossing the ocean during this early period is only to offshore islands such as the Comoros, Unguja, and Pemba, with Madagascar perhaps from the ninth century and Yemen from the late tenth century. If it is determined that first-millennium CE societies were indeed maritime, how then does one refer to thirteenth-century developments at Kilwa, Tanzania? At that time, mosques started to be built overlooking landing places, and people began exploiting resources of the fringing reefs. Previously, evidence of settlement and exploitation was in the sheltered harbour and channels of submerged estuaries or rias. Inventing new terms such as ‘proto-maritime’ and ‘oceanic maritime’ may be needed to explain what is evidently a more complicated situation. What both papers do is treat the Swahili coast as a monolithic regional identity. Smaller spatial analyses are needed because the Swahili coast is not homogenous in time and space. Evidence of a maritime society may have appeared and disappeared over the millennia of coastal occupation, and parts of the coast may have different outlooks than others. Ichumbaki’s criticism stems from believing the paper is a lag from earlier twentieth-century thought of Africans not being the founders of the Swahili towns. By taking a wider global study involving maritime societies around the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, we will be able to determine if the Fleisher et al. paper has used a colonial interpretation or is rather an assessment of whether and when a maritime outlook was held by the Swahili. A second thought-provoking paper is Jeremy Borrelli’s well-presented and original investigation into the role of risk in the development of the harbour in Table Bay from 1806 to 1910. The importance of place names (e.g., Cape of Storms renamed as Good Hope) and occurrence of shipwrecks indicate the risk and necessary management of the environment to protect

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shipping in the form of harbour infrastructure. Borrelli sees the development of the harbour as a behavioural response to risk and shows how that risk is reflected in the maritime cultural landscape. The ready availability of data, and application of spatial-analytical procedures, support his arguments concerning the use Table Bay and show how the response to risk is clearly visible. It is only unfortunate that the lack of equivalent data in less well-recorded periods and locations around the African coast prohibits such rigorous analysis elsewhere. It immediately comes to mind that risk management no doubt led to many navigation features around Africa, including the famous Lighthouse at Alexandria and medieval reef-coral causeways that mark the entrance to Kilwa harbours. The remaining papers display the breadth of the maritime cultural landscape concept. Oral history and intangible heritage come to the fore in Wale Oyediran’ s paper on the slave trade at the port of Badagry in Nigeria during pre- and postcolonial times, in which maritime ethnography and religious traditions are considered in the context of songs and dramas of the slavery experience of capture and barter. Oral histories are again paramount in Lynn Harris’s paper on seasonal hunting of whales at False Bay, Cape Colony. The oral histories recount the roles of children serving as lookouts, who guided the whalers by fires, and the work of women in cleaning and processing the meat. The whalers were multicultural and the success of open-boat bay-whaling was determined by knowledge of seasonal migration and gathering of whale pods in the same sheltered areas for calving. Ivor Mollema’s underwater investigation of eighteenth-century East Indiaman vessels revealed structural differences in Dutch and British maritime technology, including iron knees in the ships, to explain the strategic takeover of the Cape of Good Hope by the latter. Nathanial King’s study of site formation processes on an intertidal US Liberty shipwreck in South Africa’s Cape Point Nature Reserve shows welding still holding, but wrought iron eyelets corroding. Conveniently, the wreck site is popular with walkers and this is shown in a geocache, which lists comments on a website where archaeologists can monitor activity. Jennifer Jones highlights the importance of understanding the coastal processes of erosion and accretion in her investigation of the industries of whaling, guano, and diamond mining leaving camps, bones, and vessels. The latter includes Eduard Bohlen, a steamship grounded in 1909 in Conception Bay

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and now 400 m inland, which has become a symbol of Namibia’s heritage. Eduard Bohlen’s career involved transporting mail, passengers, and mining equipment, as well as being a prison ship. It shows a rich heritage that could be incorporated into the activities of communitybased environmental stewardship groups. Elinaza Mjeme realises the potential of the recording of World War I shipwrecks in Tanzania to provide local communities with economic benefits, as well as demonstrating their ecological and archaeological significance. It is uncertain how much remains of the wrecks mentioned in this paper. For example, after the scuttling of the SMS Konigsberg in the Rufiji Delta, the captain’s table has ended up in Nairobi’s Railway Museum and one of the guns is at Fort Jesus in Mombasa. Tanzania has not as yet ratified the 2001 UNESCO Convention on

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the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, but South Africa has. Jonathon Sharfman, Jaco Boshoff, and Jonathon Gribble present a final contribution about how a maritime cultural landscape approach can be used to holistically conserve and to establish local management models. However, funding and capacity constraints have limited the inventories of sites, public access to databases, and underwater survey.

References 1.

Fleisher, J., Lane, P., LaViolette, A., Horton, M., Pollard, E., Morales, E.Q., Vernet, T., Christie, A. &Wynne-Jones, S. (2015). When did the swahili become maritime? American Anthropologist, 117(1), 100–115.