ABSTRACT
The Arabs in central Africa, wrote David Livingstone on IO August 1866, 'cannot form a state or independent kingdom: slavery and the slave trade are insuperable obstacles to any permanence inland ... all therefore that the Arabs do is to collect as much money as they can ... and then leave the country'. 1 Thirty years later, however, a British Officer in the employ of King Leopold's forces in the Eastern Congo, writing of the fierceness of the Arab campaign against the consolidation of European power in that area, claimed that if the attempt of the Arabs had succeeded, 'it is probable that the (Congo) Free State would have been replaced by a Muhammadan Empire analogous to that of the Khalifa in the Soudan',2 Unless, therefore, such statements are wild generalizations, profound changes must have taken place in the Arab attitude to central African politics during the period from the 1860s to the 1890s. Professor Roland Oliver, in noting that this occurred 'abruptly' between 1884 and 1888, concludes that 'the Arabs were now aiming at political power'. 3
If this thesis is correct the destruction of Arab ambitions in British, Belgian, and German central Africa during the Scramble for Africa had important consequences for Islam in these partsnothing less, in fact, than the overthrow of a potential Islamic State or States. Thought on the spread of Islam in central Africa in the last half of the nineteenth century is too often influenced by the observation that the Arab traders did not pJJoselytize. Had they achieved political power, this would not have been necessary, iflbn Khaldun's assertion that 'The vanquished always
Special Studies
seek to imitate their victors in their dress, insignia, belief, and other customs and usages'4 is to be believed. Indeed this process had begun long before the threat of Arab political power in central Africa, as Livingstone noticed when, in 1866, he met the Yao chief, Mataka, to the east of Lake Nyasa, commented on his Arab dress, and noticed of the square house in which he was lodgecl that 'indeed most of the houses here are square, for the Arabs are imitated in everything'. 5
To add to the eomplications of the study of the spread of Islam in central Africa-and leaving aside the complex and cryptic question pf its existence there in the pre-European period6-one must note the levels at which, during the nineteenth century, it was introduced. 'In Central Africa,' noted a Scottish participant in the British battles against the Arabs at the northern end of Lake Nyasa in the mid-188os, 'we meet with three classes of Arabs-first, the Muscat, or white Arab, who is the true species ... ; second, the Mswahili, or coast Arab, who is black, bu.t is strictly Muhammadah in religion ... ; and third, any upcountry native who adopts. the m<1nners and customs of the Moslem.'7
