Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain - Northwestern University

Dissertation. Boston University, 1973.
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The Sultan of Malindi’s attire communicated his piety (via his white turban) and his
access to gold, and he even expressed his relationship to a foreign power by adorning
himself with a gift representing their long-standing political alliance. Just as fashions
reflected changing power relations on the coast in the nineteenth-century, many Swahili
rulers who formed alliances with Portugal in the 1500s dressed in a manner that blended
prevailing local tastes with aesthetic reorientations prompted by economic contact with
the Portuguese.
The appropriation of power and its intersection with material expressions of
identity are nowhere better represented than in the case of the revolving allegiances of
Yusuf bin Hasan, the early seventeenth-century Sultan of Mombasa. Hasan’s intimate
relationship with the Portuguese administration aroused so much distrust among the local
Swahili ungwana that he later regained a measure of respect from his Swahili countrymen,
according to one observer, only after he “was dressed in the sort of clothes worn only by
Moors, having laid aside . . . the dress customary of Christians.” 193 Since Hasan had
constructed a previous identity by donning clothing reflective of his loyalties, restoring his
credibilty with Swahili elites required that he prove his claims—of ending his Portuguese
allegiances and resuming a Swahili identity—by changing his style of dress, or his “social
skin.”
Modes of royal dress in the smaller Swahili cities were very similar to those in the
larger urbanized areas. Sultan Yusuf of Sofala, the first ruler to refuse Kilwa’s tributary
extraction, was described as wearing clothes “in the same fashion” as the ungwana,
“except that the cloths he wore [were] more valuable.” 194 The opulence of Comorian royal
dress mirrored Sofala’s. For example, the Sultan of Domoni in the late sixteenth century
“was richly appareled” in silk and “so were his followers.” 195 Having met with a provincial
governor of the Sharifian Sultan Omar-Adil at Fomboni (on Mwali Island), Roe described
the town official as sitting on a “Matt of Strawe” [a sign of dignity], clothed in “a Mantell
of blew and red Lynen wrapte about him to his knees, his legges and feete bare: on his
head a close cap of checker woork.” 196 Concerning Sultan Omar-Adil’s clothes Roe simply
193 “Goensis Trium Martyrum Augustinianorum,” in The Mombasa Rising against the Portuguese, 1631: from Sworn
Evidence. Ed. G. Freeman-Grenville. Oxford, 1980. 116-17.
194 Castanheda, in Records. 5:387.
195 “The Voyage of Captaine John Davis,” 137-8. Morice describes the entourage of the Kilwan Sultan in the
eighteenth century using very similar terms. French at Kilwa Island. 37.
196 William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe. 19. Roe also noted that the Sultan’s interpreters were
Mogadishuans “that spake Arabique and broken Portuguese.”