Satawah/Satuvah (Island of Macau in front of Sabi river)(?) or Singo and Nshawa old Austronesian ports in the Save delta still not rediscovered.
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The identification is based only on the similarity of the name: Satawah – Sabi as the latitude is far off: nearly 6 fingers instead of the five given by Ibn Majid. Another possibility is at five fingers being the Bazaruto islands.
Ibn Majid (1470) is the only one mentioning this place but identification is very unsure.
There is only one island in front of the Sabi river and it is also found on old Portuguese maps. But even on old Portuguese maps this island is shown as just a heap of mangrove trees. (Just besides Mambone). See also my entry on Mulbaiuni city (Mambone) another city on the Sabi river.
Taken from: Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean by Iain Walker and al.
Sicard (author for NADA The southern Rhodesian Native Affairs Department Annual) states that, before the Muslim traders, merchants from Asian origin would have used the port of Singo or Nshawa in the Save Delta for gold trading. This port, which Sicard identifies as the island of Wasika reported by Ibn-Madjid, would have been the key point in the Indian Ocean trade routes and also the inland African trade route, since going up the Save River, it was possible to reach Butua where the gold was mined. Based on Blake-Thompson's works (a medical doctor who wrote on precolonial history of Zimbabwe) he also states that the Save was navigable in small boats all the way through Mozambique at least as far as the confluence with the Lundi, where traces of a port with evidence of marine and estuarine fauna have been found.
Note: Singo and Nshawa were ports in the Save Delta founded (in oral history stories) by Austronesian traders on the lower Sabi. They founded Nshawa port by eliminating the Singo port founded earlier by the Aulaya people (also Austronesian). They have so far not been rediscovered.
Note: Singo and Nshawa is other stories are ports upriver from the delta of the sabi river (see further).
Note: here we do not identify Wasika (Vacika) as an island on the Sabi river; we identify it instead as Bazaruto island.
Taken from: Les apports austronésiens à Madagascar, dans le canal de Mozambique et en … By Claude Alibert.
(The text under is gathered from oral history stories)
The passage from Madagascar to Africa, Mozambique sector took two months to reach the Sabi River delta (at Nshawa). The route from Madagascar to the Zambezi (which they called Duanya) and then to Tete, constituted a total journey of three months.
In his Sicard letter, Blake Thompson also indicates a passage through Sri Lanka or southern India of a population of red-skinned traders who set up itineraries on the African coast, in particular on the lower Sabi (Nshawa) where they eliminated the Singo port of the Aulaya (who therefore would have arrived earlier). These two ports (first Singo, then Nshawa, would have been replaced by Sofala when the Sabi would no longer have been navigable).
Their legends, as passed down to their descendants, the 'Nyungwe, and as told by Lino Benkudo Piloto, the living descendant of Ming Yung (usually Bantuized as Munyu), their chief who settled at "Nshawa ” on the Sabi (Shawa) River.
The Aulaya lived in the kingdom of Milanje, (Note by Blake Thompson: “When after this information I mentioned
Idrisi's 'Mihradj Empire', Lino says that was how the Arabs pronounced the words like Milanje. He did not know that Idrisi was Arab”), three months sailing from Madagascar (named by Lino under
his old name Malaka). Every year the Aulaya came from Milanje to Africa to bring oxen, metalwork and other articles which they traded with the natives (not the Bantu who had not yet reached South
Africa).
From Malaka (Madagascar), it took two months to reach Nshawa, the Aulaya port above the Sabi River delta. (This
port was drained due to the change in the course of the river and it is now further inland). These peoples had other ports to the south, even further than Delgado Bay. A port was known as Ku
Drabuja. From Nshawa the boats went north up the coast to one of the mouths of the Zambezi (which they knew as Duanya), stopping after the delta near a mountain (which they called Malangwe
)
Extract from the letter addressed to Sicard by Blake-Thompson in 1954 and reproduced in “The Ancient Sabi-Zimbabwe Trade Route”, NADA, 1963, XL, p. 8.
“An Asian population came from Ceylon (Ulanga, Lanka) and from southern India towards Madagascar (Malaka or Madaga) and” after a naval battle against the Arabs, they were pushed back inland and migrated up to Nshawa (or Singo) on the Rhodesian part of the Sabi River, a port which had been their principal port on the occasion of their commercial voyages in Africa”.
Note on Sabi River
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Taken from: L'empire du Monomotapa du XVe au XIXe siècle By William G. Randles
A third river, the Sabi, which bypasses the southern flank of the Inyanga range, flows into the sea not far from Sofala, the gold port so often mentioned by Arab geographers. As being navigable, the Sabi would have been the most rational route to reach the gold of the interior, as well as the famous city of Zimbabwe, whose rise and decline lie, according to P. S. Garlake 1968, between the end of the 10th century — or the beginning of the 11th century — and the middle of the 15th century.
When, at the beginning of the 15th century, the Portuguese came to replace the Arabs on the coast of South-East Africa, no one uses the Sabi anymore, Zimbabwe is apparently abandoned, and a new center policy arose in the Zambezi Valley, at the northeastern edge of the plateau. Almost at the same time, a rival center appears at the end opposite: Khami, whose ruins can be seen near present-day Bulawayo.
Could it be that Zimbabwe's decline was caused by a modification of the hydraulic regime of the Sabi, making the river impractical for boats coming from the Indian Ocean? That’s what R. Summers 1969 thinks. To explain this upheaval, two hypotheses have been put forward, one climatic, the other tectonic. In the current state of our knowledge, nothing allows us to designate the right one. No doubt they are both, factors that could have intervened.
First the climatic hypothesis: according to Summers, a humid period would have increased, between the turn and the 8th to 9th century, the volume of water in the Sabi, thus becoming navigable for small ocean-going craft until its confluence with the Lundi; then the drought gradually set in little by little, reaching its peak around the middle of the 15th century, where the river lost all use as a route to the plateau; it was probably only after 1650 that a new wet phase began.
As for the hypothesis of a tectonic movement having led to the reduction in the flow of the Sabi, it is based on the elevation, noted in recent times, from the Mozambican coast. It would be necessary to state that this elevation occurred uniformly from the confluence of the Lundi with the Sabi, which seems confirmed by the slight slope of the course of the latter. In 1906, H. de Laessoe explored the entire course of the Sabi and noticed that, over a distance of 320 kilometers from its confluence with the Lundi, its slope was practically zero, even precision devices prove powerless to detect it. Thereby:
“joined to the general appearance of the region, gives the impression that there must have been there, in relatively recent times, a vast lake about 300 kilometers long, extending from west to east”.
If the Sabi has an almost non-existent slope over most of its course, it still increases around 21°07° latitude and 34°50’ longitude, that is to say approximately 60 kilometers from its mouth, and a sort of channel emerges:
“It could be,” says de Laessoe 1906, “that it was the canal through which, supposing that there was a lake, its waters (due to a gradual elevation of the bed) would have made their way towards the sea. "
The Sabi can serve less and less as an access route to the interior. They undoubtedly turned towards the Zambezi, at least as convenient, if not, more. However, it seems that only in the first quarter of the 16th century that it established itself as the only route. In the first years of the century, Sofala is still a flourishing trading post, and it is the dirt road that we take to get from there to the hinterland. There is no longer any question of using the Sabi. Arabs talk to Portuguese newcomers about an annual export of 1,300,000 to 2,000,000 of miticals of gold (which represents 5,500 to 8,500 kg) “momentarily interrupted due to a war in the interior”.
In 1505, the Portuguese chased the Arabs from Sofala and construct a fort, but the gold trade, which was declining, will not revive again in this place.
Taken from: A Tradition of Large Logboats on the Save River, South-Eastern Zimbabwe? By Rosanne Hawarden 2018.
In 1959 the Rhodesian archaeologist, Roger Summers (1960, 1969) reported the existence of an ‘ancient dhow harbour or dock’ at the confluence of the Runde and Save Rivers (also historically referred to as the Lundi and Sabi Rivers) located on Zimbabwe’s south-eastern border with Mozambique, flanking the Gonarezhou National Reserve (Figures 1a, b and c). The dock or riverine harbour was a roughly rectangular stretch of water, 250 yards long by 40 yards wide (229 X 37 metres) cut off from the river but connected by a dry watercourse to the Runde River about a quarter of a mile (0.4 km) before it joined the Save River. After several visits he came to the conclusion that ‘the place showed evidence of human workmanship’ and had been excavated to provide ‘a place in which small ships could moor off the river’ but the presence of hippopotamus and crocodile prevented further investigation (Summers, 1969: 208). No construction details or evidence for wooden structures were given. These rivers are thought to be one of the routes from medieval Great Zimbabwe to Sofala and the Indian Ocean (Beach, 1980: 40; Chirikure & Pikirayi, 2008; Huffman, 1972; Mitchell, 2002: 328-329; Summers, 1969: 208). In 1891 the first European expedition by James Theodore and Mabel Bent travelled along the upper Save (Sabi) River and similarly concluded that it was a ‘magnificent stream even here so far inland’ and in ‘ancient times it must have been navigable for larger craft, for all African rivers are silting up’ (Bent, 1892: 231). They were the first to conclude that the ancient builders of the ruins of Mashonaland ‘utilised this stream as their road to and from the coast’. While investigating early mining in the area, Summers (1969: 206-207) collected oral history from local African sources and Europeans who related stories of connections to Arab navigation from the East African/Swahili trade. He concluded from examining the geography and analysing maps that the Save River was the first river outlet from the ancient Zimbabwean gold-fields and that the route via the Zambezi River was a later development.
