What is the first literary evidence of the term being used historically in reference to the coast of Southern Somalia? Please list the author and date below if you can. 
First mention of the term ‘Benadir’ in reference to the Somali coast?
- Thread starter Three Moons
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It’s interesting that no Southern city, be it Mogadishu, Merca or Barawa or even any smaller ones were ever known by the term ‘Bandar’, even as a nickname. Not in the Middle Ages and definitely not in classical antiquity, while almost every major city in the Northeast did have that prefix; Bandar Qasim, Bandar Bayla, Bandar Ziyada, Bandar Khor, etc.
I have also looked at potential references and maps by medieval travellers, and have come up empty, there is no mention of a distinct Benadir region or a distinct Benadiri people. Does anyone have anything worthy to contribute outside of the troll above?
I have also looked at potential references and maps by medieval travellers, and have come up empty, there is no mention of a distinct Benadir region or a distinct Benadiri people. Does anyone have anything worthy to contribute outside of the troll above?
First foreign mention of the word Banaadir would be from the omani's, also Bandar Muqdisho, Bandar Marka & Bandar Barawa were also mentioned by them in manuscripts like this one
Thanks, from which year does this manuscript date? And which Omani works do you reference in the first part of your post? This is not FKD but a genuine question. I wonder why the term persisted in relation to the coast but not the individual cities themselves?
I also found a reference to ‘Bandar Maqadishu’ in a 16th century Yemeni navigational book by Sulayman al-Mahri where he expanded on the work of Ibn Majid, and tied Mogadishu to the constellation Ursa Minor.
It's from 1294 Hijri , the omani manuscripts would mention them such as the letters that the elders wrote to omani sultans, the term was used for individual cities aswell, as the plural Banaadir wouldn't have come about without it being used individually in the first place. Also in Xamarweyne there's a neighborhood called bandarka.
Do you have the book in Arabic?
There wouldn't be mention of distinct banadiri people, because all the inhabitants of Banaadir would be Banaadiri
An 19th century manuscript is quite late with regards to figuring out the name’s etymology and historic usage as an identity, but I’ll take it. The Omanis and other Arab polities also had political relationships with the Sultans of Alula in modern Puntland, and the latter’s cities almost uniformly carried the prefix ‘Bandar’ in their names historically. If the status of being a port was the only qualifier, the Benadir coast would have to extend to modern Bosaso and probably beyond that.
Therefore I’m looking for other qualifiers to explain why it persisted to a specific coastal part of Somalia and not the other regions. The name Al-Sawahil originally meant ‘the coast’ in Arabic and this term was at times even used for the Palestinian, Sudanese and Tunisian coasts, as well as other areas with significant bodies of water, yet today it’s the name of a specific language and people in East Africa, and it was used as a geographical identity as early as the 13th century.
As for al-Mahri, though he refers to Mogadishu as ‘Bandar’, the geographical term he used to describe the country and coast are either Barr al-Sumal and Barr al-Ajam;
I have an issue with this theory because as I mentioned above there were at-least seven other cities on the Somali peninsula with the prefix Bandar;
- Bandar Alula
- Bandar Maraya
- Bandar Qasim
- Bandar Bayla
- Bandar Ziyada
- Bandar Khor
- Bandar Filuk
In Malaysia and Oman, like Somalia, there were multiple port cities prefixed with Bandar in their actual names, yet the likes of Malacca and Muscat weren’t, despite the latter two also being referenced in historic manuscripts as a ‘Bandar’ in a descriptive sense but it wasn’t an actual prefix part of their of name. I’m noticing the same with Mogadishu, hence my inquiry.
Bandar has multiple meanings, from them a coastal city , which would be most suitable meaning in the context of Banaadir. It wasn't omani's that came up with the name, I'm just mentioning them because the earliest foreign mention that I've seen and heard of was from them.
Sawaahil basically means coasts therefore you'd see it used everywhere but not as a name for a specific coastal strip .
I've checked that source, I've noticed there's alot missing in the sections of Arab and Persian Migrations to east Africa.
Banaadir at one point referred to the coast from Warsheekh to Kismayu it included Warsheekh, Xamar, Jaziira, Dhanaane, Qoriyaale, Gandarshe, Jilib Marka, Marka , Mungiya, Barawa , Goobweyn and Kismayo, however culturally it would be Xamar to Barawa, You wouldn't see anyone else referring to themselves as Banadiri. Obviously historically demographics were different so who would be Banadiri would've changed overtime due to demographics of an area changing such as Warsheekh, the hawiyes that inhabited warsheekh area after it being in ruins for some time wouldn't be considered banadiri, nor would biimaal that lived in Dhanaane be considered banadiri.
Mogadishu and Marka and Barawa would be on the same boat as Muscat in that case
Are there any local manuscripts that define and mention the concept of a ‘Benadir’ before the references by Omanis or Italians (i.e the Benadir Company)?
Yes, but there are also early Medieval references to that specific part of Africa being known internationally as the Swahili coast. I have trouble finding an equivalent historic tradition with regards to the term Benadir, which is what sparked my interest in creating this thread.
I added the source because it mentioned Suleiman Al-Mahri’s primary source from the year 1510, which makes it a contemporary account that coincided with Mogadishu’s golden age, when it was a globally known trading empire, and not a mysterious far away city but a clear known entity to merchants, travellers, sailors and cartographers.
What you describe above looks like a well-defined geographic region, but what historic work or map are you basing these clear boundaries upon to determine that they were and are Benadiri?
It’s difficult to determine who was considered a Benadiri historically because the oldest references don’t go further back than the 19th century (as of now). Ibn Majid and Al-Mahri both considered everything between Berbera and Barawa as being part of Barr es Sumal, five hundred years ago.[A]
Other terms that were historically used interchangeably were ‘Bilad al-Barbar’ and ‘Barr al-Ajam’. That is the kind of centuries long tradition I was hoping to find with regards to the term ‘Benadir’ by starting this thread. When I mentioned alternative ‘qualifiers’ in my previous post, what I was referring to was the following;
- Origins - If we exclude the Cushitic Somali population, none of the inhabitants on the Benadiri coast share a common origin, genetically, linguistically or culturally. Even if we take all of the migrational traditions at face value and accept them as the complete historic truth without any errors, there would be a clear mix of Semitic, Indo-European and Turkic ancestries, languages and cultures.
- Language - The above explains why there is also no distinct Benadiri language in Somalia the way there is a distinct Swahili language in East Africa or a distinct Somali language family in the Horn because the migrating populations from outside Africa were too small and diverse to impose a non-African language(s) on an existing dominant local population, and too small to influence say 40 to 50% of an existing African language’s base like in the case of Swahili. There are more Arabic loan-words in Spanish for example than in Somali. This places significant doubt on the ‘settlers’ theory’ pushed by the likes of Cerulli, and which is why modern scholarship no longer entertains that theory.
We know from historical precedents such as the Phoenicians in Tunisia, the ancient Greeks in Italy or the Arabs in Iberia that a significant insertion of foreign settlers in native lands would result in major traceable changes to a local population’s language, culture and genetics, and over time this would see the birth of new geographical and cultural terms like Al-Andalus, and Carthage that emphasised this change in dynamics. This was not the case in Somalia.
- Distinct geographic term - Prior to the 19th century there is, as of this moment, no evidence of the term ‘Benadir’ being used as a distinct geographic term to define any specific region of Somalia, let alone the clearly defined one we use today. There are no ancient or medieval maps that include the term ‘Benadir’ as a geographic locale, despite the first inclusion of the Horn of Africa as a distinct landmass going back to Herodotus in 450 BC.
- Religion - The reer Xamar, the reer Marka, the Barawanis, and other important minorities in Somalia do not practice a distinct version of Islam from their Cushitic Somali compatriots, be it the ones that lived in Harar or those from Berbera and Bandar Qassim, there is a clear overlap with those in the Southern coast and interior.
Based on this evidence, the lazy thing to do now is to assume that the term ‘Benadir’ as we know it today is an Omani or Italian devised geographic term, since it excluded seven other Somali cities with the prefix ‘Bandar’, because 1) the Omanis did not have a nominal influence on the latter cities the way they did at times with the cities on the Southern Somali coast or 2) the Italians upon their encroachment in the Somali peninsula felt the administrative need to distinguish those specific cities in the South from the ‘Bandar’ prefixed cities of the Sultanates in the Northeast.
Therefore, if there is no evidence of a distinct Benadiri language, culture, DNA, religion, and geographical region with clear historic boundaries going back centuries how do you then so confidently make the assertion as to what was considered Benadiri and what wasn’t, when all of the populations on the coast historically fell under other distinct terms like al-Sumal, al-Ajam, Bilad al-Barbar, etc and not Benadir?
What exactly unites a Barawani from Barawa with a reer Xamar from Mogadishu if neither of them speak a similar distinct language that is not Somali? To dismiss the above 1) and 2) as theories for the term’s first historic usage and definition we need clear overlapping characteristics that are distinct from the dominant culture on the Somali peninsula, a longer tradition of the term’s usage in manuscripts and cartography going back centuries, and at-least a distinct language that tied this specific region together tightly before we can make assertions as to who or what was considered ‘Benadir’ over the centuries and what wasn’t, at-least if we approach this from an objective lens.
Sources;
[A] “The first person who reported the name of Sūmāl ( Somalia ) may have been Ibn Mājid. In his book he stated that Barr Sūmāl ( the land of Sūmāl ) was an area between al- Barabira ( Berbera ) and Barawa ( Brava )” - Page 350; Essays in Northeast African studies.
“Despite the tradition that Muslim immigrants “founded” the Benadir ports, it is now widely accepted that there were pre-existing communities here with African leadership who welcomed these exiles, although the Arab traders had to gain permission to stay, and they had to settle in particular quarters of the town” - Page 252; Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia
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@Three Moons
Ibn Majid is definitely the second person who mentioned the name Somali and the first Arab. He was very knowledgeable and named a lot of Somali towns which were unknown to previous Arab travellers ie Ceel Sheekh
Ibn Majid is definitely the second person who mentioned the name Somali and the first Arab. He was very knowledgeable and named a lot of Somali towns which were unknown to previous Arab travellers ie Ceel Sheekh
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