Somalia Kenya Tanzania Madagascar Djibouti Ethiopia Rwanda Burundi Eritrea Indian Ocean Islands
From the Horn of Africa to the Archipelago Islands of Moçambique, the east coast of Africa looks out onto the Indian Ocean trade axis, and has experienced long periods of Arab, Portuguese, British, German and Italian influence, all of which have implanted influences that are still clearly visible. The lingua franca of the region, Swahili, is a language with a strong infusion of Arabic, just as the Swahili culture itself is a synthesis of both Arabic, Indian and African. Pushed into the interior by the Indian Ocean slave trade, and spread down the coast by the east coast trade winds, the most widespread current manifestation of the long years of Arab dominance is the ubiquitous East African trading dhow.
The nations of East Africa, from Somalia to Moçambique, have a particular and varied African quintessence. The landscape and peoples of Kenya range from tribes derived of Nilotic origins, such as the Turkana, the Samburu and Maasai, who occupy the plains and deserts of the south and north, and the Bantu speaking Kikuyu of the highland interior. The polyglot societies of the Central Highlands – all of West African Bantu origin – make up the nations of Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, bound by historical ties of language, enmity and bondage to the remnants of Zanzibari Sultanates. Further south Portuguese is spoken in a society begun by the Lusitanian economic explorations of the 15th and 16th centuries, and ended by the bloody anti-colonial wars of the 1960s and 1970s.
East Africa has tended to see the deepest colonial imprints, and everywhere the marks and scars of several hundred, indeed thousands of years of ongoing foreign domination are visible. The region is a social and ecological melting pot, and arguably as a consequence one of the most vibrant and interesting quarters of the African Continent. With the attraction of thousands of miles of pristine beaches and islands, coastal cities and communities, the definitive plains and grassland savannahs, and mountains that in places rise above 18 000 ft to snow-caps and glaciers, East Africa is a vast destination, and a cultural and eco-traveller’s paradise.
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