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The Swahili are a coastal East African people whose culture and language emerged from centuries of trade and intermarriage between Bantu-speaking Africans and Arab and Persian merchants across the Indian Ocean. From roughly the 9th to the 16th centuries, independent Swahili city-states (Kilwa, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and others) prospered along the coast, sharing a common language and Islamic faith without ever forming a single kingdom.