The giant crossed tusks arching over Moi Avenue in Mombasa are the city's most recognisable landmark — appearing on postcards, tourism brochures, and every list of things to see on the Kenyan coast. Most visitors assume the tusks celebrate Swahili heritage, the ivory trade, or some ancient coastal tradition. They do none of these things. The tusks were built in 1952 to welcome Queen Elizabeth II on her first visit to the colony, and their survival into the present is one of the stranger accidents of Kenyan history.
The original structures were temporary — wooden frames covered in canvas, erected along what was then Kilindini Road to create a ceremonial arch for the royal motorcade. They were a piece of colonial theatre, designed to be impressive for the duration of a visit and then dismantled. But the Queen's visit was cut short when her father, King George VI, died during her trip to Kenya, and the tusks entered a kind of symbolic limbo. When Princess Margaret visited Mombasa in 1956, the colonial authorities decided to rebuild the tusks in aluminium rather than erect new decorations. The firm of Haji Suleman Haji Ladh and Sons fabricated four aluminium tusks that crossed to form an "M" shape over the road — "M" for Mombasa, though the original design had no such intention.
Somehow, the temporary became permanent. The tusks survived independence in 1963. They survived the renaming of Kilindini Road to Moi Avenue in honour of President Daniel arap Moi. They survived decades of tropical weather, road widening, and urban development. By the time anyone thought to question what they represented, they had already become Mombasa's defining image — the visual shorthand for an entire city.
The irony runs deeper than colonial origins. The ivory trade was one of the most destructive forces in East African history, fuelling the Arab slave trade that devastated coastal and interior communities for centuries. Mombasa was a major ivory export port, where tusks harvested by enslaved labour passed through the hands of Omani and Indian merchants before reaching markets in Europe and Asia. The tusks over Moi Avenue are aluminium, not ivory, and they were never intended to reference this history. But their visual association with ivory is inescapable, and they have become an unintentional monument to a trade that shaped and scarred the coast.
Periodic calls to remove or replace the tusks have come to nothing. In 2013, some Mombasa residents suggested replacing them with a monument to Swahili civilisation. Others argued that the tusks had transcended their origins and now belonged to Mombasa regardless of why they were built. The Kenya Wildlife Service has occasionally used the tusks in anti-poaching campaigns, reinterpreting them as symbols of elephant conservation rather than colonial pageantry.
The tusks stand today at the intersection of Moi Avenue and Mkunazini Road, four aluminium arches that millions of Kenyans and tourists have walked or driven beneath. They share the city centre with other landmarks that carry similarly layered histories — Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese in 1593, and the Old Port, which predates European contact entirely. But unlike those structures, the tusks were never meant to last. They were a prop for a queen's motorcade, rebuilt for a princess, and then simply never taken down. Mombasa's most famous symbol was a colonial photo opportunity. Nobody remembers that anymore, and perhaps that forgetting is itself the most telling part of the story.
See Also
Sources
- Karim K. Janmohamed, "A History of Mombasa, c. 1895–1939: Some Aspects of Economic and Social Life in an East African Port Town during Colonial Rule" (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1978).
- Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford University Press, 1993).
- Edward Rodwell, The Mombasa Story (Rodwell Press, 2002), on colonial-era public works and royal visits.
- Kenya National Museums, "Mombasa Heritage Survey: Moi Avenue Tusks" (2015).