Portuguese Chapel, Malindi

Did You Know?

• In 1542, St. Francis Xavier landed in Malindi to bury a seaman in the chapel graveyard and stayed a few days.
• The graveyard was reused starting in 1894 for the burial of James Bell Smith, the first resident administrator of the Imperial British East Africa Company.

History

The Portuguese first appeared in Malindi when Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498. On his second trip to India, he left behind a group of soldiers to set up a trading post. This post, run by an official called the 'Captain of the Malindi coast', was Portugal’s most important base in the area from 1509 to 1593. It had storehouses, barracks, homes, and offices, as well as a chapel. Around sixty Christians may have lived there. The chapel was small, possibly on purpose, because at the time Islam was the dominant religion and Malindi had seventeen mosques. By 1542, only three mosques were still in use. In that same year, the missionary Francis Xavier, later made a saint, stopped in Malindi on his way to Goa to bury a sailor in the chapel’s graveyard. He stayed a few days before moving on. Saint Francis is closely linked to the chapel, and local Catholics celebrate Mass there at Easter and on the first Sunday of December for his feast day, which is December 3. A modern picture of him on the altar shows Malindi’s ongoing tie to the saint. The chapel lasted almost a hundred years. In 1589, the Portuguese and the sultan of Malindi captured Mombasa, and the sultan moved there. The Portuguese decided to make Mombasa their main base because its harbor was better and easier to defend. They built Fort Jesus there in 1593. For the next century, Mombasa was Portugal’s chief hub on the East African coast, and the Portuguese left Malindi and its chapel behind.