Traders found here fertile grounds for their business, exploiting the wealth of this virgin territory. It was then when the Arabs started organising their caravans to the inner lands, where they captured natives to be sold as slaves, giving birth to a form of trade that would thrive for centuries. The routes so defined by the Arab tradesmen would remain as the only paths inland, that would even be used by the first European explorers who would arrive hundreds of years later.

The slave trade was the cause of the dissemination of African natives throughout the Indian Ocean shoreline and its areas of influence. In Mesopotamia and even in South China there were African slaves since 800 years ago. On the other hand, the presence of the new settlers left a perdurable trace in the Kenyan coast: today, some 40,000 descendants of those first Arab traders still inhabit this region. Conversely, the influence of the East Indies was scarcely significant in those days, regardless the fact that over the past two thousand years there were small settlings in the coast. Currently, most of the Kenyan Indian community, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Goans, has its origin in the days of the British East Africa, hundreds of years later.