Malindi Mosque, Stone Town: The Minaret Older Than the Mosque

What it is

Malindi Mosque — Malindi Bamnara — stands in the Malindi quarter at the port end of Stone Town. UNESCO’s description of the World Heritage property names it among the town’s major buildings, and the reason is the minaret.

The minaret

The advisory body evaluation prepared for the inscription records it as a Sunni mosque built around 1831 by Mohammed Abdul-Qadir el-Mansabi, whose remains are buried in front of the mihrab. It is one of very few mosques in Zanzibar with a minaret at all, and this one is decorated with a double chevron pattern.

The detail worth carrying to the site is the last line of that record: the minaret is thought to be considerably older than the mosque built around it. A building of about 1831 with an older tower attached is a small, legible piece of the layering that the whole town was inscribed for — and it is the kind of thing that is invisible unless somebody tells you.

Seeing it

It is a working mosque, not a monument in public custody: it is not among the museums or monuments listed by Zanzibar’s Department of Museums and Antiquities. Nothing reachable sets out arrangements for non-Muslim visitors, and the sensible assumption is that the minaret and the exterior are what a visitor sees.

The Stone Town guide makes the general point that applies here in particular: many of the buildings in this town are in daily use by the people who own them, and asking rather than walking in — and accepting a refusal — is the way to behave. Prayer times are not visiting times.

The Malindi quarter sits between the old town and the port, which makes it one of the busier parts of the walk, and the area has been a works site on and off. In its report to the January 2025 UNESCO advisory mission the conservation authority listed street pavement improvements at Malindi Mosque among its current works.

Common questions