The dhow in which Ibn Battuta was a passenger quickly set sail again from Zeila, eastwards into the Indian Ocean, then south along the desert coastline to Mogadishu; it was a fifteen-day voyage. For someone of his background, Mogadishu also seemed a fairly brutish place, where killing camels to supply meat for Arabia was one of the main occupations. (As Marco Polo had said, the camel-slaughtering was so great in Mogadishu that it had to be seen to be believed.)
However, this time the young Moroccan was happier to go ashore. One of his companions on board had shouted to the touts who came out to the boat: ‘This man is not a merchant, but a scholar.’ The news was passed to the local judge, who hurried down to the beach to offer a welcome. As Ibn Battuta stepped on to the beach he was warmly embraced by his fellow-qadi, an Egyptian. The salaams acknowledged his status: ‘In the name of God, let us go to greet the sultan.’
The visitor was at once caught up in an elaborate series of rituals, one of which involved being sprinkled with Damascus rosewater by a eunuch. He was then given hospitality in the ‘scholar’s house’ (merchants staying in Arab ports had quarters known as funduqs). It was not until after Friday prayers in the main mosque that Ibn Battuta came face to face with the sultan, who said with traditional courtliness: ‘You are most welcome. You have honoured our country and given us pleasure.’ Ibn Battuta joined in the formal procession from the mosque, and as a mark of respect was allowed, along with the sultan and the qadi, to keep on his sandals. Drums, trumpets and pipes led the way to the audience chamber. There the formal manner of greeting the sultan was like that in the Yemen, by putting an index finger on the ground, then raising it to the head and declaiming, ‘May Allah preserve your power.’
Other ceremonies in Mogadishu were unlike anything Ibn Battuta had yet seen in his travels. As the sultan walked along in fine silken robes topped by an embroidered turban, a coloured canopy was held above him, with a golden statuette of a bird at each corner. It was also surprising to a visitor that men in Mogadishu wore no trousers, but wrapped sarong-like cloths around themselves. (Several social customs mentioned by Ibn Battuta suggest there was a strong Indian or Indonesian influence at work.) But most firmly fixed in Ibn Battuta’s mind, when he came to commit his memories to writing more than twenty years later, was the stupendous amount of food consumed in Mogadishu. He was able to recall the typical meals served up to him three times a day in the scholar’s house: ‘Their food is rice cooked in fat and placed on a large wooden dish’, with dishes of chicken, meat, fish and vegetables placed on top. Then there were further courses of green bananas cooked in milk and pickled chillies, lemons, green ginger and mangoes, all eaten with rice. Ibn Battuta estimated that a whole group of people in Morocco would eat no more at a sitting than any man in Mogadishu: ‘They are extremely corpulent and large-stomached.’
Shortly after leaving the desert country of the Horn the ship crossed the equator: in those times an awesome moment for the superstitious, because unfamiliar constellations began appearing in the night sky. Ibn Battuta did not think it worth mentioning: ‘Then I sailed from the city of Mogadishu, going towards the land of the Sawahil, intending to go to Kilwa, which is one of the cities of the Zanj.’ His ship, its lateen sail billowing before the north-east monsoon, passed a succession of ports founded by the immigrants from Arabia. The names of only a few of these places, such as Mombasa and Malindi, had been heard of in the outside world. About this time there were even rumours in Egypt that Mombasa had been taken over by monkeys, who marched up and down like soldiers. The Swahili coast was not on a route to anywhere else, so scholarly visitors were distinctly rare.
Ibn Battuta’s interest in Kilwa, apart from its pre-eminence on the coast at that time, may have been stirred by his more general curiosity about the African gold trade. In 1324, the year before he passed through Cairo, an African emperor, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, had come there with so much gold that amazement had gripped the Arab world. The ruler was Sulaiman, the Mansa Musa, and he arrived in Egypt with 8,000 warriors, 500 slaves bearing golden staffs, and 100 camels carrying a total of 500,000 ounces of gold. Sulaiman’s profligacy with his wealth depressed the price of gold in Egypt for a decade. It was known that he controlled mines somewhere on the southern side of the Sahara desert, but the extent of Africa was such a mystery, and the dimensions of the world so misconceived, that it was easy to think that gold exported from Zanj came from the same source. (The West African mines were, in fact, an immense distance from Zimbabwe, but that would not become clear for almost two centuries.)
Ibn Battuta’s visit to East Africa may also have been in response to an invitation from one of its leading citizens. The sultan of Kilwa, al-Hasan ibn Sulayman, had been to Mecca and spent two years in Arabia studying ‘spiritual science’. There was great prestige attached to having made the pilgrimage from somewhere as remote as Zanj; being able to welcome to one’s own town a learned stranger met while travelling would have been an additional cause for pride for the sultan.
Certainly, by his own account, Ibn Battuta seemed eager to reach Kilwa, for his description of a port where he stopped overnight on the way is perfunctory. He says it was Mombasa, but at once makes this unlikely by describing it as ‘an island two days’ journey from the coast’. This is clearly a confusion with some other place, perhaps Pemba, Zanzibar or Mafia. He remembered that the people of the island lived mainly on bananas and fish, augmented by grain brought from the coast, and that the wooden mosque was expertly built, with wells at each of its doorways, so that everyone who wished to go in could wash his feet, then rub them dry on a strip of matting supplied for the purpose.
His journey further southwards, past a coastline shrouded in mangrove swamps, brought Ibn Battuta at last to Kilwa. He described it as ‘amongst the most beautiful of cities, and elegantly built’.4 His first view of it, in early 1331, would have been as the ship entered the channel between the island and the mainland. Here was a superb natural harbour in which vessels of every kind could anchor or be run up on the beaches. Within sight further away were several smaller islands; a large settlement on one of these, called Songo Mnara, was also part of the sultan’s domain.
The main town of Kilwa, with its defensive bastions, stood well above the sea, directly facing the mainland. Many of its houses were closely packed together, but others were surrounded by gardens and orchards. In the gardens were grown all kinds of vegetables, as well as bananas, pomegranates and figs. The surrounding orchards provided oranges, mangoes and breadfruit. Almost the only foodstuff brought over from the mainland was honey.
When Ibn Battuta arrived, in February, there would have been no lack of lush vegetation, for it was the middle of the wet season, whose ferocious downpours are not easily forgotten. ‘The rains are great,’ he recalled. Yet at moments his memory utterly fails him, for he says that the city was entirely built of wood. That certainly was not the case by the time of his arrival, since the first stone mosque had been built on the island two centuries earlier. That mosque was later replaced by a much grander building with five aisles and a domed roof supported on stone pillars; it would have been the envy of all neighbouring ports, which had nothing to compare with it.
There was also a huge palace, to the north of the town, with many rooms and open courtyards.5 One of its features was a circular swimming pool. This building, superbly designed, followed the gentle fall of the ground to the edge of a cliff, below which boats could anchor. It was the home of the sultan and Ibn Battuta must have been received there. He would have dined off Chinese tableware, green celadon and blue-and-white porcelain adorned with chrysanthemums, peonies and lotus flowers: oriental ware was being imported in such quantities that many wealthier residents of Kilwa had taken to cementing them into the walls of their buildings as ornaments.
Kilwa would have needed vast amounts of African labour to build and maintain it. Many of the inhabitants were Zanj, ‘jet black in colour’ and with tribal incisions on their faces; most were slaves. There were also people of other nationalities to be seen in the busy streets, including visiting merchants and their servants. Lodgings with rooms for trading were provided close to the mosque for the merchants. But not all the merchants were Muslims: some were Hindus, who had sailed directly across the ocean from India with the north-east winter monsoon. They came from the great Gujarat port of Cambay and other trading centres further south along the Malabar coast. Apart from cloth and