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The bull elephant emerging from the thicket swooped up Hassan before his daughter’s cries of warning left her mouth. He hoisted the man high in his coiled trunk, then dashed him to the ground. The elephant then turned and lumbered through the dense thicket bordering the farm, the sound of trampled vegetation fading as the dazed farmer slowly stood up. Hassan brushed the red dust off his body and clothes and picked up his short-handle hoe.
The look on Hassan’s face and the glances shared by his wife and his nine-year-old daughter signalled relief. They also conveyed it was just another hot, cloudless day in the life of an internally displaced Bajuni family struggling to scratch out an existence in Magogoni. Their nonchalance was remarkable.
“We cope with these elephants all the time,” Hassan said. “But this is only the second time one actually attacked me.”
We sat on a mat under a mango tree and talked about the weather and the harvest. Dry stalks of maize surrounded their small house, a thatch-roofed platform eight feet above the ground, three sides covered with the palm thatch makuti. Three meko stones in the area underneath this loft served as the kitchen.
Magogoni was the third location this particular family settled in since being expelled from their original home in Sendeni by Somali bandits. Sendeni was one of a string of thriving Bajuni settlements on the stretch of coast to the north that extended from the tip of Kiwayuu Island to the border of Somalia. On the brink of Kenya’s independence, the internally displaced Bajuni from these settlements were prosperous.
Elders from these abandoned settlements told the same story: “We had large farms, cattle and goats, and we harvested the bounty of the ocean during the long dry season. Our women wore gold ornaments. After the new government took away our firearms, we lost everything to the Shifta bandits.”
I first visited Magogoni with Mohammed Famau in May of 1975, and we returned several times at different points in the agricultural cycle. That initial trip had introduced me to the contrasting remoteness of the mainland north of Lamu Island. The millennium-old seaport that lent its name to both the archipelago and the Kenyan administrative district bearing its name was compact and intensely urban. The mainland was the opposite.
We took a boat from Lamu to Mokowe, which was an unremarkable hamlet at the time, with a few shops and government offices. The terminus of the Mombasa-Lamu road, arrival in Mokowe marked the penultimate stage of the long journey to Amu, a forty-minute boat ride away. But for us that day Mokowe was the entry point into the less glamorous world of the archipelago’s mainland. We began walking on a single file path, quickly transiting the world of mud and thatch to enter an area of wooded savanna.
I had no idea where or how far Magogoni was. A group of five, including my friend Tito, accompanied us. They all happened to be Kambas from upcountry. Although I was only several months into what was to become an extended stay on Kenya’s north coast, I was already aware that most of those from upcountry residing in Lamu were interested in land, a delicate issue among the coastal Swahili. I was not sure why my Bajuni friends, long displaced from their mainland homeland to the north, were now inviting those from upcountry to settle in their village knowing how dicey the land question was.
It was hot. We walked in single file, following the narrow orange clay path through an area of scattered woodland. I had spent my first few months in Kenya at a field studies centre on a cooperative farm in Ukambani, and this provided useful background for the two overlapping strands of conversation that occupied our time during the three-hour hike: why the Kamba are uncomfortable eating fish, the Somali bandit problem, and how to take down an elephant with a (flimsy) arrow and poison from the acokanthera tree (you have to get really close without being detected).
Some scattered lime trees growing in the bush along the way were the only sign of previous human presence. We picked some limes from a tree stranded among the mass of unruly secondary vegetation. I asked about our location and Mohammed Famau said, “Kililana. There used to be many farms here.”
Unbeknownst to me, we were only twenty metres from Mkanda, the shallow channel that separates Manda Island from the mainland. All transport to and from Pate and the other islands of the archipelago thread through this mangrove-lined channel. Mkanda is a bottleneck that limited passage between Lamu and the outer islands to two several-hour periods when the tide is high. Arrive a few minutes late and you find yourself stuck for eight hours as the sea ebbs out before trickling in again, enough to refloat the boat.
There were two alternate routes to Magogoni. One was the long passage around Ras Kitau and through the Mlango wa Manda channel, not an easy sail due to the angles of the prevailing winds and submerged reef extending across the southern tip of Manda. It was also a rough trip on the high seas in a motorboat. This route was rarely used, even in case of emergencies. The walk through the mainland bush we were following was arduous but still much shorter than the dhow trip passing through Mkanda and navigating the shallows and shaka, clumps of mangrove that took root on exposed sand bars and formed small islands over time.
The indeterminate nature of our destination made the distance seem much longer to me. We stopped for a breather after a long hour. I then asked how far we were and received what I learnt was the typical Kenyan answer to this question: mbali kidogo. The last time I was told the destination was the standard “still a bit far,” we ended up walking another seven hours through Maasailand. Unaware of the problems of the sea passage, where you inevitably end up poling the vessel more than sailing, I naively asked why we were not taking the Mkanda route. It looked so much easier on the map, which failed to convey the details of terrain, ocean currents, tides, and the other geographical variables conditioning many facets of northern Swahili culture and economy.
We pressed on. The heat was pulverising and no one had carried water. After another forty minutes or so, we came across some cashew trees. I love cashews. However, I knew nothing about where the nuts actually came from before this first contact. These broad-leafed trees did not look much different from the surrounding vegetation, except for the succulent orange-yellow fruit called mabibu, dangling from the branches. Mohammed Famau plucked one, cut off the top, and indicated that I suck on the flesh. The size of a lemon and shaped like a bell pepper, their pleasant juice gave way to a stringent aftertaste. The thirst-quenching effect was remarkable, as Tito agreed. Mohammed told us this was why we did not need to carry water.
We kept moving, passing piles of the decomposing as we passed through a number of small cashew farms. I asked why these useful fruits were being allowed to rot: “Why are these mabibu not available in the Lamu market?” Mohammed dismissed the questions with a wave of his hand, possibly aware I was about to discover why. My thirst returned, so I sucked on more fruit over the next half hour. The fifth fruit tipped the balance between juicy and astringency. My body suddenly reacted, rejecting the next bite with a slight shudder. This one mabibu too far answered my question.
We left the mibibu trees (more commonly known as mikorosho) behind and arrived at our destination, an area of more recent settlement. I met Hassan for the first time. The water offered in an old brass tumbler was cloudy but not bitter. It washed away the bitter astringency of the mabibu. We spread out on a frayed jamvi, and before long several trays of wali wa buru, a dish made with rice-size pieces of pounded maize garnished with a thin tamarind sauce appeared on the palm mat.
Scooping up the wali into palm-sized balls, we wolfed down the food. Nothing like honest hunger to turn a simple meal into a memorable experience. Mohammed introduced the guests from Ukambani. “We are interested in finding land to farm,” their leader explained. He was a mechanic employed by the Ministry of Works. Hassan, Mohammed Famau’s cousin, shared a brief history of the settlement. “Some people settled here after the Shifta war around twelve years ago,” he related. “The rest of us joined them after the farms we started on the islands did not work out.“
Considering the frequent complaints one hears at coastal barazas (the ubiquitous public spaces where men congregate to converse; the word doubles as the term for the traditional palaver) about Kenyans from upcountry taking over coastal land, I was surprised by how graciously the Bajuni received their Kamba visitors. The hosts explained the process of clearing the bushes and reported that maize did well, encouraging their guests to settle, offering them assistance.
“Ndooni uungane na mui wetu,” Hassan told them (come join us and become part of our settlement).
Mainland Mui in Historical Perspective
The use of the term mui, the Bajuni version of mji (city or town) in standard Swahili, confused me at first. In 1975 Magogoni was a bare-bones mui of several hundred households. How could one refer to this hardscrabble agricultural landscape carved out of the bush as a city?
In contrast, Amu (to use the town’s proper name) was a compact but cosmopolitan mui. A stroll down its narrow streets conveyed multiple layers of history and contact with the maritime civilizations from southern Arabia to China. The district’s mainland, in contrast, had reverted to a near-complete state of nature, an expanse of bush punctuated by patches of wetland and forest. It featured a scattering of new townlets like Mokowe and old muis, like the former sultanate of Witu, once a palisaded hub of northern Swahili power under the heroic Simba Fumoluti. The large stretches of doum palm on either side of Witu mark the extent of the Sultanate’s formerly cultivated land, giving one a sense of the Sultanate’s capacity to challenge the German and British during the late 19th century. The Sultanate even issued its own stamps and coins, before being destroyed by British cannon in 1895. The population of 90,000 in 1890 was now reduced to less than two thousand residents. Several of its satellite settlements, micro-hamlets with evocative names like Panda Nguo and Mambo Sasa, persisted in the hinterland.
The coast north of the Tana River receded into the backwaters of history during the colonial interlude. A society of wood and iron technology survived in Amu’s near-zero carbon environment, scattered across pockets of savanna and mangrove-lined inlets and shore. Eighty years later there was next to no infrastructure to connect the small pockets of people scattered across this once-prosperous region’s vast and still resource-rich hinterland.
One unimproved road barely-passable on a good day during the rains connected Lamu to the coastal areas to the south. The road linking Mokowe to Kiunga on the Somali border was considerably worse. This track traced an arc through the district’s hinterland, skirting the Boni Forest before angling back to rejoin the Indian Ocean coastline near Kiunga. Kiunga was a small Swahili town featuring the typical core of traditional thick-walled structures and a mosque, but distinguished from places like Witu by its heavy government presence.
Fenced-off compounds housed a clutch of state ministries and government security camps ringing the town’s periphery, their presence doing little to dispel the paranoia haunting the civil servants seconded to this hardship post—or the local population’s security. They were better at interrupting the cross-border trade with Somalia and collecting hongo, the customary term that encapsulates payment for right of passage, tax on services rendered, and bribe in one word.
Kiunga served as the market centre for the string of Bajuni Swahili settlements north of the islands of the archipelago: Ishakani, Mambore, Rubu, Sendeni, Mvindeni, Ashuwei, and Stesheni. Now a proper town in comparison to these villages, Kiunga also hosted the grave of the first British military officer to die in Kenya at the hands of the Swahili battling Arab and European intrusion.
Over the course of the 19th century, the northern Swahili had successfully repelled Arab and European colonisers, until the Witu Sultanate was overwhelmed by superior firepower.
Defeat in 1895 was followed by disenfranchisement. The occupiers classified most mainland areas of the district as crown land when the region became a British Protectorate. The Land Ordinance of 1908 subsequently designated that unused land reverts to property of the Crown. Not applied uniformly across Kenya, in Lamu this law resulted in the communal owners losing large tracts of their mainland holdings. The people of Lamu, Faza, and Siyu subsequently petitioned to retain 80,000 acres of communal land holdings on the mainland, but their case was rejected in 1919.
By the time I showed up some fifty-five years later, banditry and forced migration had reduced the once prosperous mainland settlements to small villages ranging in size from ten to twenty houses. Although technically connected to Kiunga by another motorable track, local dhows provided the sole contact with the outside world. Many of the former inhabitants of these towns were now in Magogoni, further to the south and less connected to anywhere in regards to customary tenure and spatial linkages.
After my initial 1975 visit, I continued to visit Magogoni and similar settlements on Manda Island on a regular basis. Life in these places was austere in appearance and pretty basic compared to the archipelago’s cosmopolitan material culture. The urbanised Bajuni of the islands referred to their mainland kin as watu wa qariani, people of the villages.
Watu wa Qariani
The typical honde homestead was organised around the ucha, the traditional loft houses described earlier (a thatch-roofed platform eight feet above the ground, three sides covered with the palm thatch makuti), supported by the thick mangrove poles called nguzo and sidings made of the thin mangrove called mafito. This second-story bedroom was open on the front and similarly covered with thatch or mats on three sides. The family slept here, on mats. I found the loft houses surprisingly comfortable as they were high enough to catch the breeze, which kept mosquitos away.
The area below served as the kitchen and living area. It usually featured a couple of low palm fibre seats; the three meko cooking stones; two or three pots and a clay urn for water; a log serving as a counter, cutting board, and table; and assorted knives, ladles, and sticks for preparing the food and cooking. Several aluminium sinia trays of different sizes provided for dining and other tasks. A circular woven palm fibre tray called teo was used for sifting pulses and winnowing grain. Nails on the downstairs frame provided a closet for the family’s clothes and the multi-purpose wraps used for dress. These wraps were also turned into pockets for holding harvested grain, and sundry other functions including seines for small fish caught in the shallows by the receding tide. The inventory of a typical family’s material possessions also included several machetes, short-handled hoes, some mats and the sturdy baskets known as kapu. Juzuu booklets with sections of the Quran, or sheathes of paper with Quranic verses, were stored in the thatch forming the walls and ceilings of these tree houses.
A single farm might have more than one of these ucha, which doubled as platforms for chasing off birds who attacked the mtama bishee, the white sorghum that covered most of these farms. Some space was reserved for maize and wimbi finger millet, but most of the land was devoted to the long corn-like stalks that produced a naked head of small pearl-like seeds. Young lads with slings guarded these fields during the three-week ripening period using slings also called teo, using large dried mud pellets for ammunition. These projectiles rarely hit their targets, but made a sharp whistling sound that scared the squadrons of birds descending from the surrounding trees. Guarding these fields was an unrelenting, sun-up to sun-down task.
This was one phase in the economic cycle of Hassan’s city. Shifting agriculture occupied part of the year, fishing and other pursuits filled in the cycle. Some fishermen stayed on the honde for several months to cultivate a crop, and some farmers fished during the dry season. The maritime sector provided a range of livelihood options over the course of the cycle: the dhow trade during the kaskasi winds, inshore fishing with gill nets during the blustery kusi winds, mangrove harvesting, and transport. During the late 1970s, tourism began providing income for dhows in the form of day trips to the Takwa ruins and the beach at Ras Kitao, across the channel from Shela.
Asymmetrical Processes
I came to understand the context-dependent nature of local terms (like mui) through participation in the every-day economic activities and ceremonies that defined coastal life. It took a long time to shift from the concept of city predicated on size and structures and population to the multicultural Swahili concept of settlement based on permanency and inhabitants’ categorization of their community. This concept clarified in turn the meaning of mtaa.
Commonly glossed as a ward or neighbourhood in a town or city, mtaa also refers to the area where members of a common group, clan, or kinship group reside within a larger settlement. The typical mui featured several such mitaa; Amu at the time had some twenty-two mitaa. These units also mirrored the social divisions of the old stone town. The large mtaa of Langoni were the product of new settlement. Be they Hadhrami Arab, Bajuni, or the ancient Cushite Boni, all of these groups fell outside of the town’s traditional social structure.
Magogoni was still too basic to feature distinct mtaa units; instead its inhabitants clustered around the extended family units known as milango. Hassan’s use of mui connected Magogoni to the broader context of Swahili social and spatial organisation. It conveyed a sense of the internally displaced Bajuni’s identity as part of a larger predominantly urban culture, while conveying their hopes for the future of their Magogoni community.
Magogoni still reflected the Bajuni agrarian-maritime economy. Shifting agriculture occupied part of the year, fishing and other pursuits filled in the cycle. Farming took two forms: the permanent agriculture of the shamba, farms with formally demarcated borders and typically featuring a mix of trees and other crops; and the shifting cultivation of the honde, the plots hacked out of the bush that were farmed intensively for several years before shifting to another piece of land.
Honde, or konde, is the Bajuni Swahili word for an area under cultivation. The former connotes permanent farms and tree crops whereas konde connotes shifting cultivation. The standard term for farm, shamba, comes from the French term for plantation, le champ, which entered the Swahili language when the French sugar estates established in Mauritius were replicated in Pemba. The mashamba ringing island towns like Amu, Pate, Siyu, and Chundwa contrast with the shifting cultivation practised on the mainland, including the newly cultivated honde plots Bajuni IDPs had established on Manda and in Magogoni. Honde produces grains and other field crops; shamba feature a mixture of trees, typically a mix of coconut and mango, and seasonal crops—permanence being the main distinguishing quality.
Areas like Magogoni were formerly cultivated as part of the honde shifting agriculture system maintained by residents of the former city states on Pate Island. The small towns on the mainland to the north, like Sendeni where Hassan and Mohammed Famau grew up, were miji that had access to plentiful land but limited water, and this favoured the practice of shifting agriculture over the shamba, although they did keep small farms on the periphery of their settlements and kitchen gardens—whose output could not compare with the bounty of grain produced by a well-cultivated honde during a proper rainy season.Farms like Hassan’s land in Magogoni were konde that had become honde, with the potential of evolving into shamba.
This terminological variability extended to the four asymmetrical calendars regulating the Swahili annual cycle. Calendrical time integrated both the solar and lunar years, like interlocking round and oval shaped wheels turning within a single mechanism. The Arab and Islamic calendar and their Swahili equivalent are lunar, but start on different months; both shift forward twelve days every solar year. The 365-day Western calendar kept the Swahili cycle in sync with Kenya and the rest of the world. But in the Swahili solar calendar, the New Year (Chonda) begins with the appearance of the Pleiades Constellation above the horizon at the end of August. Mariners and farmers rely upon this calendar to regulate activities related to management of the maritime-agricultural cycle.
Chonda coincides with the onset of rain showers over the next several weeks (mvua ya mwaka) needed to bring farmers’ second round of crops to fruition—mainly sim sim and wimbi. It also signals resumption of maritime activities. Chonda also marks the annual countdown referred to as pima miongo—sixty days reckoned in six rounds of ten days (i.e. miongo). This is spring-cleaning time for the archipelago’s majahazi, mitori, and mashua. The boats undergo a thorough overhaul and repairs culminating with a fresh application of sifa, the thick oil distilled from shark livers essential for preserving their ribs and planking against the ravages of sun, brine, and borrowing insects.
The two solar calendars highlighted the alternate worlds of the indigenous economy with its attention to winds and rains and tides and the external order with its political and Christian holidays, school semesters, and special seasons like the December festivities, and post-New Year’s financial crunch. Where the former delineated seasons and their work activities, the latter marked the imposed order that was inexorably infiltrating and displacing the nature-based rhythms of homegrown livelihood strategies. The Western calendar fixed the main dates of the yearly cycle like Christmas and Kenya’s Jamhuri Day in stone, the single day adjustment of leap years being the only deviation.
In the Swahili year, the holidays and the defining event of the Swahili year, the month of Ramadan, migrated and the days of celebration accompanying it were structurally uncertain due to the vagaries of sighting the moon. Kenya’s state and educational elites were often exasperated by the differences between these two mindsets, while religious leaders and traditionalists resented the intrusions and imposition of the external order.
As field linguists observe, “no contract, no information,” which is why non sequitors like Hassan’s characterization of Magogoni as a town always stuck with me.
The mjini—mwituni city and country distinction was at odds with the fundamental dichotomies described by these pairings. As the cycles of culture and economy on the coast illustrated, the asymmetrical principles generated by the mishmash of peoples and historical trajectories that constituted Kenya in 1975 could also feed the emergence of a linguistically and culturally unified polity.
The Dynamics of Informal Settlement
I estimated the base population of Magogoni in 1975 to be approximately fifteen hundred people, although the number of residents fluctuated across the seasons. As the farms with the mature cashew trees and coconut palms indicated, it was in the process of evolving from honde to shamba at the time, and with a measure of stability would come to be a proper mui/mji with the usual shops and physical infrastructure.
In 1975, however, Magogoni was to the eyes of a first-time visitor like myself a rudimentary collection of loft-houses, cleared fields and footpaths with a simple mud and thatch mosque and a single unimproved well. Even so, it was probably the single largest agricultural settlement between Mokowe and Kiunga. Moreover, it was expanding every year as Boni and settlers from other small mainland communities like the Malakote and Orma joined the growing numbers of Bajuni stakeholders who were coming and going with increasing frequency. Mohammed Famau, for example, a resident of Lamu employed by the National Museums of Kenya, maintained a one-acre plot next to Hassan’s honde and was a member of the larger Magogoni community. That he would never consider living there on a permanent basis was strictly a function of his personal circumstances.
Swidden agriculture, as the wide range of similar such cycles based on intensive input-free cultivation followed by long periods of fallow is known, had become the template for many Bajuni IDPs who had since 1963 survived by engaging in a range of seasonal and often informal economic activities, including circular and permanent migration to Mombasa, Malindi and beyond. One contingent of these watu wa qariani had settled in Lindi, in southern Tanzania, where they were reported to be doing well.
When Kenya gained independence in 1963, Amu was the one settlement that still conveyed the former glory and unique Swahili way of life. The archipelago’s other towns—Pate, Siyu and Faza—had gone from independent city-states in the late 19th century to isolated backwater outposts over the past century. The rise of Mombasa as the primary port and entry point for the new colony acted to draw away much of the population and economic capital from these former sultanates, a process that continued during the decades following independence. The Bajuni mainland, however, remained relatively stable during the colonial era. The agricultural settlements remained productive.
When decline set in, it was sudden and the ramifications were to become much greater than anyone understood at the time. Upon achieving independence, repeated shifta bandit attacks impoverished the prosperous Bajuni settlements. Many of the IDPs returned to their homes only to suffer more incursions. By 1965, all but a few of the Bajuni inhabiting the area between Mkokoni and Ras Kamboni had relocated to new villages elsewhere in the district and to Lamu town. An agreement between Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta’s government and Somalia’s Siyaad Barre’s regime in 1969 formally ended the hostilities. By that time the mainland Bajuni had been scattered across the coastal strip and beyond.
By the early 1970s, life was beginning to return to some of the Bajuni mainland settlements. There were around fifteen families reestablishing their homes in Rubu; maybe twenty in Mambore. Mkokoni was a proper village, mainly due to its location near the high-end tourist camp in Stesheni, a creatively constructed lodge situated in the archipelago’s most paradisaically beautiful niche. But Magogoni was emerging as the main catchment for Lamu’s internally displaced Bajuni.
The area of cashew cultivation we passed through during my first visit was in the early stages of becoming mashamba. IDPs like Hassan hoped to see their homesteads develop into proper farms over time. Magogoni was now representing a new kind of Swahili mui. Its establishment was proceeding through the settlement of Bajuni and returnees from the Swahili diaspora, their Boni and Orma neighbours and supposed outsiders like our Kamba visitors over time. Like the peri-urban areas of Nairobi and Mombasa – the ethnically mixed majengo neighborhoods defining the rise of Kenya towns and other spaces of multi-ethnic interaction – it was possible to discern how such informal processes were contributing to the emergence of a more cosmopolitan, multicultural Kenya.
Coevolution describes how distinct entities interact and mutually adapt to the world they jointly inhabit. Whereas the environment serves as the primary mechanism of selection in conventional evolution, in coevolution the organisation of the system also selects for adaptive traits and behaviours. This enables each agent to tune the structure of its own landscape while forming couplings to other landscapes to its own advantage. This explains the emergence of urban society in the Sahel and on the Swahili coast. Both names derive from the same term, reflecting slight phonetic variations on the Arabic letter ﺱ (or ‘sin’). The two regions illuminate how coevolutionary forces moulded the urban civilizations arising deep in the interior and along the maritime interface.
Much more could be said about this historical dynamic including examples of how it sustained the process of cultural and technological exchange and syntheses from across the region. For present purposes, it will suffice to confirm this process continues to operate, albeit underneath the surface of formal governance in Kenya. Although I did not understand it in these terms, I was to witness the unfolding of this process in Magogoni over the following years. Naturally, it would involve frictions as the numbers settling in Magogoni expanded, as an incident following our departure from Hassan’s tiny house homestead illustrated.
Moyo wa Ndovu
After the discussions about conditions in Magogoni, Mohamed Famau, myself and the rest of the party headed back to Mokowe via an alternate route. Near the edge of the cashew tree zone, we came upon a group of Bajuni men conversing under the shade of a mango tree. A few metres away a dead adolescent elephant, sans tusks, straddled our path. The Game Department had shot it earlier that morning. Elephants also love cashew nuts.
Our Kamba friends had told us they were from Kitui, the section of the Kamba community still known for their bush tracking and hunting skills. On seeing the baby elephant, they suddenly became animated, and started chattering about the virtues of elephant steak.
They conversed about how they were going to retrieve the choice cuts, oblivious of the fact that the Bajuni were not amused by their fascination with the dead pachyderm. “Baado ni mbichi,” one of the visitors claimed (it’s still fresh!). ‘‘Tusaidieni na visu tafadhali!” No one responded when the visitor from Kitui asked to borrow some knives to butcher the carcass they held to be fresh.
Feeling bad for the poor tusker’s demise, I approached the carcass and stroked its wrinkled skin. This thick and tough-to-the-touch epidermis was not the soft ‘elephant skin’ we used to get after a long soak in the pool or a hot bath when we were kids. I stepped away as the four Kamba men inspected the carcass, continuing to ask for knives so they could commence rendering the unexpected gift.
“Tunachelewa sasa,” Mohammed Famau announced. “Twende saa hii hii.” He reinforced the emphasis by motioning to me with his head that we should move on. The Bajuni were looking on with barely concealed disgust.
“Hatuwezi kupeana kisu kukata nyama haram,” one of the elders declared.
“Moyo wa ndovu, moyo wa ndovu,” Tito crooned.
“Moyo wa ndovu ni tamu ajabu,” he told me, assuming I would support his case for going home with some of the sweet elephant heart meat.
I was a bit conflicted. On one side, I was with the Bajuni by association and shared religion. Then again, Tito was a friend, married to a nice American woman from Arizona, and the dead elephant was clearly an unexpected prize for his Kamba buddies. I was not opposed to this one-off opportunity for a traditional hunting people to go retro. I felt bad for the dead elephant, while entertaining the logic that perhaps these former hunters should make use of the carcass. It was way too big to move or bury: was it going to just sit there and rot, attracting vultures and scavengers? In any event, our Kamba friends declared they were not going to leave without taking something.
“Si uwapatie kisu chako kidogo ili tupate kwenda zetu,” I advised Mohammed Famau. Should we not let them do their thing so we can get out of here? Mohammed regarded me with a resigned look, and reluctantly gave Tito the locally made knife sheathed in his money belt. We retreated back into the shade, some of the local Bajuni walking away as we watched our Kamba friends climb over the dead elephant, looking for a soft spot where they could hack away with the six-inch blade. It was clearly rough going.
After waiting for the better part of half an hour, I agreed with Mohammed that we should leave regardless of whether or not our guests leave with us. Around twenty minutes later they caught up to us on the trail. Each one of them carried a fatty chunk of the carcass dangling from a strip of palm fibre. Tito returned the knife to Mohammed Famau when we stopped for a brief rest. Mohammed reluctantly accepted the knife, holding it between two fingers as he washed off with sand and water six times before sliding it into its sheath. I asked Tito about the heart and he said it was all they could do to cut away the outer layer under the skin. Not much was said for the remainder of the walk. Tito, who walked behind me, repeatedly lamented, “Moyo wa ndovu, tamu sana! Moyo wa ndovu, tamu sana! Moyo wa ndovu, tamu sana!”
The next day I asked my Arabic teacher if eating elephant meat was legal.
“Well,” he opined, ‘‘based on Quranic classification… it’s not haram.”
A week later, I found the knife hidden underneath a mat in the corner of my house. I returned it to Mohammed, informing him that the Maalim had told me elephant meat is halal.
“Kweli ndovu ni halal,” he replied. ‘‘But for it to be halal first you have to slaughter the elephant legally, and if you are foolish enough to attempt slaughtering an elephant according to the sharia, the elephant will slaughter you instead!”
The Vave ceremony2 accompanying the burning of the bush to create a new konde held in Magogoni in 1981 appeared to mark a new stage in the settlement’s progress. The many ucha towering over the area under cultivation stretched into the distance. There was a proper well now, and the number of houses indicated a greater sense of permanence than was the case during my earlier visits. Material conditions in Mpeketoni, the government settlement scheme created in 1967 for landless Gikuyu continued to illustrate the stark contrast between the district’s indigenous inhabitants and the communities supported by the government of independent Kenya. Marauding elephants, no doubt fleeing from the guns of poachers in the hinterland, still invaded farms on the settlement’s fringe.
Even so, there was new hope, and even the promise of future prosperity in the multi-ethnic mui. Little did we know that issues far greater than food preferences and taboos were waiting in the wings. I had heard reports of the government’s plans to build a new port in Lamu, an idea that was originally mooted during the colonial era. The forces that were to short-circuit the growth of the Magogoni settlement, however, were not connected to this proposal. The coevolutionary dynamic underpinning the unique pattern of society and economy in Lamu for generations was about to change.
PS: The writer is working on a sequel, ‘Magogoni After The Port’.
1 Freemen and small men (i.e. slaves), coast and interior, civilised and savage, this world and the next
2 Vave is a long verse recited during the night before the bush is burned. It combines the story of Bajuni origins with homiletic observations about the chimerical nature of the transient world.
