ABSTRACT
The Swahili-speaking population of the East African coast-urban and peasant as well as tribal-can conveniently be subdivided into Arabs (including self-styled Arabs), Shirazi, and Swahili in a narrower sense. This is a very broad classification and the only one that can be used to impose some order upon the welter of local and cultural groups and sub-groups which are the result of centuries of immigration, transmigration, conquest, and miscegenation. The classification as such is not a territorial one, neither is it entirely stratigraphie, though it contains elements of both. Rather it is sociological, in that society, as such, recognizes, or has come to recognize, the borderlines between the three categories, although borderline cases must be admitted-and some groups will either fall outside the classification or are on the move from one category to the other. Examples of this are the Bajun who “have become" Arabs and Pemba who consider themselves to be Shirazi. References to other instances of this will be made later. All these have a common language and one common culture, though both speech and style of living show many local variants. In so far as they share this common Islamic coastal civüization, they are all Swahili in a wider sense.
