14 EARLY EAST AFRICA 



the gradually awakening Ethiopian seaboard, is a 

 contemplative traveller, a native of Tangier, one 

 Ibn Batuta, who in the middle of the fourteenth 

 century visited the East, and wrote an account of 

 his journeyings in many lands. He speaks of Mom- 

 basa and Kilwa, the latter now controlled by the 

 Sultan Hassan, the nineteenth ruler since the founder 

 Ali, doubtless of saintly memory. Batuta speaks 

 highly of this Sultan, and extols his great personal 

 courage and many victories over the barbarous 

 infidel Zanj or Bantu. This word Zanj is also 

 used by Ptolemy, who, as Sir Charles EUot points 

 out, called Africa Azania. In Arabic the word 

 means simply coast, but its probable true deriva- 

 tion is from the Persian word zang, a negro. The 

 Portuguese usually spelt Zanzibar Zanguebar. 



It is, I consider, extremely likely that from the 

 earliest times periodical migrations may have taken 

 place from Arabia, and even Persia, to what is 

 now Portuguese East Africa, by races of which 

 all trace or record is now lost — races who domi- 

 nated the savage inhabitants of Sofala and the 

 Empire of Monomotapa, and mixed among them 

 and traded and built those ruins which have so 

 exercised the minds of latter-day scientists. 



Ibn Batuta tells us that Sofala passed from the 

 suzerainty of Mogdishu to that of Kilwa during the 

 reign of Sultan Suliman — another ruler of Ali's 

 dynasty — ahd that there commenced a traffic in 

 gold and ivory of a most profitable character, which 

 doubtless continued until the appearance of the 

 Portuguese at the latter end of the fifteenth century. 



The same authority speaks of Mogdishu as a 



