One site, two names
Pujini and Mkama Ndume are the same place. Pujini is the locality — a scatter of hamlets, fields, groves and mangrove south-east of Chake Chake on Pemba that are collectively called Pujini today. Mkama Ndume, also written Mkame Ndume, is the locally infamous historical figure said to have built the stone site, and the name the site is known by in the area.
Adria LaViolette’s excavation report opens by naming it “Pujini or Mkame Ndume”, which settles it. Any itinerary offering Pujini Ruins and Mkama Ndume Ruins as two stops is selling one place twice, and an encyclopaedia entry treating them as separate sites is wrong.
What is actually there
A stone-built compound inside a rectangular rampart of three parallel walls with a parapet walk, about eight metres thick, pierced by two gates and enclosing roughly 1.5 hectares. Inside it stood a multi-storey house in the Swahili style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a stone mosque and two wells, a deep stone-lined pit beside the western gate and a staircase. Excavation recovered the largest known set of zidaka, the decorative wall niches of Swahili domestic architecture.
About 150 metres to the west-south-west, at Ukutani hamlet, are the remains of a second stone mosque of roughly twenty by twenty-eight metres, with the bases of ruined columns three across, simple graves and stone wells. A working mosque with a zinc roof stands over part of it.
The date, and the one to ignore
Clark and Horton dated the walled site to the fifteenth century on imported blue-and-white pottery. Radiocarbon from inside the enclosure supports occupation across the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, with one date from the pit beside the staircase falling between AD 1400 and 1445; the excavator concludes the bulk of it is fifteenth- and possibly sixteenth-century at the most. A Portuguese account of a raid in 1520 describes a deserted village fortified in the manner of a fortress.
A twelfth-to-fourteenth-century date circulates online for Pujini. It is contradicted by the people who dug the site and should not be relied on.
Why it matters, and what it is not
It is not a town. LaViolette characterises it as idiosyncratic — more than an elite residence but less than a major town — and that is the safest description of what a visitor is standing in.
Its fortification is the unusual part. Published work on Pujini argues it is the only known early fortification on the whole Swahili coast — a claim from the archaeological literature rather than a brochure, though the paper making it could not be opened directly for this page.
One older idea is worth not repeating: colonial-era writers called the walls foreign and hurried because they are unbonded. The excavator argues the shortcuts reflect a shortage of labour and materials, not foreign builders, and that the site sits squarely inside a Swahili architectural vocabulary. Pemba’s ruins at Ras Mkumbuu and Chwaka belong to the same world and are both older.
Who looks after it
Zanzibar’s Department of Museums and Antiquities gazetted the Shirazi ruin at Pujini in 1943, one of the earliest entries on a register now running to eighty-five sites under the Antiquities Act of 2002. The department names Pujini as one of the Pemba villages where a community group works with it on site maintenance, funded from visitor entrance fees.
So there is no interpretation centre and no published hours, but this is a monument with a custodian and a local group attached rather than an abandoned field of stones. Arrangements are made on the ground.
The archaeological tours guide covers how sites like this are visited in Tanzania, and Swahili cultural tours places Pemba’s ruins in the wider coastal picture.
Common questions about Pujini
Are Pujini and Mkama Ndume different sites?
No. They are one site under two names — the place name and the name of the man tradition credits with building it. The excavation report names it “Pujini or Mkame Ndume” in its opening sentence.
How old is it?
Fifteenth century, and possibly into the sixteenth. Radiocarbon supports occupation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth. The twelfth-to-fourteenth-century date found online contradicts the excavation.
What is there to see?
A rampart of three walls about eight metres thick with a parapet walk and two gates, enclosing 1.5 hectares; the remains of a multi-storey house, a mosque and two wells; and a second ruined mosque 150 metres away at Ukutani.
Is it worth the trip?
It depends on whether ruined walls in farmland interest you. There is no interpretation on site and no museum. For anyone who reads a Swahili fortification as the unusual thing it is, this is the most interesting archaeology on Pemba; for anyone expecting a monument, it will not look like one.