The Shirazi people, also known as Mbwera, are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting the Swahili coast and the nearby Indian ocean islands.
[1][3] A number of Shirazi legends proliferated along the East African coast, most involving a named or unnamed Persian prince marrying a Swahili princess.
One thesis based on oral tradition and some written sources (ie: the Kilwa Chronicle) states that immigrants from the Shiraz region in southwestern Iran directly settled various mainland ports and islands on the eastern Africa seaboard beginning in the tenth century, in an area between Zanzibar in the north and Sofala in the south.
By 1200 AD, they had established local sultanates and mercantile networks on the islands of Kilwa, Mafia and Comoros along the Swahili coast, and in northwestern Madagascar.
[26] The Shirazi people have been linked to the Lamu Archipelago – islands in the Indian Ocean close to north Kenya, which oral traditions claim were settled by seven brothers from Shiraz in south Iran.
[33] Both Shirazi and non-Shirazi sultanates on the coast served as trade centers for ivory, ambergris, slaves, gold, and timber coming from the African interior, and textiles, ceramics, and silver from the Indian Ocean.
[43] According to the twelfth century geography of Al-Idrisi, completed in 1154 CE, there were four littoral zones: Barbar (Bilad al Barbar; "land of the Berbers") in the Horn of Africa, which was inhabited by Somalis and stretched southward to the Shebelle river; Zanj (Ard al-Zanj; "country of the blacks"), located immediately below that up to around Tanga or the southern part of Pemba island; Sofala (Ard Sufala), extending from Pemba to an unknown terminus, but probably around the Limpopo river; and Waq-Waq, the shadowy land south thereof.
[46][47] Ibn al-Mujawir later wrote that, due to various battles in the Arabian peninsula, Banu Majid people from Yemen settled in the central Mogadishu area.
The thirteenth century texts also mention mosques and individuals with names such as "al-Shirazi" and "al-Sirafi" and a clan called "Sirafi at Merca", suggestive of an early Persian presence in the area.
[48] To the south of the Barbar region, Al-Masudi mentions seaborne trade from Oman and Siraf port near Shiraz to the African Zanj coast, Sofala and Waq-Waq.
[14][53] Another set of records are found in the Book of the Zanj (Kitab al-Zanuj), a likely compilation of mythical oral traditions and memories of settled traders on the Swahili coast.
[54] According to R. F. Morton, a critical assessment of the Book of the Zanj indicates that much of the document consists of deliberate falsifications by its author Fathili bin Omari, which were intended to invalidate the established oral traditions of local Bantu groups.
The Kitab's ascription of Arabian origins for the founders of Malindi and other settlements on the Swahili coast is also contradicted by recorded 19th-century clan and town traditions, which instead emphasize that these early Shirazi settlers were of Persian ancestral heritage.
The archaeological record firmly refutes any supposition of mass migrations or colonization but evidences extensive trade relations with Persia.
[58][59] The Muslim Shirazi settlements on the Swahili coast maintained a close relationship with those on islands such as Comoros, through marriage and mercantile networks.
[60] According to Tor Sellström, the Comorian population profile has a large proportion of Arab and African heritage, particularly on Grande Comore and Anjouan and these were under Shirazi sultanates.
[61] The contact of Shirazi people with colonial Europeans started with the arrival in Kilwa sultanate of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, in 1498.
[62] In parallel to European competition, non-Swahili-speaking Bantu groups began attacking Shirazi towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Portuguese agreed to cede this part of Africa, and a fresh migration of Arabs from Oman and Yemen into the Shirazi people settlements followed.
[66] Genetic analysis by Msadie et al. (2010) indicates that the most common paternal lineages among the contemporary Comorian population, which includes Shirazi people, are clades that are frequent in sub-Saharan Africa (E1b1a1-M2 (41%) and E2-M90 (14%)).
According to Helena Jerman, the word "Sawahil" among the Shirazi people referred to "free but landless" strata of the society who had adopted Islam, then a new social category on the Swahili coast.
[86] According to the sociologist Jonas Ewald and other scholars, the social stratification is not limited in the Shirazi society to racial lines, but extends to economic status and the region of origin.
[90] According to G. Thomas Burgess, Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad, many Africans "claimed Shirazi identity to obscure their slave ancestry, to mark their status as landowners, or to gain access to World War II rations distributed by the colonial state along ethnic lines."
Shirazi consider themselves as of Persian ancestry primarily, and more consistently regard themselves as neither Arabs nor recent labor migrants from mainland Africa.