Five hundred years ago on Easter Sunday, Vasco da Gama paced the deck of his flagship Sao Gabriel off the east coast of Africa, impatient to hire a Christian pilot who could guide him the rest of the way to India.
Although the 38-year-old Portuguese nobleman did not know it, he was near the end of a historic voyage that would forever change Europe's relations with Asia and briefly make his homeland a world power.The Sao Gabriel, the Sao Rafael, the Berrio and a supply ship were anchored off Malindi, best known in recent years as a mecca for British, German and Italian tourists on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, 70 miles north of the port of Mombasa.
Civic and tourist organizations in Malindi are holding a weeklong commemoration of the 500th anniversary of da Gama's visit, culminating Wednesday with a parade, a dramatic enactment of the ships' arrival and the presentation of four commemorative stamps by the Kenya post office.
Organizers hope the festivities will revive the area's tourism industry, which is near collapse because tourists have been frightened away since last August's politically motivated violence on the Kenyan coast. The violence was not directed at foreigners.
The People's Action Party of Kenya has warned in a statement to Malindi Mayor Gideon Mungaro that such a celebration of "the brutal and rude interruption of our peaceful development and trade with the Far East by the Portuguese slave traders, pirates and colonizers" could damage his town's good name.
About 200 people, Muslims protesting the change that the arrival of the Portuguese heralded for the entire region, attempted to disrupt the Vasco da Gama bicycle race Friday but were dispersed by police.
In 1488, Capt. Bartolomeu Dias made it as far as the Cape of Good Hope off what is today Cape Town, South Africa, in Portugal's first official try to find a sea route to India.
Da Gama's voyage was the second attempt. European powers wanted desperately to reach Asia's great trading centers, but Muslim control of the Middle East made commercial travel too difficult for Christians.
According to Alvaro Velho, the chronicler of the voyage that began in Portugal on July 8, 1497, Malindi, ruled by Muslims, carried on a brisk trade across the Indian Ocean in fine woods, spices, livestock and slaves. Some of the ships were owned by Indian Christians, and da Gama wanted one of their pilots to show him the way to India.
Guided by a Christian pilot from Gujarat, da Gama's ships arrived May 22, 1498, in the bustling port of Calicut, now called Kozhikode, on the Malabar coast.
The Portuguese entry into the closed world of Indian Ocean trade seldom was peaceful. Contemporary writers, including Fernao Mendes Pinto and later, historians, have spoken of bloody battles for cities and civilian slaughters in the quest for pepper, ports and power.
British historian Basil Davidson wrote recently that after a decade of bloody assault by the Portuguese, the African trading cities of Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa and Brava were bullied into submission.
Today, small wooden sailing ships called dhows still ply the African coast from northern Somalia to Mozambique, and larger ones from what is now Kerala State in India, work the route from Somalia to Dubai.
And residents of Malindi can watch Indian TV programs via satellite.
Not much of the Portuguese presence remains in the area, except for Mombasa's Fort Jesus, now a museum. But Portugal's ambassador to Kenya, Jose Caetano da Costa Pereira, says the anniversary is a good time to spruce up the little that is left and to encourage research of the period.