Still Sunday - visit to Gede Ruins

After church we walked 1 kilometre to Gede Ruins, an ancient Islamic site. It is interesting to see that we are often charged 5x as much as a Kenyan to visit places of interest. Here it was 100 KSh for a local to visit and 500 KSh for us "Wazungu" - white people. (Approximately £5.) It was another 300 KSh to have a guide show us round, which greatly increased the interest and enjoyment of the visit. We had Rebecca as our guide, who provided us with lots of information about the history of the site and also the vegetation.

Gede Ruins was what was left of a 12th Century Swahili village that was mysteriously abandoned some 600 years ago - possibly due to cholera, possibly due to an invasion from Mombasa. Excavations between 1948 and 1958 revealed that the Muslim inhabitants traded with people from all over the world. It is now a National Museum, and the ruins are heavily overgrown with weird and wonderful indigenous shrubs and trees such as the Baobab, the Tamarind, the Strangling Tree and the African Sycamore. More about some of those in a moment!

There were the remains of various buildings - a mosque, a palace, a court a bathhouse as well as other buildings used for housing and food storage. There were also latrines known as longdrops. One was situated quite near the well for the mosque. One theory was that the village was abandoned when cholera broke out, made worse by the inappropriate siting of the latrines to the water supply. Most of the wells have dried up now and at least one of them was being used as a nesting place for a pair of owls! One of the wells had a dip at each corner. This would have contained a small dish containing fish. It was there to attract mosquitoes to breed, then the fish would devour the eggs.

The mosque had different doorways for the men and women to pass through; the men's was quite ornate, the women's quite plain.

Inside the mosque, the men would have been at the front and the women at the back, separated by a wall. At the front there was a small semi-circular alcove where the Imam would have stood. By facing away from the congregation his spoken words would have bounced off the alcove and been amplified for all to hear. The alcove had 5 ridges to signify the command to pray 5 times a day. You can just see the right hand edge of the alcove on the left of the photo below.

The palace doorway on the other hand had 4 ridges - to signify the Sultan's 4 wives!

The sultan had a secret place where he would sit quietly each day. The wall above him had 3 slits so that he could hear his courtiers conversations the other side. It seemed to them that he had the most amazing understanding of all that was going on and it certainly put the Sultan one step ahead if there was any disloyalty amongst his courtiers!

There was a dated tomb with an Islamic inscription. It was from 1399 AD - or 802AH - that stands for Ahijirah which means the migration of the prophet Mohammed from Medina to Mecca. The Arabs count time by the moon whereas the rest of the world uses the sun.

Now some trees! This is Nick and me beside the enormous Ficus Bussei. It is a Fig tree that can grow 20 metres tall and is only found in East Africa.

Below is the African Sycamore. It has a very slippery bark so the trunk cannot be climbed by monkeys or snakes. Apparently the bark can be used as medicine in the treatment of malaria.

Below is the rather sinister Strangling Tree. It is a parasite and attaches itself to another tree and sucks all the goodness and life out of it for itself. You can see the dead remains of an old Flame tree that was used. Now the tree has attached itself to another Flame tree and the same thing will happen to that one. Euorgh! Creepy!

If you'd like to find out a bit more about Gede Ruins, here's the Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_of_Gedi