Draft:House of Ramazani

The House of Ramazani (Arabic: بيت الرمضاني; Swahili: nyumba ya ramazani) is a Waguaguana dynasty of trading parties from the Sultanate of Utetera. Established in 1860, these Waguaguana trading parties collaborated heavily with Sultanate of Zanzibar, a cadet branch of the Al Said Dynasty of Oman.

History

In 1698, Zanzibar became part of the overseas holdings of Oman, falling under the control of the sultan of Oman. Omani and other Arab traders had already been prominent in trade with the island for hundreds of years. It was also visited by traders from Persia and India, who arrived with the seasonal musim (west wind). Months later they could return east with a change in the wind.

In 1832, or 1840 (the date varies among sources), Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat in Oman to Stone Town on Zanzibar. He established a ruling Arab elite and encouraged the development of clove plantations, using the island's enslaved Black Africans as labourers.

Additionally, across the African Great Lakes region, the arrival various ethnic groups across the region created an intermingling of Hamitic and negro types producing a Bantu nation ^[1]

Zanzibar's commerce fell increasingly into the hands of traders from the Indian subcontinent, whom Said encouraged to settle on the island. Traders had been coming to the island from Persia, Arabia, and India for hundreds of years. After Said's death in 1856, two of his sons, Majid bin Said and Thuwaini bin Said, struggled over the succession. They divided Zanzibar and Oman into two separate principalities; Thuwaini became the sultan of Oman while Majid became the first sultan of Zanzibar.

As a result of this divide, Tippu Tip built a slave-trading empire, and is considered the second wealthiest Muslim slave trader in history, using the proceeds to establish clove plantations on Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff reported that, when he left for his twelve years of "empire building" on the mainland, he had no plantations of his own. By 1895, he had acquired "seven 'shambas' [plantations] and 10,000 slaves". In contrast, the House of Ramazani and local Wamanyema trading parties remained within the trade of ivory and, unlike Tippu Tip, they did not meet and help Western explorers who entered the African continent, including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. By 1884 and 1887, the Sultanate of Utetera and the Sultan of Zanzibar claimed Eastern Congo for themselves in respect of Bargash bin Said el Busaidi.

In spite of the position of the House of Ramazani, and many other trading parties, as protectors of Zanzibar's interests in Congo, The Sultanate of Utetera maintained good relations with the Europeans. However, in August 1886, fighting broke out between the Swahili and the representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium at Stanley Falls despite al-Murjabī going to the Belgian consul at Zanzibar to assure him of his "good intentions". Although the House of Ramazani was still a force in Central African commercial politics, many trading parties could see by 1886 that power in the region was shifting so much so that Abushiri revolt took place across Lake Taganyika.

In early 1887, Stanley arrived in Zanzibar and proposed that Tippu Tip be made governor of the Stanley Falls District in the Congo Free State. Both Leopold and Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar agreed and on February 24, 1887, Tippu Tip accepted. At the same time, he agreed to man the expedition which Stanley had been commissioned to organize for the purpose of rescuing Emin Pasha (E. Schnitzer), the German governor of Equatoria (a region of Ottoman Egypt, today in South Sudan) who had been stranded in the Bahr el Ghazal area as a result of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan. Tippu Tip travelled back to the Upper Congo in the company of Stanley, but this time by way of the Atlantic coast and up the Congo River.

After his tenure as governor, the Congo–Arab War broke out. Both sides fought with armies consisting mostly of local African soldiers fighting under the command of either Arab or European leaders.

When Tippu Tip left the Congo, the authority of King Leopold's Free State was still very weak in the Eastern parts of the territory and the power lay largely with the House of Ramazani, Wamanyema and Swahili trading parties. Amongst these were Tippu Tip's son Sefu bin Hamid and a trader known as Rumaliza in the area close to Lake Tanganyika.

In 1892, Sefu bin Hamed attacked Belgian ivory traders, who were sent a final threat to the Arab-Swahili trade. The Free State government sent a force under commander Francis Dhanis to the East. Dhanis had an early success when chief Ngongo Lutete changed sides from Sefu's to his. Both armed and organised, the Belgian force defeated their opponents in several fights until the death of Sefu on 20 October 1893, finally forcing Rumaliza to flee to German territory in 1895.

References

Verkerk, Annemarie; Dunn, Michael (2018-03-29). "Combining linguistics, archaeology and ancient DNA genetics to understand deep human history". The Conversation. Retrieved 2024-12-09.

See Also