Professor Claude Allibert, the dedicatee of this volume, has been our most engaging explorer of this quasihistorical world, and has led the way in seeking to disentangle the real and the fantastic, the literal and the symbolic, the imagined and the imaginary in travellers’ tales about the islands of the western Indian Ocean (e.g. The Indian Ocean has cast up a wealth of literature that merges fact and fiction, the most familiar to us being The Seven Voyages of Sindbad as passed down in the The Arabian Nights. It also suggests some general correlations between island biogeography and human settlement that can be compared to observations based on research in Oceania. The evidence presented here evokes a number of historical hypotheses, some contrary to received wisdom, about the settlement of the islands and relations between the communities involved. I will argue that the significance of hunting, trapping and the translocation of wild animals has been greatly underestimated in previous histories of this region. In this paper I will make a preliminary attempt to do so, by reviewing the cultural and biological evidence for people’s interactions with the terrestrial fauna of island archipelagos that lie between East Africa and Madagascar. In the Western Indian Ocean Madagascar has been the focus of this kind of investigation (Goodman and Patterson 1997), but it has not been extended to other islands or integrated with study of their settlement histories. One particularly fertile area of research has been the historical ecology of oceanic islands and analysis of the environmental impacts of human settlement and subsistence practices (Kirch and Hunt 1997). In this and other respects the study of the maritime heritage of the Indian Ocean lags behind that of the Pacifi c, where the history of human colonisation is the subject of lively interdisciplinary debate (cf. In addition, there are several Swahili creoles and pidgins: Cutchi-Swahili, Kisetla (Settler Swahili), Engsh, Sheng, Shaba Swahili (Katanga Swahili, Lubumbashi Swahili), Ngwana (Congo Swahili), Kikeya.Researchers have recently begun to re-examine the settlement of the islands of the Western Indian Ocean from multi-disciplinary perspectives that incorporate evidence from both the natural and human sciences (Blench, this volume Hurles et al. Swahili: Makwe (Mozambique), Sidi (Pakistan), Tikulu (Bajuni Islands, Somalia), Socotra Swahili, Mwiini (Brava, Somalia), Coastal Swahili (Lamu, Mombasa, Zanzibar), Pemba Swahili (Pemba, Mafia).Comorian languages, divided into two groups, Western (Shimwali and Shingazidja) and Eastern ( Shimaore and Shindzwani).Mijikenda (E.72–73) (North (Nyika), Segeju, Digo, Degere).In Guthrie's geographic classification, Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name Nyika.
In addition to Swahili, Sabaki languages include Ilwana (Malakote) and Pokomo on the Tana River in Kenya, Mijikenda, spoken on the Kenyan coast Comorian, in the Comoro Islands and Mwani, spoken in northern Mozambique. Sabaki is a Pokomo word for Large Fish or Crocodile. The Sabaki languages are the Bantu languages of the Swahili Coast, named for the Sabaki River.
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