1840s–1880s: (Islam in the Central East African Interior — Mutesa’s Insincere Attachment in Buganda, Yao Traders Adopting the Faith, Swahili Spreading as a L…

1840s–1880s: (Islam in the Central East African Interior — Mutesa’s Insincere Attachment in Buganda, Yao Traders Adopting the Faith, Swahili Spreading as a Lingua Franca Across a Broad Arc from Southern Uganda to Northern Mozambique, but Overall Impact Much Less Than in West Africa): The commercial expansion of the Zanzibar sultanate led to the gradual penetration of Islam into the eastern African interior, though much less systematically than in the west. Islam was perhaps most enthusiastically embraced in Buganda, where Kabaka Mutesa envisaged it as a possible state religion to control powerful spirit-mediums of indigenous belief — he proclaimed himself Muslim, possibly in the late 1860s. His attachment was insincere, however, and by the end of the 1870s he found himself compelled to execute young chiefs who had defied his authority on Islamic grounds. Mutesa ultimately sought to balance Christianity and Islam against one another, but both faiths introduced profound instability that would manifest in civil war at the end of the 1880s. Further south, Yao traders adopted Islam in the second half of the century, and more broadly Islam filtered into the coastal hinterland of Tanzania, where mobile young men used it to free themselves from traditional constraints. In the deeper interior, Islam was most visible in the commercial entrepôts at Tabora and Ujiji. Perhaps most significantly, the second half of the century witnessed the adoption of Swahili as a lingua franca across a broad arc encompassing southern Uganda, Tanzania, eastern Congo, Malawi, and northern Mozambique. Overall, however, Islam’s impact in central eastern Africa was much less than in West Africa in the nineteenth century, though it would grow rapidly from the early twentieth century.