The Mbweni Ruins today
PLAN OF THE RUINS
The School was built in four stages:
1. When Bishop Tozer bought the property in 1871 there was an Arab house on the site,
which may have occupied an even older site from Portuguese or Persian times.
2. The Courtyard building. Three wings were added to the old house, with a courtyard in the middle, completing the four sides of a square, before the school opened in 1873.
3. The Chapel, which was probably added before 1880.
4. The Industrial Wing, opened in Queen Victoria's Jubilee Year, 1887.
It was built and funded by Caroline Thackeray.
In 1857 David Livingstone gave a sensational lecture at Cambridge University about the horrors of slavery which he had seen personally on his Zambezi Expedition. Anglican Members of four universities formed a committee which came to be named the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) whose aim was to attempt to stop slavery in Central Africa and to promote Christianity there. After an abortive attempt to open a mission near Lake Nyasa, Bishop Tozer made Zanzibar his headquarters.
The Mbweni Ruins were originally a school for freed slave girls, built by the UMCA on the 30 acres of land called Mbweni Point Shamba which was bought by Bishop Tozer and Dr Edward Steere on September 8th, 1871. It was called St Mary’s school for girls. A “colony” or village of slaves freed by the British dhow-chasing ships was set up around it, each family having a plot of land big enough to build a house with a small vegetable garden. Eventually there were over 250 people living at Mbweni Mission.
The children in the school were either boarders who lived there if they were orphans, or daughters of the villagers who attended by day. There were between 60 and 85 students at any one time.
There was an “Arab stone house in bad repair” on the property and this was made into the entrance building, three stories high with a crenellated wall around the top. There was an impressive carved wooden door just above the flight of steps leading up and through the door into a hallway or baraza with stone benches on either side.
Long dormitories and school rooms were added to either side and behind this first house, and a last wing of teachers’ rooms was added at the back, making the school into a huge square built around an open courtyard, where today two royal palms are flourishing.
There were several water tanks in the various buildings including one under the original Arab house, which can still be seen on the seaward side, though only two walls remain. Another round tank lay between the chapel and the terracotta tiled dining room on the lower floor of the east wing. A conduit led to the nearby well, down the road beyond St John’s church and water was lifted from the well and funnelled into this tank when necessary. All the roofs had drainpipes leading to these tanks, for collection of rainwater.
Initially a small thatched house near the entrance was used as a chapel and later this became the dispensary. A museum will be installed here in the future. Later a beautiful chapel was built beside the main school. It had many Islamic trifoliate arches and had a marble altar with mother of pearl inlay which is now in St John’s church.
The construction was overseen by Edward Steere, who became Bishop in 1874. He was also the designer of the Anglican Cathedral on the site of the old slave market, at Mkunazini in Zanzibar Stone Town. All of the buildings were constructed using traditional Zanzibar methods, where coral stones are bound together with well cured lime. The rooms were very tall and cool, with ceilings of mangrove poles with coral blocks between, plastered from below and above. Sometimes steel girders were used in place
of mangrove poles.
St Mary’s took only three years to build, opening on September 1st, 1874. It was run by Miss Sarah Fountaine and the infants were taught by Vincent Mkono, one of the earliest pupils of the UMCA in Zanzibar, together with his wife Elizabeth Kidogo.
In 1877 Bishop Steere brought Miss Caroline Mary Defflis Thackeray, a cousin of the famous English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, to take charge of the girls’ school. She was headmistress for 25 years. The girls were trained as teachers so that they could be sent to the mainland to help run mission stations there. They took all school subjects including reading, writing, geography, history and Bible studies as well as simple household work, laundry, handicrafts and trades.
Caroline Thackeray at Mbweni
The less academically minded girls were taught industrial work. There were twelve of these girls to begin with and they lived and were taught:
“.....cooking and work of all sorts on the roof of the schoolroom. They used a box of sand with three stones on top and the fire lighted between them while a pot stood on the stones. Quite little girls could be seen with a cocoanut for a cooking pot making a meal from a few small fish they had caught, or vegetables from their own little gardens, with cocoanut juice and flavouring of peppers and limes. They also baked “mandazi” daily, small cakes of ground rice with treacle, fried in oil; other cakes of millet, “ugali” (maize porridge) and many varieties of curries. The girls were not taught European cookery as that was done by men.”
There were special uniforms: the ‘school’ girls, who were being trained as teachers, wore red and white and the ‘industrial’ girls wore blue dresses and scarves and red kofias (caps).
Mary Anne Allen supervised the industrial work until 1884 when
Ruth Berkeley took over and stayed until 1896.
Miss Thackeray built the Industrial Wing, the long thin building to the south of the rest, which was opened in 1887, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year. On holidays the girls received visits there from the boys at Kiungani, the boys’ school. Beside it was an enormous underground water tank which is still in use at the hotel today. The seaward facade had a double colonnade of Islamic arches sheltering narrow verandas, which have now collapsed. There were large bathrooms on both floors with ventilation niches.
In 1902 Miss Thackeray retired to her nearby house, which she had purchased from Sir John Kirk in 1887 when he left Zanzibar. She took in several orphans and brought them up at Kirk’s house, where she died aged 83, on 30th January 1926. She was buried at St John’s Church, between her house and the school she had loved so much.
Entrance of St Mary's School for Girls, ca 1910
In 1910 the Anglican teaching Sisters of the Sacred Passion, founded at the instigation of Bishop Frank Weston, arrived and ran St Mary’s as a convent school. In 1917 they left for the mainland to join in the work which the Anglican church is still carrying on there today.
The Chapel of St Mary's ca 1910
On May 31st 1920 the UMCA, finding itself in financial difficulties, sold part of Mbweni Mission to a consortium of the Bank of India. This included the girls’ school and nearby Kilimani, the school for infant boys. St John’s church and the clergy house (now the Inn by the Sea) remained in church hands. The few remaining girls were moved from St Mary’s to a little school run by Christabelle Majaliwa nearby, until it was closed in 1939. St Mary’s slowly turned into a ruin. The local people still came to use the water tanks, collecting drinking water and staying to do their washing and laundry. Otherwise they left the buildings alone, being afraid of the tall dark rooms and the ghostly atmosphere as creepers and wild fig trees rooted in the walls and engulfed them. Bats moved in and birds nested in the niches that once held plaster saints, until the ruins were bought by the present owners and restoration was begun.
The Mbweni Ruins ca 1960
Painting of Mbweni by May Allen, ca 1879