Zanzibar's government calls this plain whitewashed mosque the oldest still in use on the island, and an inscription inside dates the original building to the early twelfth century.
This is the Kizimkazi Dimbani Mosque, in Dimbani village near Kizimkazi, in the south of Unguja, Zanzibar's main island, in Tanzania.
Beside the mihrab, a Kufic inscription gives the year five hundred of the Hijra, which is 1107. Scholars describe it as one of the oldest dated Islamic buildings on the East African coast.
It is built of coral rag, a pale limestone made from ancient reef. But most of what stands today is newer. A second inscription gives the year 1184 of the Hijra, which is 1770, for a rebuilding, and the government's sign says the old foundations and north wall were kept.
Excavations suggest people were living on this site from about the tenth or eleventh century, before the mosque was built.
Inside, a three-lobed mihrab from the eighteenth century, said to have influenced mosques in Stone Town, sits beside a carved plaster arcade, under a ceiling of dark poles. Outside, pillar tombs, several of them from the seventeenth century, stand around the mosque, and a well still supplies water for ablution.
The roof is now corrugated metal, and the east wall has been rebuilt. A 2024 study says the site urgently needs a management plan, because of tourism and climate change.
