Mombasa, Then and Now

Annamaria on Monday

On my recent trip to Kenya, I had my heart set on my first visit to Kenya's first colonial capital:Mombasa, which had been famous since the Middle Ages.  Alas, the advice my fellow travelers and I received was "Now is not the time."  Radicals, evidently, are attacking their fellow Kenyans.   My fellow travelers and I opted for the nearest historic port city, Zanzibar. Boohoo.

Mombasa is the setting for the second in my Africa series, which is just now enjoying the release of a new and beautiful edition.  My planned visit would have been my first opportunity to see the legendary city in person, since when I was working on that story, my life circumstances did not allow for such travel.  How I wish that today I could have  my own firsthand description and photos to share with you.  But failing that, here is a glance at a factual (as opposed to my fictional) portrayal of the background town of Vera & Tolliver #2,

Quite a few cities on our sacred planet have become important because of their location: on an important coast with a natural, deep-river port.  Siracusa in Sicily, Cape Town. New Orleans, and New York leap immediately to mind.  Mombasa - on the Indian Ocean, became such a center of trade sometime around 900 A.D.  That trading village had early contacts with India and China and over the centuries grew, into the largest port on the east coast of Africa. with a current population of more than 1.2 million and the metropolitan region of 3.5 million.

The Portuguese arrived in the 16th Century, most famously led by the first European on the scene: Vasco da Gama in 1498.  Not finding an easy welcome, he eventually built Fort Jesus (a historic venue that appears often in my 1912 story).

After the uneasy and intermittently violent occupation by the Portuguese, next came a 1585 takeover by the Ottomans.  Mombasa's culture and language became predominantly Swahili.  Eventually, in the 18th Century, independent Sultans took charge, interrupted by a couple of years of British governance.

The British East Africa Association moved in on 25 May 1887 and came to stay.  Though the Sultan of Zanzibar retained a ten mile swath of the coast, including Mombasa, in exchange for a monetary tributes, he made the British Mombasa's governors.  The Brits went on to build the "Lunatic Express" railroad that you read about here a couple of week ago, and for a few years Mombasa was the capital of the Protectorate of British East Africa.

Mombasa continued to be largely a diverse but mostly a Muslim city, where Swahili was the local language.  (It is now the official language of Kenya.). Regardless of who was in charge, trade in Mombasa at the time was mostly in gold, ivory, sesame, millet, and coconuts. Nowadays, it is mostly coffee, tea, and food grown in the highlands and shipped to supermarkets in Great Britain.  

Kenya became an official colony of Great Britain in 1920.  From 1952 till 1960, all of Kenya suffered though the Mau Mau Rebellion or Kenya Emergency - A brutal battle on both sides. Finally, on the 12 December 1963 Kenya achieved independence.

Just three months before my failed February trip, King Charles III visited Kenya and Mombasa.  Perhaps if it was good enough for His Majesty it might have been good enough for me and my friends.  On the other hand, I would imagine the royal Brit had a better security detail than my friends and I could have mustered.  The local newpaper said, "The region has seen an increase in radicalization and militants kidnapping, or killing Kenyans."

I guess it is best we did not chance making that visit.  Mombasa has been there for 1124 years.  And Fort Jesus, the place I most wanted to see in person, has survived for 518.  There is hope that they will be there if I ever get a chance to try again.  In the meanwhile readers of The Idol of Mombasa can make the trip in my time machine.  And despite the murders in my story, nothing bad will happen to them when they take their imaginations to the exotic Kenya coast.  

Slavery in British East Africa

Annamaria on Monday

My British East African series is based on the Ten Commandments.  Each story has a plot thread based on the sin of the commandment.  And another based on a sin that has no commandment.  But that I think should.  In The Idol of Mombasa, the second in the series, the sin of the commandment is idolatry.  The other sin is slavery.

When I first started working on the book a couple of years ago, I mentioned the themes to Stanley Trollip.  He immediately said he thought the slave trade had ended well before 1912, when the book is set.  I figured that—as happens with me—I had chosen a topic so obscure that even a person as knowledgeable as Stan would think my story far-fetched.  I had some work to do to make my plot plausible.

I hit the books again.  My further research bore out what I had already learned: In East Africa, slavery did not disappear abruptly the day the British declared it so.  As one of my characters says, “…like every beast, slavery has a tail, and we are dealing with that tail here.”

Let’s take a look at why it took longer for slavery to be stamped out in East Africa.

The black lines represent slave trade routes in the Middle Ages.

In the late Nineteenth Century, the territory that is now Kenya was a protectorate of the British government—a step on the way to becoming a colony.  That is all of it but a ten-mile swath of the coast, which belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Arabs had been trading slaves from there since the 700s, long before any European put a foot on that shore.  Over the centuries, the Sultanates of the Middle East took African slaves to work for Persia as sailors, to dive for pearls in the Gulf, to fight as troops for Omani.  And mostly to work in houses as domestics and sex slaves.  Some were shipped as far away as China.

They used Mombasa as their shipping point, and the mixture of genes and cultures between the city’s African population and the Arab traders gave rise to the Swahili people and language.  Africans as well as Arabs traded slaves.

When the Brits arrived in East Africa, slavery was an entrenched way of life.  It might have been against British law everywhere else, but it was an important part of the local culture and sanctioned by Shari'a law. 

Also, when the Protectorate of British East Africa was declared, His Majesty’s administrators had a bitter rival for the goodies available to be plundered from Africa—the Germans in German East Africa (now Tanzania) to their south.  The Sultan still had hegemony over the BEA coast.  If the Brits did not make nice with him, he might favor the Gerries and cut them out.  The Brits’ allies in this matter were Arabs who were themselves slave owners and slave traders.

So the British East African Administration never fully committed to enforcing their own anti-slavery laws.

In the end, they prevailed with the Sultan, if paying him 250,000 pounds sterling for the right to govern the coast in his name can be called prevailing.  At least they won out over the Germans.

Little by little, the Brits tried to cut down on the number of people enslaved—by declaring 1474 existing runaways as free men, by declaring that children born after 1 January 1890 were free.  This gradual approach put the government on the outs with the passionate anti-slavery forces on the home front.

In response the government argued that slavery on Zanzibar and along the British East African coast was far more benign than the well-known horrors of the Caribbean.  They could offer as proof that the Qu’ran instructed good Muslims to be kind to their slaves and set them free when they died.

In 1897, the King’s administrators convinced the Sultan to make slavery illegal.  But nobody told the slaves.  If they found out and wanted to bolt, they had to prove that they had the means to support themselves as freemen by showing a contract of employment.  The police ramped up their enforcement of the vagrancy laws to keep the household slaves in their place.

So slavery continued in this area well into the Twentieth Century.

In my story, I wanted to include some low level slave trading, as well as slave possession.  I gave the British a pragmatic fictional reason for turning a blind eye to slave trafficking on the coast in 1912.  It served my story to imagine this.  Just this past Friday, while boning up on my facts to write this blog, I found a new article on the subject.  Here is quote from “The Windmill of Slavery: The British and Foreign Antislavery Society and Bonded Labor in East Africa” by Opolot Okia. 

  

“Moreover, unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British efforts against slave trading in these areas were more lethargic and gradual and were conditioned more by specific, local circumstances than some amorphous but inexorable anti slavery logic.” (The Middle Ground Journal: Duluth, 2011)

The institution was not finally abolished by law until the 6^th of July 1909.

The Idol of Mombasa set two and half years later in January of 1912.  I hope you will read the book.  Then you can tell me if my story of slavery in East Africa is in keeping with the actual history of the place.

Mombasa

Annamaria on Monday

 

The setting for my upcoming book—The Idol of Mombasa—has a fabulous exotic history: connected to the Sultanates of Oman and of Zanzibar, trade with ancient China, Portuguese global exploration, the Raj, and the search for the source of the Nile.  The romance of this list gives me gooseflesh.  What a place!  My series character—Vera Tolliver—describes it as a locale where you “expect to see Aladdin walking along, carrying his lamp.”

There has been a trading post on this island at least since the early Middle Ages.  Local oral tradition says it was founded, sometime around 900 AD by a woman—Mwana Mkisi and became the birthplace of the Swahili culture.  The first people to settle there permanently were traders and skilled craftsman.  Links were established with the Indian sub-continent and east as far as China.  Trade was in gold, spices, and ivory.  Once plantations, which relied on slave labor, were in place, trade expanded to include millet, sesame, and cocoanuts.

Modern picture of the historic souk

Mombasa’s harbor and its position on the Indian Ocean made it a natural as an international city, the most important port on the East African coast.  Persian and Arab traders were there early on.  One Arab geographer mentioned it in his documentation of 1151.  The first written account comes from a Moroccan traveler, writing in 1331.  He stopped in overnight and wrote in his journal, “a religious people, trustworthy and righteous.  Their mosques are made of wood and expertly built.”

 As with many other faraway places, Vasco Da Gama was the first European to show up in Mombasa—in 1498.  He must have lusted after what he saw, because he returned two years later and sacked the place.  At the time that Vasco—that villain—arrived, the city was ruled by the Sultan of Mombasa.  At which point there began a series of turnarounds for the citizenry.  Over the next four hundred, years hegemony over Mombasa went like this:

1528—Portuguese attack again and take over

1587—Zimba cannibals (!) put in a brief appearance

1589—Portuguese return and this time build Fort Jesus, which still stands

1698—Sultan of Oman tosses out the Portuguese

1728—Portuguese make another cameo appearance

1729—Sultanate of Oman is back and endures for a century

1824—Britain makes its first sally

Fort Jesus, as it looks today

Tunnel within the fort

Ancient Portuguese grafitti

Then, through a series of deaths, deals, and inheritances within the Sultanate of Oman, by 1886, a ten-mile wide swath of the coast had become the property of the Sultan of Zanzibar.   The Brits had been active in that part of the world for a number of years, trying to get a permanent foothold.  It was from Mombasa that they launched many of their forays in search of the source of the Nile.  British missionaries had moved into the hinterlands with dual and interlinked purposes—to convert the pagans to Christianity and as an important part of their effort to wipe out slavery worldwide.   In 1886, the King’s empire builders made a deal with the Sultan of Zanzibar, who gave them a concession in his territory along the coast.

At that point Mombasa became the capital of the Protectorate of British East Africa, into which they also included all the land going west to Lake Victoria and north to the southern border of Uganda. 

Just then, the Brits started to build a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, a bold, fascinating project that I have described in two posts before—here and here.  Once the railroad was completed, laborers imported from India for its construction often stayed on and settled in Mombasa, giving the city yet another facet of its fascination.

In 1906, since most of the European settlers were ensconced up country, the Brits moved their administration to Nairobi, where the capital of Kenya remains to this day.

Modern-day Mombasa stands as a pinnacle of historical exoticism. 

My characters walk around in the place as it was a hundred years ago.  Fortunately for me, photographic evidence of what it looked like still exists.  Here are just a handful of the photos I have collected:

 

Lucky, lucky me, I also have eleven volumes of eye-witness accounts—on my shelf in the New York Public Library.