Season 6 Episode 5: Make Way for Prince Ali - The Mysterious Kilwa Chronicle

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the History of Africa podcast, I'm your host, Andy. Last episode we examined the context of East African trade in the early medieval era, and the geography that would one day lend itself to Kielwa, becoming the preeminent trading city in the region.

But for now, we left the city as a wound up ball of potential, still just a mere small town, one with a great future, but no idea of what lay ahead of it. But around the same time that Kilwa begins to show its first signs of growth, we also enter an era of immense, historiographical controversy.

Today we examine the potentially mythical, or maybe all too real origins of the Kilwa Sultanate. As we explore the controversial document, or should I say documents, known collectively as the Kilwa Chronicle.

Season 5, Episode 6, The Kilwa Chronicle Make Way for Prince Ali In a continent like Africa where the legacy of 19th century colonialism still looms quite large, questions about the interactions between Africans and non-Africans are potentially thorny topics.

Modern academic history as we know it emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries a time when colonial rule in Africa was not some distant memory, but a still ongoing process. It's no secret that early European histories of the continent, influenced by the racialist ideology of colonialism, often tried to use questions of interaction between Africans

and non-Africans to justify the continent's purported lack of advanced civilization, which itself was used to justify the continent's subjugation as bringing civilization. The most infamous example of this type of historiography lies just to the south and west of the Swahili coast, with the large stone cities of the Limpopo and Zambezi valleys.

Cities like Khami, Great Zimbabwe, Zvangombe, and Mapunglobe due to their large-scale intricate urban planning and unique architecture seemingly argued against the notion of Africa as a primitive place without advanced social or governmental structures. To reconcile this incongruity with their ideology, European archaeologists were often

ordered by colonial governments to represent these structures as being built by non-Africans. They were often described as, say, the ancient Phoenician trading posts from the fabled circumnavigation of Africa, or settlements built by medieval Arabs to trade along the valley.

Of course, even at that time, many archaeologists and anthropologists recognized that this was a misrepresentation of reality, and these days, they are universally recognized for what they were, urban settlements built by the local people to the region. The cities of the Zambezi and Limpopo valleys are just one of many examples of people

using claims of outside origins to discredit the achievement of African civilizations. As a result, for those of us studying African history, we can have a bit of a primal visceral reaction when we see these types of claims. It's tempting to just dismiss any claim of influence from outside Africa as just

another plain and tired extension of this colonial trope. However, we do also have to be careful. The reality is that the history of the world, no matter where you go, was one of cultural mixing, diffusion, and international influence.

Humans ourselves originated as a nomadic species, moving from place to place. And even as we settled down, we continued to trade and intermarry with each other. It happened in Europe, Asia, it happened in America, and of course it has happened in Africa as well.

I bring up this long tangent for a reason, and that is that the official historical record of the Kielwaa Sultanate frames it not only as a place where cultural mixing happened, but that the Kingdom was itself founded as an expression of cultural mixing between East Africa and the Middle East.

Indeed, the official historical record from the Kielwaa Sultanate itself claims that the island's prominence comes from a series of foreign settlers. However, the idea itself of an official history is somewhat mired in controversy as well. The historical record of Kilwa lies primarily on a combination of two similar documents,

one from the 16th and one from either the late 18th or early 19th century, a long time after the events they described take place. These documents recount the same general story, and each of them claim not to be original at all, but rather deriving from an older, locally written, Swahili document.

The first of them comes from a Portuguese book detailing the history of exploration and colonization in the Indian Ocean. The first of them comes from a Portuguese book, which details the then recent history of Portugal's exploration and colonization in the Indian Ocean.

By proxy, some of the histories of the states they interacted with are included as well. In the 8th volume of the Decadas de Asia, as it's called, the author shares a story relating to the foundation of Kila, supposedly based on an older document from the city itself.

From a couple centuries later, we have an Arabic manuscript written by an Al-Mani Arab author, known as the Kitab As-Sulwa Fi-Ah-Ber-Gulwa, which similarly presents an account of the city's origins as well as its founding. One of the defining shared elements of these documents, known collectively as the Kilwa

Chronicle, is the purported foreign origins of the city's first rulers. In particular, they claim that the city of Kilwa was founded by a prince from the Middle East. However, he was not in Arab, but rather in Iranian.

For the next section, let's read directly from the Portuguese version of the Chronicle. According to what we learned from a Chronicle of the Kings of this city, it was in the 400th year of Muhammad and 80 years after the construction of the oldest Somali cities a Magada that a Moorish king named Sultan Hassan reigned in the Persian city of Shiraz.

By the time the king died, he had several sons, one of them called Ali, who was little esteemed among his brothers because his mother was in a long enslaved case of the Abeshe's Ethiopians,