SWAHILI PILLAR TOMB

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(1) The two installations are structured and function as 16th century's Swahili Pilar Tombs from the East coast of Africa as discussed in the article Pillar Tombs and the City: Creating a Sense of Shared Identity in Swahili Urban Space by Monika Baumanova and publish in 'Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (2018)

 

‘Visibility’ is one of the representations of monumentality. Being visible from a greater distance or over the walls. Public architecture of a monumental character is one of the most effective means for providing group identity against ‘increasing linguistic, ethnic, social and economic heterogeneity’. 

Swahili pillar tombs, as a phenomenon of mortuary architecture, were widespread along the coast of East Africa.  

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The Swahili coast extends roughly from Mogadishu in Somalia southwards across Kenya and Tanzania to Cape Delgado in Mozambique and incorporates a number of islands in the Indian Ocean including northern Madagascar. 

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The mortuary record consists of tombs which have a stone superstructure, and graves with no superstructure. Tombs can be found on numerous sites along this c. 2500 km stretch of coastline. They are part of a larger tradition of building in stone, which started to appear on the coast towards the end of the first millennium AD and has contributed continually to the development of Swahili urban identity (Kusimba 1999a). Swahili urban culture, and the built environment as its most visually dominating material testament, developed around Indian Ocean trade networks that linked the coast economically and culturally with the Mediterranean, Arabia, the Middle East, India and China (Pearson 1998; Beaujard 2012). Merchant activities on the coast also flourished within a broader web of well-established trade routes along the East coast of Africa and to the interior of the African continent (Spear 1981: 95; Pearson 1998: 67; Walz 2010; Pawlowicz 2012).

 

A pilar provided social networks with material points of reference. A kind of mortuary infrastructure that helped to interconnect, construct and put on display a shared identity of the people living. People have been known to relate tombs with homeland and identity. The highly visible pillar tombs were relevant as an everyday environmental backdrop to movement and encounters taking place around the town. Remembering the origin of the settlers. Where they are coming from. 

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It is a culture broker. Culture broking is “the act of bridging, linking or mediating between groups or persons of different cultural backgrounds for the purpose of reducing conflict or producing change”. 

"The term “culture broker” or “cultural broker” is not particularly defined in the literature but is defined through common usage as a person who facilitates the border crossing of another person or group of people from one culture to another culture[2]. Jezewski (in Jezewski & Sotnik, 2001) Usually the culture broker is from one or other of the cultures but could be from a third group. Often they are capable of acting in both directions. The role covers more than being an interpreter, although this is an important attribute in cross-cultural situations where language is part of the role. A broker is usually defined as a middleman (sic) and emphasises the commercial aspect such as in stockbroker. In terms of cultural broker, the use of the term broker is most in accord with “middleman, intermediary, or agent generally; an interpreter, messenger, commissioner” from the Oxford English Dictionary and the idea of reward is not necessarily financial (e.g. Szasz, 2001). (The Oxford English Dictionary does not give a specific definition for cultural broker.) The origin of the term is in the field of anthropology in the mid-1900s, when several anthropologists wrote about native people whose role in their society was as a cultural intermediary or cultural broker, usually with the western society. 

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The pillar tombs are places representing the past yet still active in negotiations of social relationships.

Some stelae functioned as false doors, symbolizing a passage between the present and the afterlife, which allowed the deceased to receive offerings. Tomb inscriptions, if present, communicate gender, status or occupation of the deceased; they can make claims of ownership, origin and ethnicity. Some pillar tombs had ‘chimney-like’ features that were probably used for the burning of incense. The importance of tombs as places for veneration of ancestors has been argued to more or less overlap with assertions of power.

‘Visibility’ as referred to here as one of the representations of monumentality (Moore 2005: 86–88). The height of pillar tombs is the most prominent aspect of their size and the most relevant in an urban environment where it makes them much more visible from a greater distance or over the walls.  

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Pillar tombs might have ensured interaction between parts of society for whom direct interaction was normally rare and structurally uneven, such as the rich and the poor. Generally, similar mnemonics greatly add to certain social cohesiveness allowing for future cooperation within the community (Cox et al. 1999) A unifier element that in its essence fluid and ever changing is. Strengthening social cohesion within the community.

Furthermore, in an enterprising society these practices might be used for actively ‘creating’ kinsmen, or tying together more distant relatives (who could have come from a different town) as people buried together now having local ancestors. Diverse patronage and allegiance ties are often (un)made around funeral events in Africa (Jindra and Noret 2011: 24), and prominent pillar tomb in particular might have added a permanent material reminder of these. The pillar tombs hence might have served as a very effective spatial reference point within local townscapes on which to build social relationships. 

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Swahili pillar tombs asserts the ethnographic notion of fluid identity of the Swahili, when the society regards its members as characterised not exclusively by place of birth, but also by their dwelling in the Swahili region and their urbanity. 

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As ‘objects, people and ideas make places travel’… They are migrants…

 

Identity is defined by birth place and also by their dwelling.

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