foreigners and barbarians: Africa 453 Axum suffered from the hostility of its Muslim neighbors, and eventually its people withdrew to the Ethiopian highlands Ethiopia and Egypt had a treaty that allowed Ethiopians to travel through Egypt on pilgrimages to Jerusalem in exchange for an annual tribute of slaves Much of Ethiopia’s contact with the outside world came through Egypt, and Egyptian traders visited frequently People from Europe also visited and found Ethiopia to be an enigmatic place with strange social rules Ethiopians were eager to show off their churches to visitors, but they were a society bound by complex rules of kinship, and foreigners who had no kin in Ethiopia were almost nonpersons Foreigners could elevate their status by incurring obligations from Ethiopians, perhaps by doing favors or presenting gifts, and by accepting favors, because any kind of relationship in which there were obligations gave a person a place in society Before the beginning of the medieval era there were already trading communities along the coast of East Africa Historians originally thought that cities were established by Arabs and Indians for trading with the interior of Africa, but recent archaeological discoveries show that the cities were founded by Africans Moreover, rather than being controlled by foreigners, the cities were only influenced by foreigners These cities of East Africa grew in size and wealth while their people learned to deal with foreign traders Egyptians, Arabians, Greeks, Indians, Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and Chinese thronged to their ports and mixed with the locals on city streets Hotels and inns serviced foreign visitors, and the foreigners often would stay for months, waiting for the trade winds to shift with the seasons to enable them to sail north and east Many foreigners chose to become permanent residents, indicating a welcoming atmosphere and increasing the cosmopolitan attitudes of local people The exact relationship of Arabs to the African peoples of the cities of East Africa is unclear At one time it may have been easy to say that the Arabs founded the cities, but they did not, and it was possible that they used force to convert local people to Islam At present the likeliest explanation is that people peacefully converted to Islam Despite the conversions to Islam, there were still many pagans and Christians in the cities, and foreigners of many religious affiliations were welcome guests The openness to foreigners of East African societies may have contributed to their downfall When the Portuguese arrived in the 1440s, they were able to sail their ships into port and were met by government inspectors, like all other visitors, for the assessing of tariffs and taxes Later, in the early 1500s, Portuguese ships were able to slip into East African ports by day, and at night the Portuguese attacked the cities, taking the trusting residents completely by sur- prise Thousands were murdered, thousands more were taken as slaves, and some cities were burned In the rain forests of Africa there was a migration, begun in ancient times, of Bantu-speaking peoples from western Africa They were farmers moving to find new land to cultivate or were bands of raiders seeking to conquer and loot What the indigenous hunter-gatherers thought of this situation is unclear They had traded with outsiders for centuries, but they lived nomadic lives, often without fixed villages On occasion they tried to keep foreigners out of their lands, and their poisoned arrows killed many attackers Their attitudes probably were not entirely hostile because they sometimes took up the ways of their settled neighbors and blended into the farming culture The San of southwestern Africa were also hunter-gatherers, occasionally living as nomads and occasionally in very small settlements Much of the information about their attitudes comes from after the medieval era, but some aspects of their medieval responses to foreigners can be inferred For example, they had strong views about what was their territory, and they resisted farmers and herders who tried to take the lands as their own They formed small war parties and attacked people who moved into what they believed were their traditional lands On the other hand, they often formed relationships with foreign cultures When they were not fighting the Hausa, who were pastoralists, they worked for the Hausa and learned the Hausa language to help with trade between the San and the Hausa Between the southern East African coastal cities and the lands of the San were vast grasslands The Khoi herded cattle across the lands and traded with the East African cities and with kingdoms in the interior, such as Great Zimbabwe Archaeological research has shown that the Khoi and the settled states of the Zimbabwe plateau interacted They traded goods and also fought over territory or more often over the Khoi’s paying tribute Foreign coins and beads found in Great Zimbabwe show that its people traded with the east coast, but whether foreigners actually visited Great Zimbabwe has yet to be established Among the farming peoples of western Africa and central Africa, attitudes toward foreigners varied greatly For those living in the Sahel steppes, which stretch west to east across the southern edge of the Sahara, foreigners were probably common sights Berbers, Arabs, and others made long treks south through the Sahara to reach several trading cities in the grasslands and the forests to the south Some historians think that this situation changed some traditional western African societies, which had been stateless—with no kings, no chiefs, and indeed almost no one who could be called a leader Some foreigners came not to trade but to steal and to