纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（8）（在线收听）

The last piece of pottery makes this point very well. It's brown, it's a fragment of fired clay, and it's got bold raised decoration. It's pottery clearly made for cooking and for everyday use, the clay is local and the manufacture is distinctly African. And it shows that the African inhabitants of Kilwa, while happily enjoying and collecting foreign pottery, continued, as people always do, to cook in their own traditional way with their own traditional pots. And it's pots like this one that also tell us that the Africans were themselves sailing and trading across the Indian Ocean, because fragments like these ones have been found in ports across the Middle East. And we know from other sources that African merchants traded to India, and that cities of the Swahili strip were sending their own envoys to the Chinese court.

As I said at the start of this programme, when we put an ocean and not a country at the centre of our histories, it can radically change our perceptions of what happened in the past, and why. It's a theme that's been explored by Abdulrazak Gurnah: