Dynastic History|The Gereza at Kilwa — A Fort That Became a Prison

Dom Francisco de Almeida's fleet anchored off the Kilwa bar on 22 July 1505, stormed the town on the 24th, and began a fort on the 25th, the feast of Saint James, whose name it took. The dates are the Portuguese chroniclers' own, in the Julian calendar then in use. Santiago went up over the old citadel: square, with towers at the corners. The account of the assault and of the looting that followed comes from those chroniclers, printed in Theal's Records of South-Eastern Africa; no Kilwan narrative of that week survives.

The garrison lasted seven years. Gold from the interior turned out to reach the sea more conveniently further south, Mozambique Island made the better harbour, and in 1512 a fleet under Jorge de Melo Pereira took the men off and the fort was left.

What stands on the shore today is largely Omani work on Portuguese footings, rebuilt after Kilwa passed to the Omani rulers of Zanzibar in 1784. Its Swahili name records the later use: gereza, prison. Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the building is associated with the holding of enslaved people. In 1776 the ruler of Kilwa had contracted with a French merchant trading from the Mascarene islands to deliver a thousand captives a year, at twenty piastres each with two piastres to the ruler; that traffic fed the plantation colonies of the Indian Ocean. The town was abandoned in the 1840s.

The Gereza is the first ruin visitors see from the water, a short walk from the Great Mosque.

📸 Cover: The Gereza seen from the channel, David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons — the standing fort is the Omani rebuilding, not the 1505 Portuguese structure