Vumba Kuu: Negotiating Similarity and Difference

Abstract

Identity and society in Swahili towns have tended to be considered on the scale of a settlement or region; as discussed in the previous chapter, it is possible to understand urban Swahili identity relative to surrounding populations. At Kilwa Kisiwani, one way that this can be recognized is in the relationship between the town and its wider hinterland, as this creates a sense of the urbanism of Kilwa through the practices that went on there. Display and the material setting have been emphasized as a means by which objects and architecture were bound up into social dynamics, and served as active components of the formation of urban identities. This sense of creating social worlds through the material setting is particularly apposite along the East African coast in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries. As discussed, this was a time when many new towns were founded, or elaborated with coral buildings. Even sites containing a majority of wattle-and-daub architecture were often augmented with a coral mosque during this period. This incorporation of new architectural technologies was a part of adopting the emergent material forms of Swahili towns, as well as providing a space for the practice of Islam and a new way of dwelling within stone houses. As suggested by the example of Kilwa Kisiwani, though, the towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also shaped by more mundane practices of consumption relating to food and to everyday objects. This created a distinction between town and countryside through new ways of living that defined the urban milieu. The process of distinction and identification will also have been an active one within the town and among the urban population; more recent archaeologies have thought through the ways that Swahili urban society was internally differentiated. Here, too, a biographical approach to practice recovers a sense of the ways that coastal inhabitants have lived those identities, which were intimately bound up with changing forms of materiality. For these considerations, the town and polity of Vumba Kuu is an important case study.