Sultanate of Malindi

The loyal ally

formationDrafted from Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (1913)

When Vasco da Gama reached the Swahili coast in 1498, most of its towns mistook the Portuguese for hostile intruders and refused them help. Malindi did not. Its Sheikh received da Gama warmly, supplied him with pilots to replace the ones he had taken hostile from Kilwa, and sent an ambassador back to Portugal aboard da Gama's own return voyage. It was the beginning of a partnership neither side would let go of for more than a century, built on a foundation neither side ever hid: Malindi's oldest and most powerful rival was Mombasa, and Portugal was the one power capable of keeping Mombasa in check.

Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (1913) · Ruslik0 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The partnership paid off in both directions for generations. When Mombasa "sprang into prominence" against Portuguese interests in the 1520s, Malindi sent a hundred and fifty men to help put it down. When the Zimba - a raiding people out of the Zambezi valley who had already devastated Kilwa and killed and eaten thousands at Mombasa - turned north toward Malindi in 1589, they found a defence waiting: Malindi's own people, fighting alongside a Portuguese garrison and Malindi's native allies the Wasegeju, drove them off before they could do to Malindi what they had done to every other town in their path.

What loyalty bought

No other Swahili town on the coast could claim what Malindi could by 1589: a hundred years of Portuguese friendship that had cost it nothing but occasional soldiers, and had paid it back, when the worst threat in living memory came ashore, with the one defence strong enough to turn it back. Mombasa had been burned, besieged and occupied by turns since da Gama's first voyage. Malindi had been left standing every time - and its own alliance with Portugal was about to be worth a great deal more than a defended town.

A Sheikh installed at Mombasa

expansionDrafted from Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (1913)

Mombasa's own people gave Malindi its opening. Portuguese soldiers, Malindi's own men and their allies the Wasegeju took Kilifi together, and when Mombasa marched out to answer it, the army met the Wasegeju on the way and was broken - opening Mombasa itself to occupation. Rather than install a Portuguese garrison alone to hold a town that had rebelled and burned before, Portugal turned to the ally who had never once given it cause for doubt: the Sheikh of Malindi was installed as ruler of Mombasa as well, with Portuguese soldiers behind him rather than in place of him.

It was the high point of a century of loyalty repaid in full. Malindi now governed, through the same ruling house, both its own town and the harbour that had spent a hundred years trying to burn Portuguese ships. In 1594 a new Portuguese fortress rose at Mombasa on the Viceroy's own order - not to replace Malindi's rule there but to secure it, an outward sign that Portugal now trusted this stretch of coast enough to build in stone rather than simply defend it in wood and men.

A garrison, not a gift

The arrangement was never quite equal, and both sides knew it. The fort's Portuguese captain answered to Goa, not to Malindi's Sheikh, and the same decade that saw Malindi's ruling house installed at Mombasa also saw the first Dutch and English ships probing the coast

• rivals Portugal would expect its client to help resist, whatever the cost to Malindi's own men and resources. The Sheikh who had inherited Mombasa had inherited, along with it, every enemy Portugal had ever made on this coast, with none of the independence to refuse the inheritance.

The price of the inheritance

contractionDrafted from Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (1913)

Ahmad held Mombasa for two decades on the strength of an alliance his own house had spent a century earning. It did not protect him from the men Portugal actually sent to govern beside him. In 1614 Mombasa was handed to a new Portuguese governor, Melo Pereira, who treated Ahmad with an open contempt none of his predecessors had risked - and Ahmad, rather than accept it, fled the fort for Babai, a settlement of his own slaves where he might at least be safe from the man Portugal itself had put over him.

He was not safe. The Portuguese governor is said to have had him murdered there and sent his head to Goa - proof, if any was needed, of how completely the arrangement Portugal had made with Malindi's ruling house had come to depend on Portugal's own restraint rather than on any real security for the family that had kept faith with it longer than any other on the coast.

What Portugal was teaching its own allies

Stigand's account does not treat Ahmad's murder as an isolated act of one bad governor, but as symptomatic of a wider change: "the Portuguese, who had formerly established friendly relations with the natives, at this epoch treated them with such brutality that rebellion was rife in all their East African possessions." A hundred years of Malindi's own loyalty had built the very inheritance that made Ahmad worth murdering, and his son would grow up understanding exactly what lesson his father's death was meant to teach.

A throne he could not keep

endDrafted from Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (1913)

Yusuf, Ahmad's son, was sent to Goa to be raised after his father's murder and baptised there as Dom Geronimo Chingulia. Around 1630 the Portuguese made him Sultan of Mombasa in his father's place - a Christian ruler, educated and shaped in the colonial capital itself, who should by every intention behind his upbringing have been the most reliable client Portugal had ever installed on the coast.

He was not. Subject, like his father, to the routine indignities of the Portuguese captain stationed over him, Yusuf secretly kept Muhammadan rites at his murdered father's grave - and when a Portuguese observer saw him at it and reported him to the governor as a relapsed Muslim, the governor's threat to have him deported to Goa reached Yusuf's own ears before it could be carried out.

The massacre and the fire

Yusuf did not wait to be deported. Taking three hundred followers on the pretence of a courtesy visit, he entered the fort, killed the governor Pedro Leytam de Gamboa with his own hand, and watched his men massacre the rest of the Portuguese garrison. A handful who reached the sanctuary of St. Augustine's convent held out seven days before Yusuf promised them their lives if they surrendered - and shot them down, men, women and children, the moment the gates opened. He then publicly renounced Christianity.

Portugal answered with everything it could spare: a flotilla of five hundred men from Goa, reinforced at Mombasa to eight hundred, besieged the fort for three months in 1632 without retaking it. But Yusuf knew what the siege's failure had bought him was time, not safety. He loaded his cannon and goods onto two captured Portuguese ships, cut down the town's fruit trees, destroyed what he could not carry, and sailed for Arabia rather than wait for the fleet Portugal would certainly send next. A Portuguese captain returning from Zanzibar found Mombasa deserted and simply occupied it. Malindi's century of loyalty, and the throne it had won at Mombasa, ended in the same fire the family that had inherited both had set with its own hands.