ABSTRACT
Contemporary eastern African stonetowns (the term we are using in this volume, as distinct from Zanzibar’s Stone Town) are often depicted as portals to the past – urban sites that quintessentially express Swahili culture while also embodying continuous links to an age-old civilisation. In the Zanzibari case, as an official guide so aptly put it, ‘the Stone Town of Zanzibar is a living history’ (Zanzibar Tourist Task Force 1993: 2). Or, as a volume of archival photographs phrased it, ‘Zanzibar is indeed a living museum’ (Sheriff 1995: 13). Similar terms were used subsequently to support Tanzania’s application to UNESCO for the city’s inclusion on the World Heritage List, approved in 2000. As the official UNESCO designation asserted, the Stone Town ‘evolved through several millennia of maritime mercantile interaction’, and the surviving city was a ‘physical reflection’ of the ‘long-term exchange of human values’ in coastal eastern Africa. While underlining the need for comparative study of related Swahili sites such as Lamu, Mombasa, Mogadishu and Kilwa, the UN text went on to praise Zanzibar’s Stone Town as the ‘best preserved example of its kind’, an urban formation that offers an ‘authentic impression of the living Swahili culture’ (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/173/documents">https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/173/documents). Notions of continuity and authentic tradition are nothing new when it comes to Swahili stonetowns; indeed, it is no accident that timeless and essentialised visions of coastal sites and structures were produced under Western colonialism, which rested on the denial of historical agency to indigenous others. The static understandings generated during the colonial period were in sharp contrast to the actual fluidity, dynamism and cosmopolitan adaptability that had characterised the coast for millennia. And in the postcolonial period these tensions between fluidity and fixity have taken on new forms, as explored below. Even as stonetowns are being transformed by novel historical forces, timeless visions of culture and tradition have been resurrected as rationales to preserve these sites as special zones of heritage and history for mass tourist consumption.
