Kilwa Kisiwani
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Radiocarbon dating has placed the founding of the town at the start of the 9th century AD, well before the sultanate of the traditions.
- Ancient DNA from medieval Swahili coast burials, including Kilwa, shows African ancestry on the mothers' side mixing with Persian and Indian ancestry from about 1000 AD.
- The palace of Husuni Kubwa seems to have been lived in only briefly and was abandoned before it was finished, for reasons that remain unknown.
- Husuni Kubwa had an octagonal pool and rooms about three metres high, and a Chinese Yuan dynasty flask from around 1300 was found among its ruins.
- The oldest prayer hall of the Great Mosque had a flat roof carried on nine hexagonal columns each cut from a single tree trunk, unusual for mosques of the region.
- Traces of red paint suggest the early Great Mosque was once decorated in red and black.
- Wealthy households displayed imported Chinese and Arabian ceramics in wall niches made specially for them, as a sign of status.
- Spindle whorls from the 12th century show cotton was spun here, and the local cotton could be woven into sailcloth.
- Some of the island's freshwater wells have been in use for more than a thousand years.
- The name of the Gereza fort means "prison" in Swahili.
Why it is worth it
Kilwa Kisiwani is a small island off the southern coast of Tanzania whose ruins mark what was once the most powerful city on the Swahili Coast. Local tradition holds that a prince from Shiraz named Ali ibn al-Hasan bought the island from its inhabitants and founded the sultanate in the 10th or 11th century, although the site was already settled. From around the 13th century Kilwa controlled the gold trade from Sofala further south, and between about 1100 and 1600 it struck its own copper coins, some of which have turned up as far away as northern Australia. The traveller Ibn Battuta stayed here in the early 1330s and counted Kilwa among the most beautifully built towns he had seen.
The surviving buildings are made of coral stone and lime. The Great Mosque was begun in the 12th century and greatly enlarged in the early 14th under Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman, when its prayer hall was covered with a forest of domes and vaults on slender columns. The same sultan built Husuni Kubwa on a headland above the sea, a palace with more than a hundred rooms, courtyards and a sunken bathing pool, among the largest buildings of its age south of the Sahara. Other ruins include the smaller domed mosque, houses, and the Gereza, a fort first built by the Portuguese and later reworked under Omani rule.
Kilwa's decline began with rivalry over the succession at the end of the 15th century, and in 1505 a Portuguese fleet under Francisco de Almeida took the town and installed a vassal ruler. The ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and of neighbouring Songo Mnara were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.
Getting there
The island is reached only by boat from the port of Kilwa Masoko, about 6 km away across the channel. Kilwa Masoko lies about 300 km south of Dar es Salaam and is linked by road to the main coastal highway; it has its own small airport, Kilwa Masoko Airport (KIY). The nearest larger airport is Mtwara Airport (MYW), about 167 km to the south.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kilwa Kisiwani is an island, national historic site, and hamlet community located in the township of Kilwa Masoko, the district seat of Kilwa District in the Tanzanian region of Lindi in southern Tanzania. Kilwa Kisiwani is the largest of the nine hamlets in the town of Kilwa Masoko and is also the least populated hamlet in the township with around 1,150 residents.
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