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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253019172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2016 |
| Series: | African Expressive Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Sales rank: | 1,039,253 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Prita Meier is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Read an Excerpt
Swahili Port Cities
The Architecture of Elsewhere
By Prita Meier
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Sandy Prita MeierAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01917-2
CHAPTER 1
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 nonterrito-rial 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. 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. 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. As a city-state without an army or other defenses, Mombasa depended on cultivating good relationships with powerful allies.
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. 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.
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. 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, up country Africans also started calling themselves Mswahili, or a Swahili person, to connect themselves to the wealth and power of the distant coast. 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. 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.
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, ormitaa (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. 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 and interpretations of Mombasa are defined by a heightened sense that the city is not fully knowable to outsiders. According to wamiji elders, Mombasa is not a territory or stable place, but a zone of mobility constituted by a unique relationship to the sea. As Mzee Muhammad Ahmed explained, "The essence of the city is not seen by many, you must know the secrets the ocean brings to Old Town."
To this day apocryphal accounts of the city emphasize that the city's visible structures are mirrored by a hidden city that lies beneath the watery depths of the bay in front of Old Town, in the creek separating Mombasa Island from the mainland. This city beneath the sea is ruled by majini (pl.), or Muslim spirit beings. Those who take an interest in such matters believe that majini regularly move between the ocean and Old Town, where their presence shapes the daily life of residents. They are believed to have come from the Middle East to Mombasa in the distant past because of the city's central position in trade and migration networks of the larger Islamic world. Mombasa was interesting to these beings because this is where power, wealth, and ambition converged. According to accounts given by some elders, local Mombasans once cultivated close relationships with majini (and some continue to), bringing them into their homes and families. In fact, the oral histories of specific lineages in the Taifa recount that the family begins with the marriage of a human and ajinni (sg.), making all descendants hybrid beings.
Connections to majini also had a practical side. Elders state that majini helped their ancestors foresee the dangers that lay ahead on long trade expeditions and to understand the true intentions of distant trading partners. Merchants and caravan traders also always worried that they could lose their competitive edge to others. In these narratives Mombasa's true significance lies in its role as an ancient intermediary between land and sea, which also makes it a particularly dangerous place: its state of in-between-ness leads to constant instability and uncertainty. Interestingly, mainland Kenyans also recount stories of Muslim majini, usually characterizing them as dangerous and mischievous beings who use their powers to seduce unsuspecting Christian mainlanders.
Locals also inscribe the city with names and foundational histories not recognized or understood by foreigners. Elders emphasize that Mombasa is not the "real" name of the city, but simply a name invented by outsiders. One account presents "Mombasa" as a nonsensical word, the result of a classic moment of intercultural misunderstanding. When the British first arrived at the edge the city, they asked a passing Mijikenda man, "What is the name of this place?" He responded in Giryama, "What are you saying?" — which sounded something like "Mombasa" to British ears.
According to Taifa accounts, the original name of the city is Mvita, which means "place of war." It encapsulates the conflict-ridden history and desirability of the city. The stanza below from a famous local epic poem conveys the city's significance in the local imaginary:
Kongowea belongs to Mwana Mkisi, Mvita is the ancient city.
Do not exceed its bounds, but tread respectfully therein.
Cast down your head, and do not look straight, with your eyes wide open —
It is an abyss of deep gloom; even those who are well informed comprehend it not.
The poem, which recounts the many battles fought over the island, was composed by Muyaka bin Hajj in the 1830s, when the Omani sultan of Zanzibar began to make claims on Mombasa. Muyaka is Mombasa's most celebrated Swahili poet. In this stanza he was exhorting his listeners (such poetry would have been originally recited to an audience) toremember the importance of Kongowea and Mvita, the ancient settlements of the island. Also, by asserting that Kongowea belongs to Mwana Mkisi, the poet was supporting Thenashara Taifa claims to Mombasa Island; Mwana Mkisi was the original ancestor of the oldest lineages within the Taifa. She was a pagan queen who founded Kongowea, the first center of urban civilization on the Island. Mvita is also the proper name of an important Taifa ancestor, but unlike Mwana Mkisi, Shehe Mvita was a man and a Muslim. His arrival marks the beginning of the Islamic history of Mombasa. He is believed to have been a great Muslim mystic from somewhere "overseas, who came to build the first permanent stone mosque in Mombasa in the distant past. By evoking these ancient names of power in the face of Omani Arab aggression in the 1830s, Muyaka was insisting on the fundamental alterity of Mombasa. No matter Mombasa's transoceanic connectivity and its status as an Islamic city, the poet reminds his audience of the fundamental distance between Arab newcomers and local inhabitants. Ultimately, Muyaka's stanza is a warning, reminding all with claims to Mombasa that "even those who are well informed comprehend it not."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Swahili Port Cities by Prita Meier. Copyright © 2016 Sandy Prita Meier. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
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
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Prita Meier has turned the tired question of 'who are the Swahili' on its ear by eschewing essentialist descriptions and showing how Swahili people themselves actively managed their identities locally and beyond, and throughout colonial and national administrations.
Distinctive and decisive, calmly and elegantly written, this book provides a welcome case study of how the material world is made through a rich range of traveling cultural forms from across the Indian Ocean as a world system.
A groundbreaking architectural history of the Swahili coast, this book beautifully explores issues of cultural translation and the remapping of cultural boundaries. Prita Meier brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world art history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide new ways of studying the making of art and culture. She documents the way spaces once celebrated as icons of Muslim culture are now imbricated by the ethnic politics of the modern postcolonial nation-state and offers a new model for rethinking cosmopolitanism in the global context of the Indian Ocean.
This sophisticated book does much more than show us an Indian Ocean Africa that was the parallel to Atlantic Africa. With great clarity and commitment Prita Meier gives us the world of Swahili port cities that were not only trans-oceanic but trans-continental, places where merchants, slaves, nobles, and sailors met and exchanged ideas, styles, and commodities. Taste and ideas about décor were conspicuously displayed through objects and styles that were literally constructed from the experience of trade and travel in order to bring elsewhere home.