English
Fort
Kilwa Kisiwani [Quíloa], East Africa, including Ethiopia, Tanzania
Military Architecture
The Saint James Fort was built in few a months in 1505. In a letter of 16th December 1505, Francisco de Almeida boasted about the work to King Manuel I: “Sire, we built a fortress there which, if I could, I would trade some years of my life to buy; Your Highness will see it is so strong that the king of France was expected to go there. It has dwellings with fine houses for the many people that live there. Boats unload casks through a six-step stairway in the most resistant bastion that we have. There, my Lord, I gathered and spread all ships and left the fortress well provided. All of these works were executed in 17 days, but noblemen and men of lower rank have their arms longer due to the handbarrow. I left the warehouse organized for the spices within the fortress where boats can store it” (ed. Rego, 1962-1989, pp. 326-328). Portuguese occupation did not surpass seven years, however, as the fort was abandoned in 1512.
Its maintenance was difficult and it seemed preferable to concentrate military and commercial efforts at Sofala and Mozambique. The exceptional importance of the small Fort of Kilwa derives from the fact that it was the first military piece of architecture of stone and mortar carried out according to a pre- modern architectural model which would be repeated in identical circumstances in the first stage of reconnaissance and control of the East by Europeans.
The main master of the fortress was Tomás Fernandes, who “outlined the plans and started the works in situ, leaving a subordinate at each trading post when he set off on a new mission to another trading post or point of support for the fleets” (Dias, 2005). Fernandes certainly followed a Manueline model of composition.
In 1505, Cochin was already the base of operations established in India following the adaptation of the facilities provided by the sultan to the Portuguese. Kilwa, however, was a building created from scratch and, being efficient, it was also extremely innovative in terms of the theory and history of military architecture. In effect, Francisco de Almeida had the express duty of building a fort in Kilwa, for which purpose an official regulator design must have been created. This was then the only way to adopt the directives in order to attain, in a short period, the achievement of a new form of a transitional-type architecture, i.e., ignoring significant medieval tenets and subjecting everything to the superiority of artillery, which stood out as the basis of the whole strategy. This piece of Portuguese architecture precedes Castro Marim (Portugal) and Aguz fortification (Morocco) constructions.
It is, therefore, the remaining example of the first stage of the constructive expression of the Portuguese Empire in the East. The Portuguese fort of Kilwa is also worthy of note because it is a construction that has survived without losing its original aspect despite the Swahili additions. In effect, according to studies by Neville Chittick, the English archeologist that made an intensive exploration of Kilwa Kisiwani, at least between 1957 and 1965, the aspect of the ruin of Gereza (the name that locally designates the fort and which means “prison”, possibly being a corruption of the Portuguese word “igreja”, i.e, church) is due to the Omani additions in the early 19th century, “apparently ordered by Yakut, the sultan of Muscat representative in Zanzibar. [...] We know from the Narrative of Journeys by Owen that, in 1824, it still had an Omani garrison. [...] The building was described as ruined in 1842 [...], but it still possessed a Baluchi garrison in 1850 [...]. The northern wall, battered by the sea, had surely collapsed before 1857, when Burton visited the fort” (Chittick, 1974-1975).
In 1900, Bernhard Perrot took some archeological remains to Germany; in turn, the English, in 1935-1936, started prospecting works, published from 1950 by Gervase Mathew and Mortimer (supervised by James Kirkeman), entitled Kilwa, the Cutting behind the Defensive Hall; more recently, Neville Chittick under- took a systematic campaign of archeological research, which continued for almost a decade, at least until 1965. The ruined building has a presence of great historical, aesthetic, and scenic impact, embedded in an Arab-African environment. For the present day con- struction, which has a roughly quadrangular base, is turreted and in ruins, there is a recovery/preservation project planned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
The building is part of the Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara complex, considered World Heritage by the UNESCO in 1981.
