Kilwa Day 2: A tour of Songo Mnara and Kilwa Kisiwani

Dating to the 9^th century CE, Kilwa Kisiwani is one of the most historically significant settlements in East Africa. It flourished between the 13^th and 15^th centuries as the seat of the Kilwa Sultanate, a political entity that controlled much of the Swahili Coast and with it, much of the trade that went on between Africa and other civilisations across the Indian Ocean: The Arabian Peninsula, India, and even China. Ibn Battuta, who visited the island city in 1331, described it as one of the most beautiful in the world. It was destroyed by the Portuguese in 1505, who built a fort and stayed until they, in turn, were forced out by the Omanis.

Just south of Kilwa Island lies the island of Songo Mnara. This is one of several historic settlements that dot the coasts around Kilwa Kisiwani, but it has some of the best-preserved buildings in the whole area. The Tanzanian tourism authority, which requires that people only visit the sites with licensed guides, allows visits to both Kilwa and Songo Mnara, both of which have well-kept trails and are more fully excavated than other sites.

I had reserved a tour of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara in advance, but I suspect my reservation might have been forgotten until the evening I showed up and asked when we would be leaving. For one, the manager seemed sceptical I had booked a tour until he looked it up in the system. Secondly, the tour started with a half an hour delay because fuel had to be procured for the boat. Once the fuel had been poured into the engine, the young assistant to the tour guide spent the first hour of the journey bailing water from underneath the floorboards with the bottom half of a former oil canister.

We began our tour in Songo Mnara, which lies about an hour and a half away from the mainland. To get there, we sailed between Kilwa Kisiwani and the mainland, with the captain explaining that the shorter route on the open sea was a bit too choppy. This allowed me to catch my first few glimpses of the historic sites on Kilwa: the palace, Malindi Mosque, and the Portuguese Fort. I believed the guide about the choppy waves when we reached the gap between the two islands and there was nothing to shield us from the eastern winds. Our boat swayed left and right, spraying us all with ocean water as it crashed down from the waves.

The main port of Songo Mnara is a cove by a small fishing village in the middle of the mangroves. One smells it before entering: standing outside the houses are wooden racks for drying fish, and various other unidentifiable smells join in on this omnipresent fragrance. The village, my guide Othman explained, is but a temporary one, which is evident from the light wood and palm fronds from which it has been built. Even the local mosque is evidently not made to last, nor is the local cinema with its incongruously modern satellite dish. In exchange for letting them reside on the island and ply their trade in its waters, the fishermen pay a fee to its permanent residents, who live in houses made of stone and old coral taken from the historic site.

Following the path from the village through a coconut grove, we arrived at a fork in the road. To our left, the path continued unchanged but in a slightly different direction. To our right, it made its way through the flooded mangrove trees. Naturally, I assumed we would be taking the first, but this naïve preconception shattered when Othman started taking off his trousers. “At high tide,” he said and gestured in front of his chest with his palm facing downward, “the water reaches all the way up here.” I was relieved to find that I had put on untorn underwear as I followed Othman’s lead.

Approaching the mangroves, our feet set the mudskippers jumping onto the tree roots, and tiny fish darted away from us as we waded in. Mangrove forests act as nurseries to baby fish, which avoid predators by hiding among their roots – in some cases waiting to become formidable predators themselves, like the small barracuda Othman pointed out. Clearly passionate about nature, Othman also showed me the differences between the mangroves. Just on this short walk, we saw at least three species: the grey mangrove, the black mangrove, and the red mangrove. The last of these reproduces with long, heavy seeds, which fall from the trees and stick in the ground like spears, or else fall into the sea and slowly turn into a vertical position as they absorb water.

Songo Mnara lay just behind this flooded forest. I first saw several tall baobab trees before I noticed that they were growing from among the ruins of the old buildings. We followed the outer wall to the first and only remaining floor of a tower that once defended the settlement. The whole site used to be higher above sea level, but it has since sunk, and a causeway has been built to allow visitors passage. From the former tower, we continued to the cemetery, which lies within the city walls, after which we looped back to the main complex of Songo Mnara.

At the heart of the complex stands the palace – a building with a quadrilateral theatre pit and some indications of an erewhile second storey as well as a few original ceilings. Some parts of the complex have been reconstructed, particularly the quaint niches and ornate doorways. Next to this complex are the ancient office building and quarters for lodging guests: due to the regularity of the monsoons, traders who came from the east had to stay on the island for months on end before the winds reversed and they could set sail for home. These guests could make use of the town’s many mosques, of which some have survived in a surprisingly good state.

We returned to the boat after perhaps an hour and a half. By the time we reached our mangrove trail, the tide had risen even further, and I was dismayed to see Othman taking off his shirt along with his trousers. Perhaps partly out of denial, I refused to undress, and by the time I had reached the other side, my shirt was wet up to my bellybutton.

We ate lunch on the boat as we began our return journey to Kilwa Kisiwani. The clouds came in but dispersed again by the time we made land on the beach by Makutani Palace. As we walked along the beach, I noticed something white and blue in the pebbles just a few paces ahead. I stooped down and to my great surprise, I found it had Chinese writing on it – it was the fragment of a porcelain vase! “Look at this!” I called to my guide.

“Yes,” he said simply, “it is Chinese. There is a lot of pottery, some from China, some from Arabia, some from India…”

I did not think such a pretty find was so unremarkable. My hand started slipping down to my pocket.

“You cannot take anything from the beach,” Othman said sternly.

I did not even know what I intended to do with the shard, but my mind rebelled against throwing it back into the waves. “Maybe we can bring it to a museum?” I ventured sheepishly.

“There is no museum.”

The five hundred years of history between me and the shard screamed in my head. If I put it back, would anyone ever find it again? Would a chance crash against a rock destroy it for good? I lay it down on a slightly elevated rock and took a few pictures so that it might at least not be forgotten.

We walked around the gutted insides of Makutani Palace, where we continued a previous discussion on the functionality of the civilisation’s toilets. I could not wrap my head around the fact that the toilets did not simply flow out into the sea and were not emptied. Instead, the guide said, the walled waste holes under the toilets were built without mortar, which allowed the waste to be absorbed into the ground when flushed with seawater.

Makutani Palace was built by the Omanis in the eighteenth century, its design reflecting a newfound need to build advanced fortifications. Before the ill-omened arrival of the Portuguese, the former palace – Husuni Kubwa – stood on a bluff overlooking the sea and was more of a residence than a fortification. It was easy for the Portuguese to raze it to the ground. In contrast, Makutani Palace served partly as a fortress, with the Sultan’s lodgings and offices located on the second floor. Like many defensive structures, it was built with arrow slits that allowed friendly forces to shoot at their enemies without running an excessively high risk of being shot themselves.

A short walk away from Makutani Palace stands the fifteenth-century Small Domed Mosque, which still retains most of its variously designed domes. To its right, the path branches off towards the royal cemetery, going past a vast tidal plain from which the sea can barely be seen for the distant mangrove trees. Walking across the plain, I was afraid I might step on one of the many crabs running before our feet with their colourful claws held out against their chests like little matadors. Fortunately, they were all much faster and cleverer than I thought.

The royal cemetery lay in the shadow of a giant baobab tree. Othman explained that baobabs can live for thousands of years, and that many reach this venerable age thanks to the fact that they are useless to humans. Their wood is soft and brittle, unusable for making furniture, ships, or even charcoal. On the other hand, a live baobab can often act as a water reservoir if it happens to be hollow on the inside, and elephants like to chew on the tree’s succulent bark.

Finally, we reached the most famous site on Kilwa Kisiwani, the Great Mosque. Founded in the tenth century, the mosque was renovated and rebuilt multiple times as the settlement grew in wealth and importance. Instead of the familiar tower-like minaret, the mosque has a small platform by the common entrance: my guide climbed it and pretended making a call to prayer to the amusement of a few local passersby. After its modern rediscovery by archaeologists, it had to be partially dug up from the ground, which is evidenced by the roots of the trees growing out of its walls, which extend abruptly downward from what was once ground level for them.

We finished our walk by the Portuguese Fort (the Gereza) we had seen from the sea. It stands opposite the small Malindi Mosque, which, unusually, has a row of pillars right in front of its mihrab, splitting the hall into two halves rather than creating a nave or a large hall. In the neighbourhood of this mosque lies another cemetery, this one built for affluent merchants. Othman explained that although the town made plenty of money by trading slaves and ivory, its real wealth lay in gold: Kilwa was once the terminus of a land route leading all the way to the goldmines of the once glorious kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. After the arrival of the Europeans, this trade route got rerouted to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, robbing Kilwa of its importance and accelerating its decline from which it never recovered.

Instead of walking farther, we took the boat to our last stop, Husuni Kubwa, which is said to have once been the largest palace in Subsaharan Africa. To reach it, we once again had to wade our way through a mangrove forest, but the path was quite shallow, and I managed to keep my partly dried shirt from getting wet again. The palace was where, before the sacking of the Portuguese, the sultan lived together with his wives and harem, and behind it lay a large marketplace where traders from near and far would exchange their goods. Beside its theatre arena, the palace also had an octagonal pool, which was kept full by servants carrying buckets of water from the sea.