What happened to “Gedi”?

 

To start off, Gedi/Gede is not the original name of the settlement. It is named so because the site is adjacent to the town of Gede in the Kilifi District and within the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest.

Although "Gedi" remained unknown to most of British East Africa's colonists until the 1920s, the site was known by the Mijikenda peoples. Currently, the Giriama, one of the Mijikenda, maintain a large community around the Gedi ruins who view the site as a sacred and spiritual place. Despite prevalent belief systems and the prominence of islam in the region, ancestral spirits are thought by many to reside at Gedi.

Many theories and so-called conspiracy theories surround the story about this settlement. However, many questions remain unanswered.

What happened to “Gedi”? Why was it left to fall into ruins? And why, even more strangely, does no tradition of it linger on?

It is not marked on any map by Portuguese explorers, and the Arabs who came to this coast don’t even have a name for it.

The Africans will not approach at night-time, believing it to be the haunt of spirits. At the time of my visit, there was a huge baobab tree at the entrance of the site in which, the tour guide claimed, sounds of ancestral spirits can be heard at night. But spirits of whom? Of Arabs, Persians, Chinese? I doubt.

At the time of Huxley’s visit in the mid-1940s, no archeologist had gone to dig and study. Louis Leakey, a curator of Coryndon museum in Nairobi only had a brief visit, and without any study, announced it to be Arab in origin and to consist of at least three cities, one on top of the other.

Following that, excavations commenced at Gedi in 1948 under the supervision of James Kirkman, lasting until 1958 with intermittent excavations occurring from the 1960s to the 1980s. Kirkman's report "The Arab City of Gedi, The Great Mosque, Architecture and Finds" was published in 1954, followed by a series of monographs and papers. Since the 1990s archaeological research at Gedi and other Swahili settlements has intensified. From the 1980s archaeological research increasingly began to focus more on the relationships between the coastal communities and the interior, challenging the original notion that the development of the Swahili Coast was driven by foreign influence through Indian Ocean trade or by Arab colonists. Another important development in the study of Swahili sites is the increased attention given to remains of structures that were not built of stone. Surveys of the open terrain at Gedi found dense concentrations of mud-thatched dwellings.

At the time of Huxley’s visit, the commonly held European belief was that it was a Persian city. And even though there were some Persian settlements made on this coast, there is no evidence linking Gedi to Persians.

Other questions emerge. Why was it abandoned? Again, varied stories and theories abound. Some say drying up of wells, some a fearful pestilence, and others the storming and obliteration of the town by ravaging nomadic raiders.

I believe that in order to unravel the mystery of abandoned ruins in the East African coast, it is important to study the history of the displaced Indigenous African people especially after the invasion of Arabs backed by the British East India company for trade colonies to partake in Indian ocean trade networks.

If today, some indigenous African peoples’ homes are in left ruins, and 500 years from now, a foreign nation excavated for artefacts, they would surely find an assortment of Chinese electronics, English plumbing, and American “form follows function” architecture. Does that make the builders/owners/occupiers Chinese, English or American?

 

References

Huxley, Elspeth (1948). A sorcerer’s apprentice: A journey through East Africa

Spear, Thomas (2000). "Early Swahili History Reconsidered." The International Journal of African Historical Studies vol. 33 no. 2

“Gede - Historical Background". National Museums of Kenya. 2007