Kilwa Kisiwani and the Swahili coast city-states

A Swahili port

Kilwa Kisiwani is a small island off the coast of southern Tanzania. UNESCO describes it as occupied from the ninth to the nineteenth century, with its height in the thirteenth and fourteenth. It was one of a chain of Swahili towns along the East African coast whose Muslim, Swahili-speaking merchants linked the African interior to the Indian Ocean world.

Rulers and origins

The Kilwa Chronicle, a genealogy of the city's kings probably written in the early sixteenth century, names Ali ibn al-Hasan, whose name points to Shiraz in Persia, as founder of the ruling dynasty. Historians read this "Shirazi" claim carefully. National Geographic reports that scholars now think he probably came from an established African family with Persian roots. That fits the conclusion of the archaeologist Neville Chittick, who excavated Kilwa from 1958 to 1965 and found that most of its people were African. This work countered nineteenth-century European writers who claimed Africans could not have built the coast's stone towns.

Gold and wealth

Kilwa's fortune rested on the gold trade. Gold mined on the Zimbabwe plateau reached the coast through Sofala, in present-day Mozambique, and Kilwa extended its control over that southern outpost. World History Encyclopedia notes that this let Kilwa overtake Mogadishu as the richest Swahili city. Gold and ivory were exchanged for silver, carnelian, perfumes, Persian glazed ware and Chinese porcelain, and Kilwa minted its own coins.

Buildings

The city's coral-stone architecture survives as ruins. The Great Mosque, first built in the eleventh century and much enlarged in the thirteenth, is the oldest standing mosque on the East African coast, according to UNESCO. The vast Husuni Kubwa palace, with more than a hundred rooms and an octagonal bathing pool, dates to the reign of Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman in the early fourteenth century. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited around 1331 and called Kilwa one of the most beautiful towns in the world.

Decline and legacy

Dynastic disputes had already weakened Kilwa when the Portuguese arrived after Vasco da Gama's voyage of 1498–99. In 1505 Francisco de Almeida's forces attacked and occupied the city after it refused to pay tribute, and the Portuguese built a fort there. Kilwa never recovered its former role. In the eighteenth century it became a slave-trading port, and the old town was abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century. UNESCO inscribed the ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and nearby Songo Mnara as a World Heritage site in 1981 and placed them on its danger list in 2004.