(light piano music)
- [Voiceover] I'm speaking with Stephen Battle,
who is Program Director for sub-Saharan Africa
for the World Monuments Fund,
and we're talking about the ancient city of Kilwa.
- [Voiceover] Kilwa is located in the south of Tanzania,
and, in fact, there are two islands in the Kilwa occupalico,
Kilwa Kiswani and Songo Mnara,
today, surrounded by dense mangrove.
- [Voiceover] It's hard to re-imagine what this landscape
must have looked like when these ports were
in their hay-day.
These were cosmopolitan centers.
- [Voiceover] So, nowadays, it's a very poor part
of the world.
There's a village on each of the islands,
and most people in those villages make their living
from fishing or from subsistence farming.
But, at one time, it was probably the most powerful
city-state in the whole of East Africa.
- [Voiceover] And there were a series of city-states.
These were trading centers that dotted the Swahili coast,
down the east coast of Africa.
- [Voiceover] The word Swahili means, in Arabic,
"people of the coast."
The Swahili civilization occupied coastal East Africa
from around beginning of the ninth century
through until the 17th/18th century.
Indeed, descendants of the Swahili still live
along the coast of East Africa.
- [Voiceover] So, this is an indigenous culture,
but one that readily absorbed influences
from the entire Indian Ocean region.
- [Voiceover] The Swahili were traders.
They were merchants.
They traded all across the Indian Ocean,
north to the gulf region, east to India,
and as far away as China.
- [Voiceover] And we can see that probably most clearly
in the fact that this is an Islamic culture.
And, for instance, in the mosque we see embedded the wall
a bowl from China, celadon ceramics,
and so we've see evidence of this cosmopolitan environment.
- [Voiceover] The Swahili was really a collection
of city-states, dotted along the East African coast.
Each had a certain degree of autonomy with its own sultan,
but by the mid-14th century the Sultan of Kilwa had
asserted his power over all of the city-states,
and the source of his power, and of his wealth,
was really control over the gold trade.
Gold was mined in, what is today Zimbabwe,
and brought on foot to the coast in,
what is today Northern Mozambique,
loaded onto dhows, sailing ships,
and then transported north ending up
in the marketplaces of Fatimid, Cairo.
And the Sultan of Kilwa levied a custom's duty
on all of that exported gold passing
through the waters that he controlled,
and, thereby, grew fabulously wealthy.
- [Voiceover] And we can see evidence of that wealth
if we look, for instance at the Great Palace on Kilwa,
and we can see, here, evidence of gardens,
a pool, most famously, both the private residence
and the commercial activities that was the source
of wealth for this culture.
- [Voiceover] It's the Great Palace is known
in Kiswahili as Husumi Kubwa,
and it was built by Sultan Al-Hasan bin Sulaiman.
It has been described by an eminent art-historian,
Peter Garlig, as the earliest surviving major building
on the coast of East Africa, south of Somalia,
and, by far, the largest and most sophisticated.
- [Voiceover] When you look at photographs,
it's a little bit difficult, I think, to reconstruct
what the palace might have looked like.
In part, because what we see are these large,
extremely rough blocks of coral.
It's important to imagine that they were smoothed,
and that many of these surfaces were, in fact, painted.
- [Voiceover] So, the palace consists of two main areas.
There's a public area and a private area.
And in the public area, is a very large courtyard
with a number of storerooms,
and that area would have been used
for trade goods taken by the sultan.
There's an intermediary space, which is an audience hall,
or diwan, which consists of a sunken courtyard
with a series of steep steps where people coming
to see the sultan would have sat and faced him.
And then you get to the private part of the building,
built around a bathing pool open to the view
across the harbor, and the sultan would have bathed
inside this pool whilst watching the sun set
over mainland Africa.
- [Voiceover] I find it so interesting
this more public mercantile space of the diwan.
A traveler given an audience,
and the kinds of cross-cultural opportunities.
But soon enough, this wealth would attract the Portuguese.
- [Voiceover] So in 1498, the first Portuguese ship sailed
up the coast of East Africa.
The Portuguese had come to Africa in search of gold,
and they found it at Kilwa.
In 1505, the Portuguese established a garrison
of soldiers on Kilwa.
You have to remember that the Swahili were really
a mercantile people.
They had great sea-faring skills,
but had no experience of sea warfare,
and could not match, in any way,
the fire power of the Portuguese.
- [Voiceover] The best physical evidence we have
that represents this occupation, is a fort
which dominates the view from the sea.
- [Voiceover] Remarkably, contemporary
Portuguese accounts say that the fort was built in 16 days.
That's a little difficult to credit,
but it's clear, when you examine the building,
that it was based on an existing house.
And it seems, again, from looking at contemporary accounts,
that the Portuguese demolished a number of other houses
in the close proximity and used the materials
taken from those demolished houses to build up the fort.
It seems by the time the Portuguese garrison left,
in 1512, it was really quite a substantial
defensive building situated on the edge of the harbor.
- [Voiceover] And the Portuguese would remain
a very powerful presence in the Indian Ocean.
But, they would be replaced by the Omanis,
by the Sultan of Oman, up in the Persian Gulf.
- [Voiceover] The Omani Arabs had been trading
up and down the East African coast for centuries.
After the Portuguese arrived, they increasingly came
into conflict with the Omanis.
And so, in the late-1730, 18th century,
they launched a systematic attempt
to kick the Portuguese out of East Africa forever.
- [Voiceover] And, it's at this point, that Kilwa
experiences a resurgence, a kind of economic boom,
under the Omani.
In fact, the Omani loved the East African coast so much
that they would relocate their capital
to the coast of Africa, and there would be
a significant building campaign in Kilwa, as well.
And probably the most extravagant example is
an Omani palace.
- [Voiceover] The foundations of this palace,
the so-called Makutani Palace were built
by one of the earliest Swahili sultans.
But when the Omanis finally gained complete control
over Kilwa, and the rest of the East African coast,
they expanded and greatly added to the Makutani Palace,
and created the structure that you see today.
- [Voiceover] Kilwa's source of wealth was clearly gold,
but it also transformed over time.
This would have included ivory and enslaved peoples.
But as time progressed, enslaved peoples made up a larger
and larger percentage of trade and of the wealth
of the city.
- [Voiceover] Kilwa became, in the mid-19th century,
the major trans-shipment point from mainland Africa
to the principle slave market on Zanzibar.
So, the Makutani Palace consists of a building
within a building,
The palace is really at the center,
and that would have been the residential area.
But that sits within a much larger walled stockade
used to store trade goods, but also,
most likely, would have been used
to imprison enslaved peoples
before they shipped north to Zanzibar.
- [Voiceover] We have the indigenous Swahili culture
building on this island with the Portuguese
asserting their influence, and then the Makutani Palace
this expression of Omani control, this layering of history.
And now, all of it is in ruins,
but the Wold Monuments Fund is stepping in.
- [Voiceover] And that's what's so remarkable
about Kilwa Kisiwani and its sister-island, Songo Mnara.
It really represents a slice through
over 800 years of East African culture,
starting from the early 10th century Swahili occupation
right up until the early 20th century when it became
the capital of colonial German East Africa.
What's remarkable is that extraordinary structures
from each of these periods of occupation still stand
on those two islands.
(light piano music)