ACK Mombasa Memorial Cathedral: an Anglican church deliberately built to look like a mosque

At the junction of Nkrumah Road and Cathedral Road, near Fort Jesus, the Memorial Cathedral is the cathedral of the Anglican diocese of Mombasa. It is the oldest diocese of the Anglican Church of Kenya, established in 1898 out of the earlier diocese of Eastern Equatorial Africa under the aegis of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and not, as is sometimes assumed, of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, whose sphere of action concerned rather Zanzibar and Nyasaland. Work began symbolically on 24 June 1902, the foundation stone was laid in July 1903 and the building was consecrated on 31 May 1905, at a reported cost of about 4,400 pounds of the time. The project was promoted by the founding bishop William Peel, and the cathedral was dedicated to the memory of Bishop James Hannington, first bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, killed in October 1885 in Uganda together with Bishop Parker and the Reverend Wright. The name of the architect, given by a single source as «Sinclair» without further detail, cannot be verified independently. The most distinctive feature of the building is the deliberate architectural choice to echo the local mosques: pillars of Romanesque taste carry arches in Swahili style, beneath whitewashed walls of coral stone and a silver-white dome, a gesture of visual integration in a city with a Muslim majority. The interior keeps wooden choir stalls dating from 1662, given by the English abbey of Milton, a brass lectern of 1903 and a font of Carrara marble. In 2015 the wooden cross that crowned the dome, in place for 111 years, was replaced. This cathedral is to be distinguished from the Catholic cathedral of the Holy Spirit, seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Mombasa, a different building a few hundred metres away, consecrated in 1923: the two cathedrals, of different denominations, are sometimes confused in some online tourist sources.