A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [152]
The city comes down to the shore and is surrounded by a wall and towers, within which there may be 12,000 inhabitants … The streets are very narrow, as the houses are very high, of three and four storeys, and one can run along the tops of them upon the terraces, as the houses are very close together … and in the port are many ships.
Kilwa was the southernmost and the richest of a chain of towns and cities strung along the East African coast, running from Tanzania north through Mombasa, in modern Kenya, to Mogadishu in Somalia. These communities were always in touch with each other, sailing up and down the coast, and they also mixed constantly with traders coming across the ocean.
The evidence of all this trade – the broken crockery – is full of information. It is quite clear even to me that the pale green sherds are Chinese porcelain, fragments from beautiful luxury bowls or jars – Celadon ware, which the Chinese were manufacturing in industrial quantities and exporting not just to south-east Asia but across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and Africa. The Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah remembers finding his own bits of Chinese pottery on the beach as a child:
We used to see these things, these bits of pottery, on the beaches. And sometimes older people would say to us, ‘That’s Chinese pottery.’ And we’d think ‘Yeah, yeah,’ we’d heard lots of stories of this kind of thing – flying carpets, princes lost, etc. – so we took it as just another one of those stories. It was only later on, when you begin to go in to museums or hear these persistent stories of great Chinese armadas that visited East Africa, that the object then becomes something valuable, something that is a signifier of something important – a connection. And then you see the object itself and you see its completeness, and its weight, and its beauty, and it makes inescapable this presence over centuries of a culture as far away as China.
As well as the Chinese porcelain, there are other bits of pot here that have clearly travelled a long way to get to Kilwa. A blue piece with black geometric patterning on it obviously comes from the Arab world; when you look at this fragment under the microscope, you can tell from the composition of the clay that it was made in Iraq or Syria. Other pieces come from Oman or different parts of the Gulf. These fragments alone would be enough to demonstrate the strength and the extent of Kilwa’s links with the Islamic Middle East.
The people of Kilwa clearly loved foreign pottery. They used it for dining and they also decorated their houses and mosques with bowls set into walls and arches. Pottery, of course, was only one element in the thriving import–export trade that made Kilwa’s fortune – but as it was the toughest and the most enduring product, it is the evidence that has survived. Also coming in were cottons from India – a trade that continues to this day – Chinese silks, glass, jewellery and cosmetics. Another Portuguese visitor conjured up the rich exchanges that took place at harbours like Kilwa:
They are great traders in cloth, gold, ivory and diverse other wares with the Moors and other heathens of India; and to their harbour come every year many ships with cargoes of merchandise, from which they get great stores of gold, ivory and wax.
Exports from Africa included iron ingots much in demand in India, timber used for building in the Gulf, rhino horn, turtle shell, leopard skin and, of course, gold and slaves. Many of these were brought over huge distances from inland Africa; gold, for instance, came from Zimbabwe far to the south. It was the trade through Kilwa that 800 years ago made Zimbabwe such a rich and powerful kingdom, capable of constructing as its capital city that supreme and mysterious monument, Great Zimbabwe.
All this trade made Kilwa very rich,