Swahili Port Cities

The Architecture of Elsewhere

Sandy Prita Meier

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253019172
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

On the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing. Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal zone was an expression of the desire of coastal inhabitants to belong to places beyond their homeports. Here architecture embodies modern ideas and social identities engendered by the encounter of Africans with others in the Indian Ocean world.

ONE

Difference Set in Stone

Place and Race in Mombasa

Architecture has a powerful impact on how culture is experienced. The very notion that people “belong to” or can claim a certain territory is constituted by culturally variable politics of inhabiting, in which the built environment plays a central role. Examining how these spatial processes unfold in such fluid borderlands as the Swahili coast is an especially clarifying exercise because its port cities are fundamentally nonterritorial cultural landscapes, shaped by the constant movement of peoples and things across great distances. Here the relationship between identity and place is particularly mercurial and in constant flux.

For centuries permanent stone architecture occupied an important place in the civilizational order of Mombasa. Founded sometime in the early second millennium, this ancient Swahili city was the site of an important port long before it became part of the British Empire. In contrast to Lamu and Zanzibar, whose global connectivity is a fairly recent phenomenon, Mombasa has nurtured direct connections with inland Africa, Europe, and Asia since at least the fourteenth century. Great Zimbabwe, Portugal, and Ottoman Turkey were among the major empires that had regular contact with the city. Mombasa Town stood at the edge of intersecting worlds; its vibrant mercantile culture drew peoples from the African mainland, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Merchants, diplomats, and even attacking armies came to Mombasa because it provided access to the markets and resources of inland Africa. As a result Mombasa figured prominently in the consciousness of foreigners. This long history of transcultural contact also influenced the worldview of Mombasans. Locals learned to appropriate faraway objects, styles, and technologies in the making of their city. Yet the nineteenth century marks a major watershed moment in this long history of transregional engagement, when industrial capitalism and colonization changed a range of preexisting systems and traditions. I chart this process of transformation by showing how stone architecture once embodied the Swahili ideal of the “elsewhere” and how it came to stand for racialized difference. What becomes clear is that the revolutionary circumstances of the nineteenth century forced Mombasans to reconstitute how they made their sense of place useful to themselves and legible to others in the world.

SWAHILI COAST IDENTITY POLITICS

Today Mombasa is the second largest city of Kenya, with municipal boundaries embracing all of Mombasa Island (an area of six square miles) and parts of the adjacent mainland. Its historical center, Old Town (plate 4), is situated on the southeastern side of the island, overlooking a protected creek that still serves as a harbor for regional and overseas ships carrying foodstuffs and commodities from other western Indian Ocean ports. Before the colonial period the city exported grain and timber from the neighboring mainland and ivory and also enslaved persons from more distant places in central Africa.¹ Overseas imports were largely confined to manufactured goods such as cloth, metalwork, porcelain, and beads from South Asia, the Middle East, and as far away as China. The fifteenth century is often celebrated as Mombasa’s “golden age,” when it was an independent city-state overseen by a local oligarchy.² During this period powerful polities, including the Portuguese empire, increasingly took an interest in the city and its transcontinental trading networks. Mombasans also gained a reputation for being intensely competitive and unpredictable at this time. Indigenous leaders constantly negotiated a complex web of alliances and counteralliances throughout the city’s history in an attempt to garner protection, but also autonomy, from others.³ As a city-state without an army or other defenses, Mombasa depended on cultivating good relationships with powerful allies.

FIGURE 1.1. “Mombasa Swahilis” lithograph, 1856. Illustrated in Charles Guillain, Documents surl’histoire, lagéographie et le commerce de l’Afrique Orientale, recueillis et rédigés (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1856), insert.

The oldest community of Mombasa, the Thenashara Taifa, or Federation of Twelve (figure 1.1 and plate 5), continue to be a strong sociopolitical force in Old Town. Until the colonial period the Taifa functioned as a series of loose and expanding alliances, absorbing peoples from diverse places, including from inland Africa and the Middle East. Strict social hierarchies characterized Taifa membership even before the colonial period. Before the abolition of slavery, and even long afterward, one’s status within the Taifa was measured in terms of how long one’s immediate family was watumwa (enslaved or bonded) or waungwana (freeborn, not bonded). By the second half of the nineteenth century the waungwana of the Taifa began to lose their authority and power. In response, they attempted to foreclose the incorporation of newcomers into their community in order to consolidate whatever authority they had left.

Arab cultural markers also became desirable in Mombasa during this period. Because, by the 1830s, Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula controlled the economic institutions and trading networks of the region, dressing in Omani fashions or using Arabic words came to signal prestige in new ways. For example, Thenashara Taifa is an Arabic appellation likely coined sometime in the early nineteenth to make the local political system mirror categories familiar to Omani newcomers. But while some lineages within each moiety elected to Arabicize their names, by adding “al,” for example, the twelve moieties that make up the Thenashara Taifa all still carry ancient Swahili place-names. Ten of the twelve lineages belonging to the federation are in fact named after settlements on the African continent, while two are named after places on Mombasa Island.⁴ Thus the umbrella polity, the Thenashara Taifa, evokes overseas connections to the Middle East, while the more intimate social matrix of familial relations ties each member of the Taifa to the African continent.⁵

Today those Mombasans associated with the Taifa will also use a range of modern identities, calling themselves—depending on context—Swahili, Kenyan, Shirazi, or African. These narrative shifts in belonging and selfhood are in part a response to the identity politics of the colonial and later postindependence periods, when modern citizenship was increasingly linked to ethnicity. One of the defining aspects of the nineteenth century was the emergence of ethnoterritorial categories of identity. Yet coastal Muslims never fully embraced a single identity or one place of belonging, although the British colonial administration wanted Swahili to be a clearly demarcated African tribe.⁶ But coastal peoples remained strangely “hybrid” to the colonial administration. Coastal Muslims posed a threat to the logic of colonial governance because they always attempted to detribalize themselves by claiming to be nonnatives (by sometimes calling themselves Arabs or Persians). Living in a border zone between land and sea has allowed locals to cultivate concepts of affiliation and belonging that still confound newcomers who are more familiar with identities linked to one territory or one place.

Yet Swahili was not just a modern or colonial category. The term originates in a distant moment of encounter and translation. It is derived from an Arabic word meaning edge or border. Originally the term encapsulated an Arabic-speakers’ perspective, and traders and immigrants used it describe the coast and its inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, upcountry Africans also started calling themselves Mswahili, or a Swahili person, to connect themselves to the wealth and power of the distant coast.⁷ Similarly, recently arrived immigrants to the coast who converted to Islam would call themselves Waswahili (the plural of Mswahili), to claim the rights and opportunities accorded to city-dwellers. Thus, while the British and local use of Swahili were interrelated, ultimately it had very different meanings.

Until independence (and sometimes today), families belonging to the Taifa Thenashara largely rejected the ethnic marker Swahili, emphasizing instead their Muslim heritage and ancient pedigree as patrons of an urban civilization. To Mombasans it was always more important to be wamiji—peoples of the city—since urban citizenship offered an entirely different spectrum of opportunities and advantages compared to the social networks of the non-Islamic mainland. In fact, coastal residents often still do not “make sense” to mainland Kenyans, who often comment that “Swahili is not a real tribe,” meaning that their Kenyan citizenship is suspect. This is because contemporary Kenyan nationhood emphasizes the rights of natives, who are presented as having a fixed and primordial connection to the physical geography of Kenya. Clearly this definition of citizenship runs counter to the notion of wamiji, and as a result coastal Muslims also often feel that they are a marginalized minority in Kenya, whose rights are not fully recognized because they are oriented toward the global Muslim community (this also takes on sectarian dimensions because they are Muslims in a largely Christian nation).

A CITY WITH MANY NAMES

Since its independence from Britain and separation from the Arab Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1963, the Indian Ocean–oriented world of Mombasa Island has been confined to Old Town, although no physical boundaries separate it from the high-rises, markets, stores, and traffic congestion of the abutting business district developed during the colonial period. During the day the frenetic energy of international commerce extends into Old Town, where stores specializing in Middle Eastern and Indian imports draw a diverse clientele. Yet Old Town gradually unfolds as a distinctly Muslim place as one moves from the business district toward the historical waterfront. Here the five calls to prayer and minarets visually and aurally distinguish the space from the rest of the city. Swahili, Arab, Baluchi, Mijikenda, Hadhrami, Barawa, Ithnasheri, and Bohra families have resided in Old Town for generations, and their visibly Islamic expressive and material culture seems rooted in time-honored practices.⁸ Yet, new waves of immigrants, aesthetic choices, and political and religious ideas are constantly adding to the existing fabric of the town—making it a perpetually changing place. For example, over the last decade large numbers of Somali Muslims have moved into Old Town, creating new tensions among its many different Muslim communities. “Neo-Orientalist” style mosques, often funded by Saudi patrons or members of the city’s diaspora living abroad, have replaced old mosques. Imams from across the Middle East become new leaders of old religious institutions, sparking heated debates and intergenerational conflicts regarding the appropriateness of locally established Islamic practices.⁹

Outsiders see Old Town as a place apart from the rest of Kenya. European tourists and mainland Kenyans take short tours of Old Town in the hope of glimpsing an exotic culture. Prepared by the popular images presented on postcards and tourist memorabilia, visitors expect to see veiled women, “Arab” architecture, and other oriental vistas. For them the physical layout of Old Town has the characteristics of an unplanned maze, where few real streets exist and one easily loses one’s bearings. Old Town also continues to frustrate the municipal government of the larger city, which strives to gain oversight over the urban fabric of Old Town for census and taxation purposes. For residents, the Town’s interwoven web of small unpaved alleys and interconnected spaces between houses are a practical matrix of pedestrian passages, making moving between abutting houses and neighborhoods quick and easy (plate 6). In contrast to outsiders, Mombasans conceptualize the city as a flexible and logical space whose topography is easily understood as a series of named places. In Mombasa—as in many other coastal cities—the designations of neighborhoods, or mitaa (pl.) in Swahili, do not describe a series of streets or the boundaries of areas, but memorialize patterns of migration and significant historical events. The mtaa (sg.) system is a kind of palimpsest of communal memories and shared experiences.¹⁰ In Old Town Mombasa, where one mtaa ends and another begins is not physically inscribed onto the city, but is rather embodied in its residents as a form of oral knowledge. Residents are very much aware that to outsiders Old Town is disorienting, which in their eyes enhances the city’s reputation as a place of the subversive and uncanny, a place that is ultimately unknowable to outsiders since they cannot see the ordering logic of the city.

Even today visitors cannot quite decide whether Old Town is an “African” or “Middle Eastern” place. In contrast, Mombasans see their city as a fulcrum in motion, a great hub where peoples, ideas, and practices merge and converge to create a mercurial and multilayered landscape. Local conceptions an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Place In-between
• 1 Difference Set in Stone: Place and Race in Mombasa
• 2 A “Curious” Minaret: Sacred Place and the Politics of Islam
• 3 Architecture Out of Place: The Politics of Style in Zanzibar
• 4 At Home in the World: Living with Transoceanic Things
• Conclusion Trading Places
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index