The forgotten ghosts of Fort Jesus in Mombasa

Tourism is Kenya’s biggest foreign currency earner and Mombasa with its white sand beaches and warm ocean is one of Africa’s most popular holiday destinations. Fort Jesus is the city’s most ancient landmark, and it is a place with its own history of conflict.

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Fort Jesus stands high overlooking the old harbour in Mombasa.  Its walls and turrets are stained red and black with age.  It is an ancient, haunting citadel silhouetted against a background of palms, white sands and a turquoise sea.

In the clear shallows beneath its battlements, rusting cannons lie among shoals of tiny silver fish.  Small boys dive amongst them and splash in the warm water of the Indian Ocean.

Mombasa is one of the oldest towns in East Africa.  There has been some kind of settlement here for at least 700 years, perhaps longer.  It has always been a melting pot for African, Arabic, Asian and European culture.  The name Mombasa is derived from an Arabic word ‘nabas’ to speak in public.   It has a history of negotiation, and of trade in slaves, ivory, rhino horn, sugar, cloves and palm-oil.  But it also has a history of conflict.  In the 16th century it became known as Kisiwa ya Mvita – The Island of War, and the Swahili name for Mombasa is still Mvita today.   The town has been attacked and conquered by the Zimba tribe, Omani Arabs, Persians and Portuguese seafarers, including Vasco da Gama who arrived in 1498.  It became a British protectorate in 1895 and part of independent Kenya in 1963.

I walk through the ominous stone gateway with a Kenyan friend, Moses.  A tour guide is angry.   He thinks Moses is taking his fee.   ‘We Kenyans are poor because people like you are greedy,’ one of them snarls at Moses.  His is the anger that lies just beneath the surface in so much of Africa where economies are failing and jobs are scarce.

Fort Jesus is a witness to nearly 500 years of war that brought first the Portuguese then the Arabs to the African coast.  In the tiny museum we see what archaeologists have dug up: shards of Chinese porcelain, Somali silver, iron spear heads from the interior of Africa, rusting muskets from Europe.  The ruins of Fort Jesus stand at the intersecting seam of so many civilizations.

Originally built by the Portuguese to defend their monopoly of the valuable trade routes to the East, the castle fell in 1698 to the Sultan of Oman.

Fort Jesus was a far-flung symbol of European power and oppression, but the staunchest defense of the fort was led by an African, Bwana Daud.  His soldiers were largely African – Swahilis and others loyal to the Portuguese.  Many of the frightened people crammed into the fort were women and children.

The horror of the siege of Fort Jesus still echoes within its ancient, decaying stones.  Amidst the fighting, the defenders died of starvation, cholera and bubonic plague.  When the fort finally fell, 6500 Portuguese and African lives had been lost.  A terrible cost of death among people crammed for two years into an acre of sun-baked stone and crumbling coral, reeking of disease, human waste and rotting corpses.

Today we can still see the grafitti drawn by the defenders in their last days before the Sultan’s troops closed in.  The crude representations of ships are scratched into the sun-blackened lichen.  Those angular, uncertain drawings are the messages from frightened, hungry people telling us of their last hope – that a ship will appear on the horizon to relieve them.

In the estuary beyond the broken stone battlements, rusting fishing boats chug out to sea.  Minibus taxis crawl through the traffic on a spit of land across the water.  The noise and bustling energy of people in an African town drifts across the languid bay.

Standing here, it seems to me that the ruined walls of Fort Jesus say so much about the layers of fear and suspicion that reach back into the history of this continent.

In the end, relief ships did come.  The new Portuguese commander insulted Bwana Daud and the Swahilis who had fought so bravely.  They left in disgust.

A desperate handful of Portuguese soldiers and African women held on, but without the Swahili soldiers the fort was doomed.  The final attack began at night.  The defenders fought until dawn, when the commander was beheaded.

The Portuguese were betrayed by their own racist arrogance.  But it is in the minds of Bwana Daud and the African defenders that the real meaning of the siege of Fort Jesus lies.

They were Africans battling for the collapsing empire of their white rulers.  Why did they choose to fight?  What fears drove them deep inside the stone walls of the white man’s fort?  What hopes did they hold for their own future?

We can speculate but we will never know for certain.  The ruins are layered with the silence of their untold stories.  But there must have come a point when their hopes ceased to matter, when they stared over the battlements and knew that they could no longer escape.

From that moment the tragedy of their story began.  From then on, their fate rested entirely in the power and the hatred of their attackers.

Looking out over the crumbling, moss-covered fortifications,  I could not help thinking that Fort Jesus today stands on the edge of a continent where at many different wars and armed rebellions are taking place.

The wars of Africa remain terrifying, often desperate sieges.  People all over the continent are walled in by poverty and the lack of choices for their own lives.  They are trapped by the power and hatred of others.   But, unlike the defenders of Fort Jesus, today their stories should not be forgotten.