Shaykh Mwinyikombo bin Makame, remembered in Diani as Sheikh Mwinyi Kombo, was not a Digo. He was a Swahili scholar from Mombasa. His mother was a Kilindini and his father came from Pemba. Yet he has a place in Digo history. In the late 1920s he persuaded the elders of Diani that an overgrown ruin on their shore, where people went to make offerings to spirits, was a mosque. He then reopened it for prayer. The Kongo Mosque has been the Friday mosque of Diani ever since. The maulid celebrations he led there spread across Digo country in the early 1930s.
Who He Was
What we know of Mwinyikombo comes mainly from interviews that the historian David Sperling recorded in Diani, Mtongwe and Chitsanga in 1987, with people who still remembered him. His full name was Mwinyikombo bin Makame. One informant explained that his mother was a Kilindini and his father a Pemba man "who had close ties with the Tangana". The Kilindini and the Tangana are two of the Three Tribes (Miji Mitatu) of the Mombasa Swahili. So his family belonged to the Swahili world of Mombasa and Pemba, which had traded and intermarried with the Digo for centuries.
At the time of the Kongo revival he was imam of the Khonzi Mosque in Mombasa, well known for the maulid he held there. The maulid is the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birth, with recited praise-poems. With Sayyid Amin of Takaungu and Muhammad Mbwana he formed what Sperling calls "a triumvirate of maulid supporters", who attended maulid celebrations up and down the Kenya coast.
The Mosque in the Bush
The Kongo Mosque stands at the northern end of Diani beach, on the south bank of the Mwachema River (also called the Tiwi or Kongo River), in the locality known as Kongo. Its age and builders are not known. It is a coral-stone building, roofed with barrel vaults and domes, under great baobab trees. Archaeologists have found 14th-century pottery near Tiwi, and pottery from the other ruined settlements nearby suggests they began in the 15th or 16th century. The archaeologist James Kirkman thought the mosques of this stretch of coast might be as recent as the 18th century. Popular accounts often say the mosque was built in the 13th or 14th century, but no excavation has confirmed this. One suggestion, made cautiously by Sperling, is that the builders of the old mosques at Tiwi, Diani, Kongo and Ukunda were Kilindini Swahili. The Kilindini lived on the mainland south of Mombasa before moving to the island after 1593.
By the early 20th century the building was empty and overgrown, but people knew it was there. In 1914 the District Commissioner described a ruined mosque at Diani "in remarkable preservation, with the roof still on" but "badly overgrown". The government asked the Wakf Commission to pay for repairs, and the Commission refused. Traders knew it too. An Arab trader named Idi used to beach his boats near the Kongo Mosque to exchange cloth and maize for tobacco. For the Digo of Diani, the overgrown building had become a place of the spirits, mizimu, and they offered sacrifices there.
The Revival
In the late 1920s Mwinyikombo set out to change this. As one Diani man told Sperling:
"Mwinyikombo called the elders of Diani together and told them, 'Kongo is a mosque, it's not an mzimu. The people going there to slaughter chickens and things like that are desecrating it, that's wrong.' Mwinyikombo convinced them to revive the mosque."
The horn was sounded, and the villagers, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, turned out for a communal bush-clearing. The District Commissioner is said to have overseen the opening of a path to the mosque. Oral testimony names the DC as S. V. Cooke, which places the clearing between March and July 1927. In the same year, the colonial government is reported to have gazetted the mosque as a monument.
The mosque was not used for prayer until 1932, when Mwinyikombo organised a maulid for its official opening. Digo Muslims came from all over Digo District, and Muslims came from other parts of the coast, including Sayyid Amin from Takaungu. In his homily, people remembered, he told the gathering to celebrate the maulid three times a year: "from now on this mosque is your Mecca." From then on Kongo was the Friday mosque for Diani. The people of Tiwi alternated, praying one Friday at Kongo and the next at home.
Teacher and Maulid Preacher
After the first maulid, Mwinyikombo began teaching religious knowledge ('ilm) at Kongo every Thursday after the evening prayer, to a group of seven or eight pupils from Diani and Tiwi. He kept up these classes until his death.
He also took the maulid on the road. Between 1932 and 1935 public maulid celebrations spread to Mtongwe, Likoni, Vyemani, Pungu, Ng'ombeni, Matuga, Ukunda, Msambweni, Chikoneni and Lungalunga, usually with the recitation of the Simt ad-Durar. Mwinyikombo attended them, preached on the basics of the faith, and then went round asking people whether they were Muslims and whether they were married. If they were not married as Muslims, he married them on the spot. "He wasn't converting people," an informant recalled; "he was bringing them out of their state of ignorance and closer to their faith." Sperling concluded that the presence of eminent coastal scholars such as Mwinyikombo and Sayyid Amin "gave a new prestige to Digo Islam". One of the people Sperling interviewed put it more simply: "The maulid brought us the joy of the religion."
Shaykh Mwinyikombo died on 5 Safar 1353 AH, which was 20 May 1934. People remembered that on the Saturday before, he had said: "The bull is going away, you won't see him again." On the Sunday he was taken by a fever and died.
The Dream Tradition
Today the story told at the mosque is different. The caretaker and deputy imam, Sheikh Hamisi Suleiman, has told journalists that Mwinyi Kombo was commanded in a dream to look for a mosque along the Diani coastline, and found the old building at Kongo, "which had become a home for bats". Popular accounts often add that this happened about three hundred years ago. This is a living tradition of the mosque community. It is not found in the testimony Sperling recorded in 1987 from people who had known Mwinyikombo. The 1914 colonial report also shows that the building was known long before the revival. The "three hundred years" probably comes from the building's age being attached to the story of its revival.
The Mosque Today
The Kongo Mosque is one of the best-preserved old mosques on the south Kenya coast. Its roof of barrel vaults and domes is largely intact. The vaults over the prayer hall rest on three central columns, and the mihrab, the niche facing Mecca, is a plain arch opening into an undecorated apse. To the north are at least five old tombs, three of them large and nearly square, one with a panelled face under a frieze of small niches. Local tradition says the name Kongo comes from an inscription reading "Swaddiq Kongo" (or Siddiq Kongo) on one of the graves, but Kongo is also the name of the locality. The mosque has been renovated with cement and paint and extended to the east. It remains an active place of worship, and at Eid the crowds spill out onto the beach.
The colonial government listed the "Ruins at Diani" as a protected monument in 1929 (Gazette Notices 170 and 457), under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Ordinance of 1927. In 1983 Gazette Notice No. 440 declared the Kongo Mosque a monument.
Mwinyi Kombo's Place in Digo History
Sheikh Mwinyi Kombo was a Swahili scholar from Mombasa, not a Digo. His story is still part of Digo history, because the people who made the revival happen were Digo. The elders of Diani accepted his argument and gave up a shrine. The villagers cleared the bush. Digo Muslims filled the mosque at the 1932 maulid, carried the maulid to their own villages, and remembered all of this well enough to tell a historian about it half a century later. The revival of Kongo marks the point when Islam in Diani, which had grown slowly through traders, friends and a few village mosques, gained a shared centre and a public celebration of its own.