Swahili Coast · a Light

An East African island city impressed the world's great traveller

In 1331 Ibn Battuta sailed down the East African coast to Kilwa, an island town in what is now Tanzania, and wrote that it was one of the finest and most substantially built towns he had seen. Kilwa lived on the Indian Ocean trade, exporting gold brought north from the Zimbabwe plateau through Sofala, and importing Chinese porcelain, glass and cloth. Its ruler built the Husuni Kubwa palace, with an octagonal bathing pool cut into the cliff, and a great mosque roofed with coral stone domes. The ruins of both stand today. The Swahili language and the stone towns of the coast grew out of centuries of Africans and Arabs and Persians and Indians trading in the same ports.

Kilwa Kisiwani · 1331 CE