Chwaka Ruins, Pemba: Four Mosques and a Pillar Tomb

Which Chwaka this is

There are two Chwakas in the Zanzibar archipelago and they have nothing to do with each other. This one is in the far north of Pemba, in Micheweni District, about six kilometres from Konde town and reached by a short trail towards the village of Tumbe. The other is Chwaka Bay on Unguja, several hours and a sea crossing away. Itineraries confuse them.

A town built out of an older one

Chwaka was founded around 1050 by people from Tumbe, an earlier settlement roughly fifty metres away that had covered some sixty hectares and been occupied from the seventh to the tenth centuries. The new stone town grew to about eight hectares within a century and twelve by 1300, and was occupied into the sixteenth.

That sequence is the interesting thing about the site and the reason archaeologists keep coming back to it. It is a place where an earlier village and the stone town that replaced it sit beside each other, which is rare enough to have carried a long programme of survey and excavation by Adria LaViolette and Jeffrey Fleisher, and more recently work with Mark Horton on how Islamic practice took shape in this landscape between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.

What survives

The mosques are the substance. Four mortared coral mosques were built here in sequence: a congregational mosque of Porites coral with a timber roof in the eleventh century, a second near the water’s edge in the twelfth, a third in the thirteenth, and a smaller one — the Choroko mosque — in the late fifteenth. In the fourteenth century the first mosque was rebuilt and extended with two side halls and barrel vaults, roughly tripling its capacity.

Outside the congregational mosque are ten tombs, two of them pillar tombs in mortared coral rag. The more intact stands about twenty metres to the north-west and is known as Haruni’s Tomb: a roofless rectangular enclosure entered from the west, the pillar at its eastern end, decorated with shallow niches, glazed tiles and bas-reliefs worked in mortar. Pillar tombs are a Swahili idiom from the fifteenth century onward and are associated with high-ranking people.

Two cautions about the name. Zanzibar’s Department of Museums and Antiquities calls the whole site the Haroun Ruins and lists it among the places it has excavated, but in the archaeological literature the name belongs to the pillar tomb rather than to any mosque — so a listing advertising a “Haruni mosque” has crossed two things over. And the tradition that Haruni was a son of the Mkama Ndume of Pujini is tradition, not archaeology.

Who looks after it

The site has been protected for a long time. Two of its structures — the Shirazi mosque, and the Mazrui mosque and ruin — were gazetted in 1943, and Old Tumbe next door was added in 2002, on a register of eighty-five sites held by Zanzibar’s Department of Museums and Antiquities. The department names Chwaka Tumbe as one of the Pemba villages where a community group works with it on maintaining the site, and states that such groups take their income from visitor entrance fees.

There is still no interpretation centre and no published opening hours. Arrangements are made on the ground.

Pemba’s other ruins, at Ras Mkumbuu and Pujini, are both a long way south of here and are separate days rather than a circuit. The archaeological tours guide covers how sites like this are seen, and Swahili cultural tours sets Pemba’s ruins in the wider coastal story.

Common questions about Chwaka, Pemba