Mishkaki Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Mishkaki (mshikaki; older spelling mshakiki) is beef or goat marinated in spices such as cumin and ginger, pushed onto skewers and cooked over charcoal. It is a familiar snack on the streets and in the markets of the Swahili Coast of East Africa.

The meat itself was a long-established local food in East Africa, on hand well before any of the spices arrived. Those spices came from across the sea. Cumin and ginger reached the Swahili Coast from Arabia and India, carried over the Indian Ocean.

That spice trade settled into place along the Swahili Coast in the second half of the first millennium, roughly between the 7th and 10th centuries, as the East African littoral was drawn into the wider Indian Ocean network and cloves, cumin and ginger began crossing the sea. Grilling meat over charcoal was a plain, old technique; the spiced marinade carried in on that trade laid over it, and the charcoal skewers of the Swahili Coast took on the flavor they still carry today.

There are two accounts of where the name mishkaki comes from. One takes it as a borrowing from an Arabic word for skewer; the other traces it to the Swahili root -shika, to grip or to pierce.

One of the oldest surviving dictionary entries for the word is in J. L. Krapf's A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London, 1882), whose headword Mshakiki reads 'a spit, skewer; meat put upon a little stick for roasting'. Krapf gathered his material in the 1840s and 1850s, so the word itself is older still. His entry gives the meaning only and says nothing about where the word came from. It is A. C. Madan's Swahili-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1903) that marks the same headword as Arabic, with the note '(Ar. sikkat)'. That mark is the only dictionary support for the Arabic borrowing. The -shika reading appears in neither Krapf's dictionary nor Madan's. Neither account has anything decisive behind it, and the origin of the name remains open.

There is no firm date for when the dish itself took shape, only an upper bound for the spice trade behind it. In 1498 the account of Vasco da Gama's voyage records cloves, cumin, ginger, nutmeg and pepper in abundance along the East African coast at Mombasa and Malindi, so the spice trade was in place by that year at the latest.

Some accounts add that from the late 18th century, once the Sultans of Oman ruled Zanzibar, Arab spices and the local Swahili charcoal skewer drew together into something close to the present form. That, though, describes a later styling; the grilling and the spice trade both reach back further, to the second half of the first millennium. With the date of its making still not narrowed to a single answer, mishkaki goes on being cooked over charcoal, a snack from the meeting of two sea-borne cultures.