Mikindani Old Town

A national historical centre, not a preserved village

Mikindani Historical Town is one of the nine historical centres run by the National Museum of Tanzania, and the only one in the far south apart from Lindi and the Tendaguru palaeontological site. That status is the reason the old town has a warden, an address and a published inventory, and it is what separates Mikindani from the many pleasant coastal settlements on this shore that have none of those things.

The museum service dates the town’s significance to the ninth century, describing it as a significant trading hub with the finest port on this coast from that period. It records successive Arab, Portuguese, German and British influence producing mixed traditions, languages and cooking, and names what went through the harbour in both directions: ivory, gum copal, enslaved people and seed crops outbound; garments, ceramics, weapons, beads and similar goods inbound.

What the inventory actually lists

The museum’s record of the site names the buildings it considers significant: the Custom House, the Sultanate Palace, the German Governor’s Residence, the slave market, the Mikindani Mosque, an Indian temple, stone-built homes, Indian Street, historical graves, churches and historical water wells. Alongside them it lists the archaeological and historical evidence of an extensive settlement combining Swahili culture with Arab, African and European history.

That is an unusually full list for a mainland Tanzanian town, and it is the thing to walk with. Indian Street and the Indian temple in particular point at a commercial community that most accounts of this coast skip over entirely.

Why it is quiet

Because the port left. Mtwara Region’s own record states that a full municipal authority for Mtwara–Mikindani was established in 1948 under the colonial administration, when the Port of Mtwara was relocated from Mikindani to its present site at Mtwara. Everything about Mikindani today follows from that single administrative decision: the harbour works stopped being used, the town stopped growing, and the nineteenth-century fabric survived because nothing replaced it.

The name itself is local rather than grand. Mtwara Region derives Mikindani from mikinda, meaning an area where coconut palms do not grow well.

Walking it

The old town takes an hour on foot at a stroll and half a morning with a guide who stops. Interpretation on the ground is limited, which makes a guide worth more here than in a town that explains itself. See historical walking tours and, for the wider coastal frame, Swahili cultural tours. The harbour’s role in the export of enslaved people belongs with the treatment in the guide to slave trade history tours.

The museum service lists the activities based here as historical tours, education and research, sport fishing, swimming and boat rides, and names two fixed dates in the town’s year: Mikindani Day on 26 October, and Site and Monument Day.

Getting there, and a figure that does not agree

The museum service says Mikindani is 25 kilometres from Mtwara Municipality, reachable by tarmac road or by flying from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara. Mtwara Region, meanwhile, administers the two as a single municipal council formed by combining them, and local accounts consistently describe Mikindani as a short drive from Mtwara rather than half an hour. The 25-kilometre figure is the managing authority’s own and is given here for that reason; treat it as a maximum.

Common questions