Oral history credits the founding of Barawa to a Tunni saint named Aw-Ali, drawn to the site by the freshness of the ocean breeze. The town grew into one of the great Islamic centers of the Horn of Africa, home to a body of scholars known as the Barawaani Ulama who attracted students from across the region. The thirteenth-century geographer Ibn Sa'id called it "an Islamic island on the Somali coast," while the Andalusian writer Al-Idrisi described its coral houses and its markets crowded with domestic and foreign goods. This was a town built largely from the sea itself: coral was harvested from the reef and burned to make lime, then bound into multi-story stone houses linked, in places, by raised walkways so that women and the elderly could cross the town above the crush of its streets.

Barawa was famous for what its hands could make. Weavers produced the prized alindi and kioy cloth and the distinctive kufi baraawa cap, and craftsmen worked sandals, weapons, fine jewellery, and carved objects like the mihmil that holds the Qur'an and the elaborate attir wedding bed. By the thirteenth century the town stood, alongside Mogadishu and Merca, as one of the three most important cities on the East African coast, all of them commercial and religious hubs of the Indian Ocean trade. Word of its wealth traveled remarkably far. In 1430 the Chinese Xuande Emperor named Barawa, rendered as Pu-la-wa, among only eighteen western ports listed in an imperial decree, and the mariner Fei Xin, who passed through during the great Ming treasure voyages, described its people as pure and honest.

Wealth made Barawa a target. In 1506 the Portuguese commander Tristão da Cunha turned his fleet on the prosperous harbor as part of a campaign to seize the Ajuran Empire's coastal cities. The fighting was fierce. The Portuguese stormed ashore, burned the town, and looted it, but the people of Barawa resisted hard enough that the invaders could not hold the city. Da Cunha himself was wounded in the assault. Those who had fled inland eventually came back, rebuilt their homes from coral and lime, and the town recovered with the stubbornness that has marked its entire history. It was a pattern Barawa would repeat across the centuries: sacked, scattered, and then, somehow, restored.

Barawa's later centuries were turbulent. It passed under the Geledi Sultanate, weathered the failed Banadir revolt led by the scholar Sheikh Uways al-Barawi, and declined as colonial powers poured their investment into Merca and Mogadishu instead. The Somali civil war brought looting and loss, and Al-Shabaab seized the town in 2009 before Somali and African Union forces retook it in 2014. Through all of it, the Bravanese identity has held. The town still counts the Tunni as its majority alongside a Bravanese minority, and Chimwiini still passes from one generation to the next, even as war has scattered its speakers across the globe. To stand in Barawa is to stand in a place that has been a meeting point of Africa, Arabia, and Asia for a thousand years, and has refused, against long odds, to be forgotten.