Zanzibar

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Zanzibar

Lat: -6.161327777777800, Long: 39.188883333333000

Zanzibar

East Africa, including Ethiopia, Tanzania

Historical Background and Urbanism

Zanzibar, a coastal island a part of present day Tanzania, is a gem of Islamic and Swahili civilization. In the 15th century, it was a small settlement, part of the numerous Afro-Arab entrepots and trade hubs spread along the coast of east Africa. From the late 15th century, after the passage of Vasco da Gama through Zanzibar in 1499, Portuguese explorers and traders began to influence the economic activity on the island, establishing some small nuclei there from 1503 onwards and the island would be claimed as a Portuguese possession by Captain João Homero in 1505. These nuclei would later come under the main protection of the large fortification of Mombasa, in present day Kenya, between the late 16th century and the late 17th century. In 1698 Portuguese military control over the island ended, as it was handed over to the Omani Empire. By the late 16th century, the island was run by a local dynasty under Portuguese influence and hegemony. With the increasing decadence of their “Empire of the Indies” from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, however, the dominant influence in this region would gradually be transferred to the Omani Arabs, who finally expelled the Portuguese from Zanzibar in 1729. There are reports mentioning the existence of two “Portuguese houses” in Mulvani on the coastal island of Pemba, a little to the north of the largest island of Zanzibar. There are also reports of the remains of a fort with a chapel in Zanzibar (in the north of the island, near Manama). Here, the “Portuguese” word was synonymous with “doreno” (from the kingdom).
In terms of urban layout, the main town on the island, the so-called “Stone Town” (or in Swahili “Mji Mkongwe”, considered World Heritage by the UNESCO in 2000), has features of the historical towns of the Islamic world in its core, with a considerable concentration of buildings in an elongated urban fabric (running southwest to northeast), with narrow streets and densely populated (see the map of 1846, in the quoted work, which alludes to the “trade quarter” surrounding the fort). This urban fabric, however, due to its morphological characteristics, might have marks of the old Portuguese contribution (see the site of the so-called “Portuguese arch”), associated to the central presence of the fort, which indicates the former remains of civil and religious architecture of Portuguese origin (trading post and church or chapel) – similar to some Moroccan towns where there was also a Portuguese presence.

José Manuel Fernandes

Military Architecture