Mombasa

4 Key excerpts on "Mombasa"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Swahili World

  • Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Adria LaViolette, Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Adria LaViolette(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  To the descendants of freed slaves, the Freretown settlement remains their home and heritage; St Emmanuel Church (completed in 1896), the bell tower and the cemetery are markers of their identity. As places significant to residents and their ancestors, they are depositories for individual and collective memories, symbolic arenas where residents go to gain a physical connection with the past.

  Conclusion

  The strategic position of Mombasa has enabled it to be an important trading centre on the coast for centuries and to play a central role in the international networks of the Indian Ocean. This in turn has contributed to its long and complex history, one that has seen Mombasa as the headquarters of waves of colonial governments. This history has seen terrestrial and maritime Mombasa turned into a ‘memorialscape’ – one that commemorates both good and bad in human nature. As shown above, there are vestiges there that celebrate numerous events, through which multiple histories of Mombasa are simultaneously remembered and forgotten (Macrone 1998; Winter 2005). For instance, while the people of Freretown see St Emmanuel church as the embodiment of their spirituality, Tuaca’s population see Mbaraki Pillar as playing that role. Mombasa’s residents find spiritual nourishment, restoration of their dignity, expression of identity, leadership and achievement, in these places. Even more importantly, the memorialscape of Mombasa has enabled its inhabitants to both place themselves in Mombasa’s cultural and political landscape, and connect to elsewhere in eastern Africa, the western Indian Ocean, and the world.

  References Abungu G. H. O. 1985. ‘The history of Mombasa and its inhabitants’. Unpublished Papers, National Museums of Kenya, Fort Jesus Museum.

  Aldrick, J. 1993. ‘The Freretown bell tower at Kengeleni’. Coastweek.

  Beachey, R. W. 1976. The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa . London: Rex Collings.

  Berg, F. J. 1968. ‘The Swahili community of Mombasa 1500–1900’. Journal of African History 9 (1): 35–56.

  Berg, F. J. and Walter, B. J. 1968. ‘Mosques, population and urban development in Mombasa’. Hadith 1: 47–99.

  Bita, C. 2009. The Intertidal and Foreshore Archaeology of Mombasa Island: An Inventory of Maritime Sites.

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  The Art of Connection

  Risk, Mobility, and the Crafting of Transparency in Coastal Kenya

  • Dillon Mahoney(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  26 I was initially drawn to Mombasa and its Old Town for reasons similar to those that have enticed hundreds of thousands of American and European travelers to visit the Kenyan coast every year since the late 1960s. Our predictable imaginations, desires, and spending habits were the eco-nomic foundation of Mombasa’s tour guides, hawkers, and the occupants of the roughly twenty wood-and-sheet-metal kiosks that were built on the road-side outside of Old Town’s Fort Jesus. These structures and their occupants were the focus of my initial study in 2001, during which time I befriended many of their resident art vendors who were selling Kisii soapstone and Kamba wood carvings, as well as handmade baskets, paintings, and jewelry. I found it easy to emerge from even a brief foray through Mombasa with two quite different stories of the social landscape. On the one hand, the city has since the 1960s been a major international tourism hub, a destination for European beach prowlers, American safari seekers in transit, and a multitude of international cruise lines navigating the western Indian Ocean. Even among Kenyans, Mombasa occupies an imaginative space of vacation, warmth, and welcome, as summed up by the oft-heard phrase “Mombasa raha ” (Mombasa fun). Tourist art adorns even local bars and Internet cafés in the city, and until recently a sign in French, Italian, German, English, and Swahili welcomed visitors entering Mombasa from the airport, Nairobi, and the continental mainland. During my stay in Mombasa, tens of thousands of t w o Mombasa Marginalized claims to land and legitimacy in a tourist city Nearly everyone arrives on the coast at Mombasa, a much more enjoyable place to spend time than Nairobi. Kenya’s second city is a tropical centre par excellence: steamy, lazy, at times unbeliev-ably dilapidated, but genial. r ich a r d t r i llo The Rough Guide to Kenya (2002:441)

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  African Urban Economies

  Viability, Vitality or Vitiation?

  • D. Bryceson, D. Potts, D. Bryceson, D. Potts(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Transport and trade The Port of Mombasa serves as a gateway for goods to and from the Great Lakes Region (Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi) and southern Sudan. A container terminal has been developed in recent years, which now accounts for 60 per cent of total traffic. The port’s current capacity is 20 million tonnes per year and it is the city’s single largest employer, although its workforce declined from an all-time high of 12,000 in 1986 to under 10,000 at the end of the 1990s (Hoyle 2000). However, traffic has stagnated over the last 20 years with the 1981 figure not exceeded until 1996, when 8.7 million tonnes were handled (KPA 2001). During the 1980s, the volume of traffic fell by 11 per cent, reflecting the decline in Kenya’s traditional agricultural exports (see below), its continuing trade deficit and civil unrest in many surrounding countries (CBS 2001a: 91). Although traffic increased during the 1990s by 28 per cent, this reflected an increase in imports (from 67 per cent of Mombasa’s Missing Link 139 the total in 1991 to 79 per cent in 2000), while exports continued to stagnate or decline as a result of Kenya’s continuing economic diffi- culties, and war, genocide and civil unrest elsewhere in the region. The single most important import is crude (and refined) oil (43 per cent by weight) but relief goods for countries to the west and north, and growing imports for Uganda are also important (KPA 2001). All the East African ports have long had a reputation for low product- ivity and relatively high port costs. Mombasa is typical, with low productivity resulting from limited capital investment, poor equipment maintenance and overstaffing. Since independence, the port has been operated by a parastatal, the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA).

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  Muslim Societies in Africa

  A Historical Anthropology

  • Roman Loimeier(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  After a siege of three years, the Portuguese garrison in Fort Jesus capitulated on 12 December 1698, and Portuguese control over the north-ern and central East African coast came to an end. At the same time, Oman was not yet capable of replacing Portuguese domination. The coastal towns consequently regained their independence and, as in the case of Mombasa, rose to regional prominence. The end of Portuguese domination also signaled the end of Malindi’s brief rise to power: Malindi declined in a short period of time, was destroyed in an Oromo raid in the early seventeenth century, and was even reported deserted in 1846. Some years later, Malindi achieved a modest recovery under Omani control, when it became a major exporter of grain from the East African hinterland. While Malindi was able to rise to regional prominence on the coast for a brief period only, Mombasa was one of those coastal settlements which tried particularly hard to gain not only local but also regional hegemony over a stretch of the coast for a longer period of time. In this endeavor, Mombasa had to compete with Pate, later Malindi, and still later Lamu in the north, as well as Zanzibar in the south. Mombasa historical tradition ascribes original settlement of the island to an alliance of twelve settlements (Swa. miji kumi na mbili), ruled by the taifa tatu (three clans), namely Changamwe, Kilindini, and Tangana. In the early fourteenth century, local power shifted to the Shirazi who controlled the town until 1592, when the Portuguese took control of Mombasa and started to build Fort Jesus. Until that time, Mombasa had suffered Portuguese attacks in 1500, 1505, and 1528. Although accepting Portuguese overlordship, Mombasa was quick to recognize Ottoman control when the Ottoman navy appeared on the East African coast in 1585 and again in 1588, establishing a garri-son in Mombasa commanded by Amīr ʿ Alī Bey.

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