Afro-Coral Walls

Through tarrying on the East African shoreline, this chapter explores ancient fortresses built with coral rock. These are fortresses in Mombasa, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The chapter makes the case that the longevity of these structures enables an alternative historicization of slavery on the Swahili coast. As places of cannonballs, rusted manacles, dank smells, passages, statues of colonial kings, and echoes, forts offer ways of reading submerged pasts. The chapter takes the reader along a queer journey in search of the trace of happenings submerged below memory. Walking in the ruins, the method is one of stepping inside, encircling, pacing, intuiting, and fabulating into the void through ritual archives.