IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 294

For more than a thousand years, a chain of ports along the East African coast linked the interior of the continent to the markets of Arabia, Persia, India and China. They stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Kilwa, Mombasa and Malindi, and southward to Sofala, near the mouth of the Zambezi. The people who lived in them spoke Swahili, a Bantu language enriched by centuries of contact with Arabic; the name itself comes from the Arabic word for coasts.

Archaeologists have shown that the coast was settled long before Islam arrived. Fishing and farming communities lived along the shore in the first centuries AD, trading iron and ivory with passing ships. A Greek merchant's guide written in the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes a port called Rhapta somewhere on this coast. From about the eighth century, merchants from the Persian Gulf began to settle, and Islam spread among the coastal communities. The earliest mosques were small, built of timber and mud, and only later rebuilt in stone.

Everything depended on the winds. For part of the year the north-east monsoon blows down the coast, and for the rest it reverses and blows back towards Arabia. Sailors in wooden dhows timed their voyages to these seasons, arriving with the north-east wind and leaving with the south-west, so that a round trip took about a year. The same winds carried African goods north and brought cloth, pottery and glass south. Ships were navigated by the stars rather than by instruments.

The trade was varied. From the interior came ivory, rhino horn and, above all, gold, mined on the plateau that is now Zimbabwe and carried down to Sofala for shipment north. Mangrove poles, cut in the coastal creeks, were valued in the Persian Gulf as roof beams, since good timber was scarce there. In return the coast imported Indian cotton cloth, Chinese porcelain, glass beads and pottery from Persia. Excavations at Kilwa and Manda have produced fragments of celadon and blue-and-white ware that show how far these luxuries travelled.

Prosperity showed itself in stone. Builders used coral, a fossilised rock cut from the reef while it was still soft, and lime made by burning coral in kilns. Walls were plastered and decorated with niches and carved panels, and roofs were supported by mangrove poles. The Great Mosque of Kilwa, begun in the eleventh century and enlarged over the following three hundred years, is the finest surviving example, with domes and barrel vaults supported on stone columns. Nearby stands the palace of Husuni Kubwa, built in the early fourteenth century for a sultan enriched by the gold trade.

Stone houses were the exception. Most inhabitants lived in houses of mud and thatch, and the contrast between the two kinds of building is one of the clearest signs of inequality. At the top stood a small group of ruling families and wealthy merchants, who owned plantations and ships and who competed for the office of sultan. Below them were craftsmen, sailors, porters and enslaved people. Swahili society was also literate: scholars wrote in Arabic script, and poets composed long narrative poems in Swahili that are still performed today.

The most famous visitor was Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveller who had already crossed much of Asia. He reached Kilwa in 1331 and judged it one of the most beautiful and best-built towns he had seen, praising its mosque and the piety of its ruler. His account is vivid but brief, and it reflects the interests of an educated Muslim visitor: he says little about how ordinary people lived. For all its value, then, his description tells us more about what a fourteenth-century traveller noticed than about the town as a whole.

European ships arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. Vasco da Gama reached the coast in 1498 on his way to India, and within a few years the Portuguese had decided to control the trade of the Indian Ocean by force. In 1505 a fleet under Francisco de Almeida attacked and plundered Kilwa, and other ports were taxed or occupied. At Mombasa they began building the fortress of Fort Jesus in 1593. Portuguese power on the coast was never secure, and in 1698, after a long siege, the fortress fell to forces from Oman.

The centre of gravity shifted north. In the nineteenth century the rulers of Oman, who had expelled the Portuguese, took a growing interest in Zanzibar, and in 1840 the sultan moved his court there. Clove plantations worked by enslaved labour made the island one of the world's leading producers of the spice, and the export of enslaved Africans across the Indian Ocean grew until it was gradually suppressed.

The old towns are now the subject of both archaeology and politics. Colonial writers once described the stone cities as Arab or Persian colonies planted on an African shore, denying the inhabitants any role in their own history. Excavations and the study of Swahili language and literature have overturned that picture: in their language, their farming base and most of their population, the towns were African. Several of the sites are now recognised internationally, and Kilwa, Mombasa and Zanzibar all attract visitors and researchers.

A postage stamp is such a familiar object that its invention seems obvious: a small printed label, bought in advance and stuck to a letter to show that the charge has been paid. Yet the idea had to be argued for. In the early nineteenth century, letters in Britain were usually paid for on delivery, and the charge depended on the distance travelled and on the number of sheets of paper used. The system was expensive, slow and widely evaded. Reformers wanted a cheaper service in which the sender paid a fixed sum in advance, but they had to overcome the resistance of officials who believed that any change would cost the Post Office money.

The decisive proposal came from Rowland Hill, a former schoolmaster who had studied the postal service in detail. Hill had set out his argument in a pamphlet published in 1837, and it attracted wide attention. In it he proposed that postage should be charged at a uniform rate and paid in advance, and he suggested that the simplest way of showing payment would be a small piece of paper, gummed on the back, which the sender could attach to the letter. He did not claim to have invented the idea from nothing. In 1839 the Treasury invited the public to submit designs and methods for prepaying postage, and well over a thousand suggestions arrived, from officials, artists, printers and eccentrics. In 1840 the first adhesive labels went on sale in London, and they could be used from the sixth of May.

The stamp that resulted was a rectangle of about two by three centimetres, printed in black from an engraved plate. At its centre was a portrait of the young Queen Victoria, adapted from a medal by the sculptor William Wyon; around it were ornamental scrolls and the words POSTAGE and ONE PENNY. Each sheet held 240 stamps, and every one carried a pair of letters in its lower corners which recorded its position on the plate. The paper was watermarked, and the printing was done by a firm that specialised in banknotes. The same portrait, with small changes, remained on British stamps for the rest of the queen's long reign.

Labels were not the first way of proving that postage had been paid. As early as 1680, William Dockwra's London Penny Post stamped letters with a triangular mark to show that the penny had been received, and in the early nineteenth century the kingdom of Sardinia used handstruck marks on prepaid letters which varied with weight and distance. Both systems required an official to apply the mark, however, and neither produced anything that could be bought in advance and carried away by the sender. In 1840 the British Post Office also issued prepaid envelopes with a printed design, but they were thought ugly and were soon withdrawn.

The most persistent rival claim comes from Scotland. James Chalmers, a bookseller and printer in Dundee, published a plan for prepaid postage in 1834, six years before the first British stamp appeared, and later submitted designs for an adhesive stamp to the Treasury competition. He died in 1853, and for the rest of the century his son campaigned to have him recognised as the inventor. The difficulty is that the surviving evidence is uneven. Some of Chalmers's designs survive, but no stamp of his was ever issued, and part of the case rests on family papers assembled decades later, when the quarrel had become a matter of local and national pride.

A second claim comes from the Habsburg Empire. Lovrenc Košir, a Slovenian-born official in the Austrian postal administration, proposed in 1836 a system of gummed paper that could be stamped with the amount paid and fixed to a letter. The authorities showed no interest, and Austria did not issue stamps of its own until 1850. Košir's proposal survives in the archives and is taken seriously by postal historians, but it was a suggestion rather than a finished object, and the claim made for it is weaker than the claims made for Hill or for Chalmers.

Early stamps had to be cut out with scissors, because the sheets were not perforated; the first perforated British stamps appeared in the 1850s. Some early issues became famous for their oddities. In 1847 the colony of Mauritius issued one-penny and two-penny stamps that carried the words POST OFFICE rather than the POST PAID used on later issues, a wording long described as an engraver's error. Only a handful survive, and they are among the most valuable objects in philately. Other countries soon followed the British example, and by the 1860s most independent states were issuing stamps; many of the early ones are now worth far more than the letters they once carried.

How, then, should priority be judged? Postal historians work from three kinds of evidence. The first is official: the Treasury and Post Office files record what was proposed, minuted and decided. The second is material: surviving stamps and proofs can be examined, and a stamp's position on the printing plate can be worked out from the letters in its corners, a technique collectors call plating. The third is documentary: dated envelopes, known as covers, show the earliest recorded use. Each has limits. Official files record decisions but not the reasoning behind them; a surviving design proves that an idea existed, not that anyone acted on it; and a cover proves only the earliest date that has survived, not the first day on which a stamp was used.

In a school history lesson, nothing works quite like a diary. A single sentence written in a trench by a frightened nineteen-year-old can do more than a page of statistics to make a war seem real, and over the past thirty years extracts from soldiers' diaries, letters and memoirs have moved from the margins of the textbook to its centre. The change is usually presented as a victory for authenticity over a dry official narrative. Textbooks now print such extracts in boxes, set beside a photograph of a field of crosses. I want to ask what pupils gain from this shift, and what they may lose.

The official histories were works of enormous scale, compiled after 1918 by committees of officers with access to unit records. Their purpose was institutional memory: to establish what had happened, where and when, and to draw lessons for future wars. They are often criticised as bland or defensive, and they were certainly written by senior men about events in which senior men had made the decisions. But they were not propaganda in any simple sense. They were checked, revised and sometimes argued over, and they remain the essential framework within which any other account has to be placed. Their volumes run to many thousands of pages and are still consulted by historians.

Closer to the fighting were the unit war diaries, kept in the field by adjutants and other officers, which recorded positions, orders, casualties and the weather day by day. Many are brief to the point of terseness, and some entries are plainly wrong. They were written under pressure, sometimes several days after the events they describe, and they were never intended for publication. Yet their very dullness is a kind of guarantee: nobody wrote them to impress a reader or to justify a reputation. Occasionally an officer added a sentence of comment, and those sentences are worth more than their length suggests. The National Archives has now digitised a large proportion of them, which has made them far more widely used in classrooms than they once were.

Private diaries are a different kind of document. Soldiers were discouraged, and at times forbidden, from keeping diaries at the front, since a captured notebook could give information to the enemy; many kept them anyway, in tiny notebooks, and many more wrote letters home. Those letters were censored by officers, and the writers knew it. These accounts are vivid, but they were written for a particular reader — a wife, a mother, a future self — and they were shaped by what could safely be said, by the fear of worrying the family, and by the conventions of the age about how men should describe fear. A letter written the day after a battle and a diary entry written a week later may disagree about the same hour.

A further difficulty is time. A diary written in the trenches in 1916 and a memoir published in 1930 are not the same kind of evidence, even when they describe the same event. Memory reshapes what it preserves: the order of events shifts, details that once seemed important vanish, and the writer's later knowledge of how the story ended colours everything that came before. Many of the most quoted accounts of the war were written years afterwards, when their authors knew what the public wanted to read. This does not make them false. It makes them testimony about memory as well as about battle.

Then there is the question of who is represented. Literacy, rank and the habit of keeping records all leave traces in the archive: officers' accounts survive in greater numbers than those of private soldiers, and some units and some campaigns are far better documented than others. A single eloquent diary can illuminate a whole experience, but it cannot stand for it. The voices most often quoted are those that say what later readers expect to hear, which is why the same handful of passages appears in book after book. Pupils are rarely told how narrow that sample is. A few celebrated diaries have shaped the popular picture of the war more than any official volume.

None of this is an argument for returning to the official history alone. Diaries engage pupils in a way that a summary of operations rarely does, and they make abstract questions concrete: what was it like to be cold, frightened and bored at the same time? Used well, they teach the skills of source criticism — who wrote this, when, for whom, and what could not be said? — more effectively than a textbook paragraph, because the pupil can see the person behind the document. The danger is that this pleasure in a voice is mistaken for proof that the voice is typical and true.

My conclusion is that schools should teach both kinds of source, but not as rival versions of the truth, one honest and one official, one emotional and one cold. The interesting question is not whether a diary is more authentic than a history, but what each was written to do. Taught that way, the two correct each other: the diary supplies texture and the official record supplies scale and sequence, and each exposes the silences of the other. That lesson, about how history is made and what evidence can bear, seems to me worth more than either document on its own.