ABSTRACT
East Africa ranges from the dry scrubland of northern Mozambique to the empty deserts of northern Sudan and Eritrea and from the seasonally dry savanna bordering the Indian Ocean inland to the mountain–rain-forest mosaic of Rwanda and Burundi. From time to time, debate on the extent to which Indonesian peoples penetrated and colonized East Africa (bringing their cultural practices, including music, with them) still surfaces. Islam continues to gain converts throughout East Africa—a spread that in earlier centuries was associated with trade with the Arab world, rather than conquest, but which need not always have been connected with the introduction of the Arabic language. Trumpet ensembles were formerly part of the music at the courts of other East African kings and rulers. In British East Africa, native recruits readily learned skills on European band instruments. The coastal peoples of East Africa have long had contact with the Arabic world and with other cultures around the shores of the Indian Ocean.
