Ngomeni, Fort Jesus: A Digo home, not a Portuguese fortress

1 I thank my PhD supervisors Prof. Tina Steiner and Dr Uhuru Phalafala, Stellenbosch University, and Prof. Stephanie Newell, Yale University, for their comments on the chapter of my dissertation from which this paper is extracted. I am indebted to Mzee Nyembwe who shared a wealth of knowledge on the history of the Kenyan coast with me, and Bwana Baraka who took me on a tour of Fort Jesus museum. I also thank the editors of this special issue for their initial comments on this paper.

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Notes

1 I thank my PhD supervisors Prof. Tina Steiner and Dr Uhuru Phalafala, Stellenbosch University, and Prof. Stephanie Newell, Yale University, for their comments on the chapter of my dissertation from which this paper is extracted. I am indebted to Mzee Nyembwe who shared a wealth of knowledge on the history of the Kenyan coast with me, and Bwana Baraka who took me on a tour of Fort Jesus museum. I also thank the editors of this special issue for their initial comments on this paper.

2 Ngugi, Globalectics, 63.

3 For more on this debate, see Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 3; Hofmeyr, “Talisman,” 89; Ong, Orality and Literacy, 10; Saussy “The Return of Orality,” 314; and Wasamba, Contemporary Oral Literature Fieldwork, 4.

4 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5.

5 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 18.

6 I am aware that there also exist complexities in Europhone African literature because research and debates on the subject pay more attention to Anglophone literature than they do to Francophone and Lusophone literatures.

7 Moretti, “Conjectures on world literature,” 56.

8 Here, I am largely inspired by Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds., Re-figuring the Archive.

9 Kosgei, “Historical Sources,” 102-104.

10 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

11 Makoni and Pennycook, “Disinventing multilingualism,” 447.

12 Kezilahabi, “Dialogic Swahili Literature,” 35.

13 Khamis, “Nguvu Versus Power,” 52.

14 Gonzalez, “Decolonial Multilingualism,” 11.

15 Burton, “Introduction,” 3.

16 Ibid., 6.

17 Ibid., 2.

18 Ibid., 7

19 Ibid., 2.

20 Hamilton, Harris & Reid, “Introduction,” 9.

21 I am in possession of the transcripts of this oral history.

22 Oral history seems to be transmitted in a patrilineal fashion, reminding us of Cooper’s (2009) argument that many tales of conquest ‘have most often been told as stories of men’ (1523). This ties in with history itself as a product and/or manifestation of power.

23 The full definition of ‘ngome’, given in a Digo-English-Swahili dictionary commissioned by Bible Translation and Literacy in partnership with Digo Language and Literacy Project is: ‘ngome ledge high on a cliff face; carved building (lit. a building carved out of the rock); fortress; ngome’ (Mwalonya, et al., Mgombato, 136).

24 Mzee Nyembwe; personal interview, 6 November 2018.

25 These Nyaturu men may have been drawn from the Nyaturu, also known as the Rimi, an ethnic group that is native to Central Singida region in North-Central Tanzania (Gieringer, “A Traditional Nyaturu Hymn,” 518; and Liebenow, “The Nyaturu of Tanganyika,” 65).

26 Mzee Nyembwe could not tell the point at which these Nyaturu men were offered Digo brides because, as he explained, ‘that is a very long history and as people did not keep records in writing, the one who gave me this history did not tell me.’ A few days before I interviewed Mzee Nyembwe, I met Dida, a middle-aged Duruma man who works in a hotel in Diani Beach. According to Dida, the Duruma originated from Southern Africa, around Malawi. They ended up as Portuguese slaves, and some were brought to Fort Jesus where they were put to work. Eventually, two brothers escaped. The two then ran to nearby villages which mostly belonged to the Digo, and the Digo welcomed them. After conducting themselves well among their hosts, the brothers were one day offered two Digo women for marriage. Since there was no way they could return to their original home, the two brothers and their new families were adopted by the Mijikenda. From then, the Duruma have lived on the south coast with their uncles, the Digo. Dida added that the two brothers are responsible for the division of the Duruma into two clans, the Mrima and the Mmwezi. Dida’s version on the origin of the Duruma, a slight variation of that given by Mzee Nyembwe, demonstrates that there exist multiple oral histories within a single community, and all of them should be recorded.

27 Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge,” 19.

28 Hadebe, “Commodification,” 7.

29 Connell, “Meeting at the Edge,” 59.

30 Boxer and De Azevedo, Fort Jesus, 89.

31 Ibid, 95.

32 Mzee Nyembwe; personal interview, 6 November 2018.

33 Ibid.

34 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xvi–xvii.

35 Bouchon and Lombard, ‘The Indian Ocean,’ 46.

36 See, for example, Huxley (1939).

37 The Standard, August 6, 2019.

38 Bwana Baraka; personal interview, 7 November 2018.

39 Mzee Nyembwe; personal interview, 6 November 2018.

40 This tension between land and sea has been the subject of recent research in oceanic humanities. See, for example, Bystrom and Hofmeyr, “Oceanic Routes,” 4; and Clarke, “New Waves,” 154.

41 Mzee Nyembwe; personal interview, 6 November 2018.

42 Gagnon and Desbiens, “Mapping Memories,” 40.

43 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 51.

44 Boxer & De Azevedo, Fort Jesus, 110. See figure 1.

45 Ibid., 108–110.

46 Ibid., 109–110.

47 Ibid., 110.

48 Mzee Nyembwe; personal interview, 6 November 2018.

49 Ngomeni, derived from the root word ‘ngome’, is both a Kiswahili and a Digo word. In Kiswahili, ‘ngome’ means ‘fortress’ or ‘castle’. Hence, the official Kiswahili name for Fort Jesus is ‘Ngome Yesu’, a direct translation of the English name – ‘ngome’ being Kiswahili for ‘fortress’ and ‘Yesu’ Kiswahili for ‘Jesus’. From my interview with Mzee Nyembwe, I gathered that the Digo’s insistence on the name Ngomeni to refer to Fort Jesus is based on the Digo meaning of the word, that is, aside from the Kiswahili meaning explained above. To the Digo, Ngomeni is primarily a cave that they once called home, that is, they derived the name Ngomeni from the Digo word ‘ngome’ which means a ‘carved building (lit. a building carved out of the rock)’ (Mwalonya et al. 136).

50 Frenkel, “Cultural Negotiation,” 317.

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Notes on contributors

Jauquelyne Kosgei

Jauquelyne Kosgei is a postdoctoral fellow in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa, and a Recalibrating Afrikanistik fellow in the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University in Germany. Her research, located in Indian Ocean studies, advocates for indigenous knowledges and argues for the inclusion of oral sources in mainstream discourse. E-mail: [email protected]

Jauquelyne Kosgei, WiSER, 6th floor, Richard Ward Building, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, 2050 South Africa.