As part of the delivery of training in cultural heritage workshops that took place in Mombasa, Kenya from 12-16 November 2019, the team and participants took a trip to Fort Jesus.
Built on the order of the Portuguese between 1593 and 1596, Fort Jesus was taken over by Omani Arabs in 1698 and then the British in 1895. In 1631, the fort briefly fell under the control of the Sultan Yusuf ibn al-Hasan of Mombasa. Under the British it was used as a prison, declared a historical monument in 1958 and given UNESCO World Heritage status in 2011. Thus, as a site, it has had a colourful and contested history.
The purpose of the trip was to consider the UNESCO world heritage site and Mombasa’s dominant monument in terms of what had been discussed in the preceding workshops. Participants were invited to consider the site in terms of formal and informal uses of the space, who had the right to use the space, how heritage was foregrounded or promoted and what kinds of narratives were evident.
The conversation the following day was one of the highlights of the week. Curated by Dr Moore, participants identified several areas that they now felt were questionable in terms of how the space was presented. For example, they identified that there was very little mention in any of the displays about the local community, as though the fort had simply been a site of chronological occupation by foreign power with no connection to the people living and working outside the gates.
Secondly, they identified that in the section recently renovated by a grant from the Oman government there was a series of mannequins in traditional Omani dress, but no critical information on the role that Omani Arabs played in the Arabic slave trade or the lives of indigenous population. In fact, there was no mention of the role of the fort in slavery at all.
Similarly, the British presence, which lasted over several decades, was characterized as being administratively and scientifically progressive, rather than part of a theatre of imperial power.
As we left, we saw a large group of school children coming in to view the site and run around the large expanses of grass and crumbling walls. Over the following week, we pondered large questions of how funding effects what stories are told, how uncomfortable stories are passed down and whether historical sites need to have their history sanitized in order to be accessible.
This blog was written by Stephen Collins, Stephen is a Lecturer in Performance at UWS.
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