In the 19th century, Oman ruled the EA coast.
When the sultan of Oman died in 1804, Muscat was once again thrown into one of its frequent bouts of instability. The sultan’s son and heir, Said bin Sultan, was only 13.
So Said’s cousin, Badr, was appointed regent. The regency ended three years later in violent circumstances when Badr, having made the fatal mistake of teasing Said for crying like a girl, was killed on the spot by the latter.
Said, now 16, became sultan, or Seyyid, of Oman.
Seyyid Said bin Sultan was to have a greater influence on the development of the Swahili coast arguably more than any other person in history.
By the time he became sultan, the Mazrui family, which was opposed to the Omani regime, had begun to reassert its influence at the (now Kenyan) coast. At the time, Said was more bothered by rampaging pirates off the coast of Oman, and militant tribes that opposed his rule.
Accordingly, Seyyid Said focused his time and energies consolidating his authority in Oman, even as the power of the Mazrui spread north, right into the heart of the Lamu Archipelago.
But in East Africa, the Mazrui were about to take a step too far.
In 1807, around the time Seyyid Said was murdering his cousin, the Mazrui deposed the pro-Omani King of Pate, an island that’s presently within Lamu county but which in those days was by far militarily stronger.
Fearing that they, too, would be overran, the people of Lamu decided to make (actually pretend was more like it) political rapprochement with the Mazruis, inviting them to build a fort in Lamu. This was to ostensibly “protect wa-Amu from Pate and other enemies…”
But what the Lamu people didn’t know was that the Mazruis took up the challenge in connivance with Pate. The Mazrui built a fort, alright, but which they wanted to use to conquer Lamu from the inside.
While the fort was partially complete, the Lamu people learnt of the plot and kicked out the Mazruis.
But within weeks, a massive combined force of pro-Mazrui Pate and Mombasa troops landed on Lamu island from the Shela side. They pushed forward as far as Hedabu hill. To the surprise of the invaders, however, Lamu put up a massive counter attack, albeit with heavy losses.
Pate legend has it that a brass pot and gong had been buried at Shela by a Lamu magician to prevent the invaders from advancing over it.
And as the battered Patean and Mombasa forces retreated towards Shela, greater tragedy lurked. The tide had gone out and with their dhows stranded in the shallow Indian Ocean waters, the invaders had nowhere to take cover. They were completely annihilated.
Since that bloody day, the once mighty city-state that was Pate never dared again to wage war against Lamu. There are no known records as to how many people died in the Shela massacre but the numbers are suspected to be in the hundreds.
In fact, a century after the invasion, bleached skeletons of some of the dead were being unearthed from the sand dunes of Shela on Lamu island.
Meanwhile, fearing that Pate would shake itself off the defeat and rise again with vengeance, the people of Lamu desperately sent emissaries to Oman pleading for protection.
Help did come.
Seyyid Said’s men came to the town, helped Lamu finish off the fort that the Mazrui had begun, and left a governor (Liwali) there, giving the Omani for the first time a secure foothold on the north coast from which to take on the now-bruised Mazrui.
Meanwhile, aided by British ships that were based in India, Seyyid Said was able to defeat the pirates that threatened navigation off the coast of Arabia. By 1817, Seyyid Said had strengthened control in Oman enough to consider extending his authority from his base in Lamu.
That year, he sent a fleet of dhows containing four thousand men to wrest Pate from Mazrui control. After three waves of attacks, Pate fell.
Said then issued a decree forbidding any of his subjects in East Africa to trade with Mombasa, a sanction made many times worse in 1822 when Omani forces seized control of Pemba Island (in Tanzania today), cutting Mombasa off from her main source of food.
Now sandwiched between Omani blocs to the north and south coasts, and with their coastal empire slipping away, the Mazruis suddenly realized that their stronghold of Mombasa was vulnerable.
So they turned to a reluctant Britain for protection.
See, the Brits had signed a pact in 1807 with the Mazruis, who even subsequently opened a consular office in Bombay, India, which was then under British rule.
In that pact, the Mazrui had offered overlordship of Mombasa to Britain in exchange for protection against Oman.
But Britain was busy fighting in the Napoleonic wars and the last thing they wanted was to antagonize Oman. If they offend Oman, the British reasoned, Napoleon could potentially use that country as the launchpad for an invasion of India.
The Mazruis offer was therefore outrightly rejected.
In the same year as the Mazrui had made their first offer, Britain’s parliament, energized by the powerful arguments of one of its members, William Wilberforce, had passed a law prohibiting trade in slaves within the British Empire.
Enforcing this meant ensuring that no slaves were imported into any of the British possessions. In the Indian Ocean, this meant India and Mauritius, the former French colony which had been given to Britain following Napoleon’s defeat.
Therefore in 1822, just a year before the Mazrui’s second offer, Britain and Oman signed the Moresby Treaty which not only prohibited the transport of slaves to British possessions, but prohibited Oman from exporting slaves outside the sultan’s domains in East Africa and Arabia.
The Mazrui request for protection against Oman therefore came a bit too late and there was no way the British government would upset Oman in order to help the Mazrui, a family that was in fact involved in the slave trade.
If slaves were ferried away from the East African coast to far away destinations, great mementos in the form of forts and palaces, however derelict their state, were left behind and still stand to this date.
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pate fort.
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Lamu fort
(Source: Historia ya wakenya fb Page https://www.facebook.com/historia.yawakenya )