KILWA, Tanzania, 16 September 2003 — The boat’s wooden keel crunches over coral submerged in the shallows. An anchor splashes in the water and passengers wade through the surf.
An Arab fort guards the beach, its tumbledown walls once a prison for slaves seized on the mainland. A boy watches from the rocks above as the strangers brush sand from their feet.
Beyond a green fringe of mangroves lies what is left of Kilwa Kisiwani — a fabled island state that once dominated the east African coast, reaching its peak during the 14th century.
Golden splendors have collapsed into melancholy ruin. A tiny islet that once lured Portuguese explorers, holy men from Persia and Omanis and Europeans hunting human cargo now attracts only a handful of foreign tourists each day.
That could be about to change.
Inhabitants have hacked away undergrowth choking the remnants of the great palaces on the island, which lies just a short trip by boat from the Tanzanian coast.
A French architect is supervising work by a team of locals to stop the decay at the vaulted Great Mosque — once one of the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa. Visitors will no longer have to wade as the Japanese are funding a new jetty.
For at least some of the 1,000 or so islanders, the prospect of more tourists and more income is a blessing.
“We’ll welcome visitors,” said Abdurahamani Bakari Aboud, 68, an islander in heavy-rimmed glasses and skullcap. “There’ll be more work, more money, more development,” he said with a grin, before hopping from the boat and into the warm water.
Nowadays, Kilwa’s inhabitants live in houses of mud and thatch, but the ruins evoke the ghosts of a Swahili civilization that stretched from modern-day Somalia to Mozambique, mixing African and Arab peoples, languages and cultures.
An octagonal swimming pool takes pride of place in Husuni Kubwa — a palace built for Sultan Al-Hassan ibn Sulaiman in the middle of the 13th century, now reduced to crumbling foundations perched on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean.
The graves of 40 Muslim religious teachers said to have died in a feud among themselves lie amid the mighty Baobabs — trees as wide as a house that look as old as stone.
European explorers wrote breathless accounts of an island grown magnificent from its role as a gateway for gold mined in Zimbabwe and destined for Asia and Europe.
“The houses are high like those of Spain. In this land there are rich merchants, and there is much gold and silver and amber and musk and pearls,” reported Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500. “Those of the land wear clothes of fine cotton and of silk and many fine things, and they are black men.”
Kilwa flowered, then declined as the dynamics of the gold trade shifted. The island enjoyed only a brief resurrection in the 18th century — this time as a base for slavers.
As many other parts of Tanzania embraced the march of modernity, Kilwa slumbered. There are no cars. Young men survive by fishing in dugouts.
Women draw water from a well, balancing buckets on their heads.
At night the only visible electric lights are solar-powered lamps illuminating the fort — part of the restoration project.
Many visitors still arrive in small wooden boats reminiscent of the Arab dhows of old, their design dating back to antiquity.
Tourists visiting Tanzania have traditionally favored the “northern circuit” of famous game parks, the snow-capped Kilimanjaro mountain and beaches of Zanzibar.
The government, seeking to fight poverty, is opening up the south with a new Chinese-built road linking Kilwa to Tanzania’s main city Dar es Salaam, 250 km to the north.
Donors are funding a $2.5 million euro ($2.80 million) project to help boost tourism on Kilwa, aiming to increase the number of visitors and skim off revenue to invest in projects run by the community.
Planners talk of conserving forests and chasing off fishermen who dynamite coral reefs while ensuring increasing numbers of visitors do not spoil what they have come to see.
“We know it’s going to change,” said Pierre Blanchard, on-site architect for the restoration project. “Rather than everything being destroyed in two years, we want to control it so it can benefit the people for generations.”
Lodges resounding to South African accents are springing up on the mainland, anticipating an influx of big game fishermen, or tourists heading to the big Selous Game Reserve to the west.
A Tanzanian project official said he anticipated visitor numbers rising to about 1,000 in the next July-June financial year, from 600 this year, which would hardly swamp Kilwa.
But as gales of laughter echo around the ruins, pealing from the mouths of a group of Italian visitors, there might be some reservations on a deeply conservative island.
“Tourists can bring work for us,” said Bakari Saidi, 25, unloading three bleating goats soaked in spray as the boat returned to the mainland. “But changes will change our culture.”