No one who visits East Africa’s Coast can fail to wax rhapsodic.

Now, the unbounded cordiality of its cosmopolitan citizenry combined with its arresting architectural visuals comes alive in an ambitious new book by German-American art historian Prita Meier called Swahili Port Cities; The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016).

The author delights in the rich cornucopia of coral rag-and-limestone structures. Featuring the familiar cast of characters, — Zanzibar, Lamu and Mombasa — art history provides the academic discipline framing an interlinked transnational web of trade and religion that encompasses East Africa’s island archipelago with a nod to West Africa’s Atlantic coast and Salem, Massachusetts.

Had the author researched further, she may have included Ilha de Mozambique, a key entrepôt in Portugal’s overseas empire and a southern island outpost rich with colonial architectural heritage.

Insights abound. On the restoration in “the coloniser’s image” of Mombasa’s Old Town, Meier observes the National Museum of Kenya’s recent foray into urban preservation as “largely an attempt to return Old Town to the garb of Empire.”

By 1824, during the Imperial British East Africa Company’s short-lived occupation of Mombasa, William Owen had occupied Leven House, named for a ship in his fleet.

Today, with commerce in mind, the newly reconstructed Leven House “is meant to produce an image easily consumed by tourists, in the hope that the city will conform to the current Western taste for picturesque panoramas of the colonial past.”

Her pen-portrait of Zanzibar’s iconic 19th century House of Wonders, based on structures in Port Said exemplifying “the new aesthetic of global circulation and capitalist expansion,” is on target.

Omissions also exist. Can one focus on western Indian Ocean island architecture without fully framing its creation within the social system that built it? The geopolitical complexities of the Arab and European imperial ages constituted new social forces at work and generated a proliferation of town reconstruction needing illumination before viewing its built environment.

And the labour needed? New reconstituted relations of power and privilege catalysed a colonial system of structural violence. A powerful colonial oligarchy of Gulf State Arabs, Portuguese and later Britons left the majority economically vulnerable, with many subject to wage theft as slaves or low-paid workers. Tensions arising from these divisions eventually led to, in Zanzibar, a revolution from below.

Here the discipline of art history as applied to colonial architecture needs questioning: As all structures built on foreign lands may be considered political, isn’t the separation of aesthetic forms from political economy reductive and dogmatic?

Shouldn’t the social processes that created any artistic endeavour be higher than the product itself? In Meier’s study — as frozen in time as a theatrical stage set — only occasionally does she reach for the ebb and flow of either causality and/or its consequences.

Not considered art?

Enduring exclusionary policies structuring the colonial (and post Independence) administrations are reflected best in residential architecture.

Zanzibar’s elite residential housing tells its own story: Its outsized edifices are emblematic of colonial privilege, class, wealth accumulation and, perhaps lack of social responsibility.

In narrowly focusing on the stone architecture of the affluent (for art’s sake?), the author omits the equally compelling story of the socially responsible, communal housing of the Swahili majority.

The author’s casual indifference to the known coastal historical record is disappointing as is her lack of engagement with current scholarship on ruined stone towns along the Coast.

Archaeologically speaking, two historical waves of stone town construction occurred. A first “medieval” wave was from the 8th to the 16th century, followed by a second Omani-European age to the present. The latter embedded a massive social engineering project that reshaped the Coast’s entire urban design.

Unsubstantiated ad hominem presuppositions are better left unstated: On European and mainland Kenyan tourists to Old Town Mombasa, she reports: “For them the physical layout of Old Town has the characteristics of an unplanned maze, where few real streets exist and one easily loses one’s bearings.”

The point missed: As Mombasa dates centuries before the onset of European imperial domination, it, as do other extant pre-colonial settlements, lacks a Roman grid plan for town design and ordered structure alignments.

In an ongoing historiographical debate, Reginald Coupland’s dated East Africa and its Invaders identifies builders in stone as colonial outsiders, while Tanzanian archaeologist Felix Chami champions indigenous origins.

As tracing styles over time is at art history’s core, Meier’s elusive Elsewhere as an inclusive escape hatch does little justice to her own discipline and sits too close for comfort to the Coupland thesis.

If the author had spent more time studying indigenous structures, she may have seen in Mombasa’s conical minarets, for example, elongated reproductions in stone of upcountry, earth-walled rondavels.