6
The Coast
The Coast Strip stretched the full length of the Kenya shoreline but extended inland to a depth of only 10 miles. This was the Kenya Protectorate as distinct from the Colony and, except for the small enclave of the Sultanate of Witu, was leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar. Though the pace of development lagged, the coast had its own special features and administrative problems, arising from past history and the mixed character of its population. Indeed, it was the only part of Kenya that had a written history before the British came.1
There was a quiet calm about the coast quite different from the rest of Kenya. A vivid sense of the past could be felt in what was seen around in ruins haunted by the spirits of the baobab; in ancient mango trees planted by slaves for Arab masters and owned today by the grandsons of those slaves; in mangrove swamps where slaving dhows used to hide from vessels of the British Navy; in the old harbour at Mombasa where the dhows came in from Muscat; in Arab streets flanked by once proud buildings, their embossed doors and ornate carved lintels sadly in decay, but streets still alive with the happy-looking faces of children of many races. There were also the great monuments: Fort Jesus to the Portuguese, the fort at Lamu built by Seyyid Said for resisting the Mazrui and the mysterious ruins of twice sacked and abandoned Gedi, long lost in the forest of Mida and leaving not even a memory behind to tell what happened.2
None of the Arab towns were as populated or prosperous when the British Protectorate started as they had been 400 years earlier when they first excited the attention of the Portuguese. Their ruthlessness in sacking Kilwa, Mombasa and Lamu started the decline of Arab power and raids by African tribes from the interior added to the destruction.
The failure to make any lasting recovery during the years after the Portuguese left must be ascribed partly to the rising influence of Zanzibar, but mostly to the turbulence and ceaseless bickering of the Arab towns. The essential unsoundness of a slave-based economy must have been a contributory cause and the fact that many wells along the coast turned brackish may also have had something to do with it. When Sir Arthur Hardinge, the first commissioner, took charge in 1895, quelled the Mazrui rebellion and put a final stop to the traffic in slaves, he was faced with the formidable task of arresting the tide of decline and getting a free-labour based economy started.
Slave ownership on the coast was fully abolished in 1907 and the Arabs were compensated for their slaves, but they soon ran through the money, lacking the skill and enterprise to engage labour or to work the land themselves. Many of them mortgaged their land to Indians; the mortgage money went the same way, and they were ruined. In matters of ownership of plantation land, which slave labour had formerly cultivated, the Protectorate government was bound by the treaty with the Sultan to honour all titles which he had conferred, and a recorder of titles was appointed to ascertain them. There were very few cases, however, outside the towns and their immediate neighbourhood, where clear title could be established or where boundaries of land were defined. As for the released slaves, not many of them went home. Here and there, especially at Freretown on the northern mainland opposite Mombasa Island, a few of their descendants lived and traded in special reservations near Christian mission stations, and other settlements intended for them were established in Kilifi and Malindi districts. The great majority, however, stayed on to cultivate the land abandoned by their former masters.3
Although many of the people living on the coast strip were ex-masters or ex-slaves, the general Swahili population was neither the one nor the other, but was of mixed Arab/African blood, living in the towns or in village settlements along the coast and cultivating the neighbouring land as of squatter right. Many of those near Mombasa claimed to be of Arab descent through membership either of the Tisa Taifa (nine tribes) or of the Thelatha Taifa (three tribes) and presumably belonged to a very early wave of settlement of coast Arabs, scarcely recognised as such by the later immigrants. They engaged in petty trade, but retail trade in the towns had passed into the hands of Indians, some of whom had been on the East African coast for generations.
Among other elements in the population there was, in the Kilifi and Malindi districts, an increased infiltration of Nyika from the hinterland. Further north, in the area beyond Malindi – between Mambrui and the Tana River – there was a stretch of fly-free country where a section of the Galla, who were originally from Ethiopia, lived and kept cattle. The Pokomo inhabited the Tana Delta and upriver along the banks for about 200 miles while, in the off-shore islands of Lamu and in parts of the adjoining mainland lived elements of the Bajun, of whom there were only a few thousand in Kenya. They were lighter skinned and straighter-haired than other East African tribes and they divided their time between agriculture, fishing and cutting poles in the mangrove swamps, which they transported to Lamu for export to Oman. The Sultan of Witu was himself a Bajun.
In the first decade of the Protectorate, while the seat of government was still at Mombasa, the commissioner travelled freely in the coastal districts and was able to give them a large share of his attention. A telegraph line was laid through the bush to connect them with headquarters, and staff for administrative, medical, police and even agricultural services was provided on a scale which, modest indeed, was generous in proportion to the tiny revenues of the country. By their efforts, combined with those of the Arab officers, it was possible at least to keep up appearances, if not to make progress. Thus encouraged, several European firms ventured capital on coconut, cotton and rubber plantations, to be followed later by sisal and at least one sugar plantation. But when the seat of government was moved to Nairobi the coast again fell into decline. Much of the land between the towns and village settlements reverted to bush, especially in the Kilifi district. Sanye bushmen again ranged the scrub in search of elephants and hunted and trapped small game. Elephants came down to the coast in June to bathe in Kilifi creek to rid themselves of mange. Over large stretches of country tsetse fly was returning and rendered wide areas impossible for keeping cattle.
It was not, however, a total collapse. Several of the wealthier Arabs, especially those around Lamu and some near Mombasa and in the neighbourhood of Witu, managed to keep their former plantations under some degree of cultivation. Others sold their plantations to Europeans or Asians, while there were many cases in which plantations, once of considerable size, had been split up under the Mohammedan system of inheritance into quite small pieces where the heirs eked out a precarious livelihood. This was seen especially in the Tana River delta, where the fragments were so small as to be scarcely even worth the cost of registration.
Efforts by Europeans to start plantations on a wider scale had had, at this date, little or no success. Rubber was a failure and so was cotton at that time. Coconuts were proving a very poor investment, and the price of sisal was dangerously low. As I went up the coast road in 1918 I met the last of the Malindi rubber planters on his final way out. Shortly after this the fortunes of the coast reached about their lowest ebb, with conditions of acute food shortage almost amounting to famine, followed by the outbreak of Spanish influenza. Maize had to be imported from South Africa, and it was dealt out, partly, by issue to selected traders who had to be trusted to distribute it fairly under supervision of the liwali, and partly by road construction relief works, the pay for one day's work being a pot of heaped maize. This pot, called a pishi, was a recognised measure holding six pounds of maize when heaped or six pounds of rice when cut off flat. The day's pay, therefore, was calculated to provide a full ration for the worker himself and enough for three other adults besides, which was the surplus which he took home to his family. The year became known as N'daa ya pishi moja, while the former famine of 1898 was the N'daa ya mahunia – the pot famine and the gunny-bag famine. The Spanish influenza, following soon afterwards, proved much the greater affliction of the two, because there was no known remedy. Tea drinking was advised for those who could afford it; and hot water for those who could not. Doses of kerosene oil were held by some to be efficacious but, perhaps fortunately, this advice did not arrive until the epidemic was virtually over. In spite of rumours to the contrary I do not think the mortality was very serious at the coast, certainly not nearly as grave as it was with the Kikuyu upcountry. The only exception to the general depression along the coast at this time was Mombasa Island itself, which enjoyed comparative prosperity through being the port and railhead for upcountry.
In all other district stations of the Kenya coast – reduced to five by the secession of Jubaland – administrative staffs had dwindled until there was only one British officer in charge of each of them in addition to the Arab officers maintained under the treaty. Departmental officers were almost non-existent except for an occasional posting on temporary duty. When extra help was needed it had to be obtained from provincial headquarters at Mombasa or from Nairobi.
With staff so low and almost no money available, there was little the district administration could do to arrest the process of decay. It was easier to see what was required to be done than how to do it, how to tackle the principal sources of decline, among which apathy, disease, drink and debt were prominent; to get the land, including abandoned plantations, back into agricultural use; to improve the quality of produce; to foster the dhow and fishing industries and the small local handicrafts and check the decline in coastal trade. Often the only weapon was hope, but at least the coast was peaceful and the people friendly.
Of the Arab officers maintained under the terms of the treaty, there was an average of about three per district. The kathi was the one with the most clear-cut duties to perform. He was concerned with matters of Islamic law, arising chiefly in connection with marriage, divorce, inheritance questions, and the administration of wakf, or consecrated lands.4 The other Arab officers – liwalis and mudirs – had titles which, except in the case of the senior liwali for the coast, were higher than the nature of their duties warranted. They appeared to regard their duties in different ways. Some seemed to consider their small salary as a pension, and sufficiently earned by acting as social head of the local Arab community. It was a defensible point of view, for there was nothing prescribed; but they were more useful when, besides giving special attention to their own communities, they undertook also to cooperate in the general administration of the coast population, African as well as Arab. There was so much fusion of blood amongst them that I recollect no difficulty in getting the African headmen to accept it. They were practically all Mohammedans in the Coast Strip, except the Nyika encroachers, who usually became so before long.
Except for a short period when the Nyika tribe5 was administered from a centre inland, the boundaries of all the coast districts extended far into the hinterland. It was essential that produce from the interior should have easy access to the small coast ports as well as to Mombasa and the railway, so road communications were gradually improved and, as they lost their fear of slavery, many of the Nyika infiltrated into the Coast Strip and settled on vacant land. They were in fact trespassing on land which, in most cases, was under some form of claim and awaiting adjudication, but, on the other hand, they were clearing it of bush, putting it to good agricultural use and, in the process, opening up the landscape and warding off infestation by fly. Seeing that the main problem of administration was how to check the decline of the coast, get some heart into the thoroughly dispirited population, and try to restore some measure of prosperity, these encroachments were accounted an asset and best left undisturbed, at least until a specific issue for adjudication of the land arose.6
The Africans in this part of the coast were unenterprising compared with most upcountry tribes and lacking in political cohesion. The Arab domination had gone and their headmen had little authority. Order had therefore to be effected, mostly following upcountry lines with native councils and tribunals. But the tempo of progress was slow. Many Africans were extremely improvident, especially the Nyika from the hinterland, and were constantly in debt to Indian shopkeepers who advanced them loans. These loans were mostly of food in the hungry season, given against the security of growing crops, and were usually advanced on a basis of sevenfold repayment. Rescuing these people from this state of economic servitude was a chief preoccupation. Attempts to deal with the matter by regulation were never successful, for there was as yet no usury ordinance so framed as to cover such transactions, so the best hope was to show to fair minded Indians that their methods must cease if agriculture and, consequently, their own businesses were ever to prosper on the coast.
Apart from the Arab community, which was generally abstemious, drinking among the Africans was often carried to great excess. Palm wine could be very strong, especially when laced with Nubian gin, and the places where it was brewed, though usually hidden in the bush, were easily traced by the smell. Because they were often the scene of violent crime they had to be kept under control, so the experiment was tried of bringing them out into the open where they could be licensed and easily inspected. Fear that this policy would increase drunkenness rather than diminish it proved groundless and, as the idea was developed in later years, these places became social clubs and a valuable source of local government revenue. It also proved possible, by regulation, to give the owners of the palms and tappers a better deal.7
Agriculture, forest produce, fishing and the dhow-carrying trade were the chief economic activities. Ivory, once significant, was now of minor importance. Few could afford the fee for an elephant licence and ‘found’ ivory had by law to be handed in, payment being withheld until the circumstances of the find were proved. There was some smuggling and poaching of ivory and rhino horn but it seemed not to be in any great quantity.8 Rope, sails, mat bags, lace caps, carpet mats attractively coloured with local vegetable dyes, well made locally, and some weaving, carpentry and wood carving were also sent. There were silversmiths too, but they were mostly Indians, often working in Indian rupees illegally melted down.
The coast belt was rich in the diversity of its agricultural produce. The plantation giants – coconut palms, mangos, and cashew nut trees – dominated the scene as they must have done for centuries. All were of great value in the general life of the countryside, and every part of the coconut palm had its local uses. However, it had little export value. The market for copra showed no expansion and excessive tapping of the trees for palm wine had spoilt the yield. Although limited use of the oil was made in Mombasa soap factories, started about this time, and fronds for thatching were sold upcountry, the planting of coconuts beyond the requirements of local needs had had its day. Neither mangos nor bananas were of good enough quality to have much export potential but there was more hope for cashew nuts. The quality of the nuts was excellent and there was no lack of demand, but the problem here was that the trees were so scattered as to make collection and processing difficult. Nevertheless, at a later stage, a processing plant was started. It seemed, however, that the less conspicuous crops would have to be relied on to bring prosperity to the coast. They included rice from the Tana River (the planting of which could be much extended through irrigation), sesame, groundnuts, castor and other vegetable oils, beans, cotton, chillies and a little tobacco. There was also fruit – oranges, limes, pineapples, grapefruit, mangustines and pomegranates – all of which grew well.
There was not much that could be done about these things in the early years before agricultural officers arrived. But a start was made by constant exhortation and attention to such matters as the better selection of seed so that produce coming to market should be more uniform. Further, it was ensured that sales should be for cash and not barter which had generally meant a double profit to the traders at the expense of the growers. Strenuous efforts were also made to get more of the land back into use. As for livestock farming on the coast, it was entirely in African hands, and was confined to the hinterland and the fly-free areas of the coast belt. Its problems were no different from what they were in the tribal areas upcountry.
***
The year I spent among the Pokomo on the Tana River was a light charge among a pleasant and contented people.9 The district commissioner at Lamu told me when I was on my way there, ‘You've got a most absurd district, four hundred miles long and two miles wide’. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but it may have been true that the river was as long as that, with all its windings, and that nearly all the cultivation was along its banks. All the Pokomo lived there, while the plains of the right bank were sparsely occupied by Galla and an influx of Giriama from the Nyika country. A few miles away on the left bank lay Witu and the Lamu district and inland of that was Somali country, part of the Northern Frontier province. With the latter I had nothing to do beyond providing them with fly-free access routes to the river for their cattle.
The district station for Tana River was Kipini at the mouth of the Ozi Creek into which the river flowed. There was practically nothing there beyond the official quarters and a small customs post, a shop or two and the huts of a few aged ex-slaves drawing government pensions as having no other means. There had been a mission station close by but this had been abandoned, and there was practically no native habitation within several miles. There were a few privately-owned dhows, a government launch, a lighter which it could tow, and a fleet of about 40 dug-out canoes. The main function of the station was as a base to rest and refit and enter up the books and accounts between up-river safaris. In order to avoid too frequent visits I fixed up the lighter as an office and took a clerk with me up the river so that wherever I happened to be at the time became the district office. When the river was in flood the launch could go the whole length of the Tana Valley almost to the rapids; at most other times one could generally reach the middle river and then proceed by canoe or on foot.
The Pokomo of the lower and middle river were Swahili-speaking. They mostly appeared to be of no professed religion. Those of the delta, however, tended towards Islam, while along the middle river there was a chain of Methodist mission stations exercising some local influence. Further up the river were people of other speech and, probably, other stock. They were known by the Pokomo as korokoro, but they may well have been Tharaka like those of Embu district. There was also a settlement of the Boni, who were akin to the Sanye and Dorobo.
The staple food of the Pokomo was rice and bananas, though maize and millets and all the usual coast crops grew well. There was no lack of palm wine made both from coconuts and also from mkindu and mtwapa palms growing wild on the plains, although the use of the latter two was restricted to prevent wasteful destruction. The presence of ‘fly’ prevented the keeping of livestock beyond chickens and very few goats, but there was occasional barter with Galla from the hinterland. These Galla – and the Boni too – would sometimes come in with ivory which they alleged to have been ‘found’.
As a rule the Pokomo had no great difficulty in feeding themselves, but the river, flooding twice a year, was apt to play tricks. It would sometimes alter course for a few miles or would heap a man's land not only with silt but sometimes with sand. From time to time the river failed to flood and there was drought. More often floods were excessive and would carry all before them, causing widespread devastation. It was therefore obvious that, if ever proper use was to be made of the great potentials of the Tana Valley, extensive irrigation and protection works would have to be undertaken. The need was the more urgent having regard to the pressure of growing population and expansion amongst the Kikuyu and other large tribes.10 But such development was far beyond the resources then available. All one could do was to study and promote the methods of self-help that the Pokomo themselves were employing to protect their villages. This they did with little ramparts built along the banks. They also dug conduit trenches, which they called m'belezo, which led off over the dead-level plains to depressions further back in which temporary lakes were formed, some of them almost permanent. In some of the worst flooded areas of the middle reaches of the river the Pokomo built their huts on stilts and communicated by canoe. In these places rice was planted on rafts ready to be transplanted to seed beds when the river subsided; later it was transplanted a second time into the paddy fields.
The Pokomo had no money to speak of and not much need of it. Apart from occasional finds of ivory, their only source of wealth was the export of rice and bananas to Lamu and a little tobacco, roped and coiled, to Italian Somaliland. These things they transported by sangalis, rafts holding about a ton and a quarter weight constructed over two canoes placed side by side. Rice to a European palate is rice, but the Arabs were very fastidious about it. There were just three of the many varieties grown on the river that had any value for them. It was thus very necessary to keep the seed unmixed, and much attention had to be devoted to that end.
Mosquitoes existed in such hordes up the river that they had to be swept off rather than swatted. The Pokomo had acquired a tolerance of malaria and seldom exhibited its symptoms, but constant biting may have affected their bloodstream causing lethargy. The worst disease plaguing the Pokomo however was yaws, a disfiguring complaint causing hideous growths. There was practically no treatment available, although a little could be done by sending a man to hospital at Lamu for treatment, but I never saw any marked result. I felt so strongly about the matter that I made a special journey to Nairobi to persuade the authorities to undertake a campaign of inoculation. Happily they yielded to my importunities and a team of two doctors was sent to tour the whole length of the river giving inoculations. Whether this had any permanent effect in reducing the spread of the disease I am unable to say, but I am quite sure that the immediate effects were extremely beneficial.11
When I had been on the river a year or so, the Tana and Lamu districts were combined and I found myself in charge. The two areas had been so interdependent that the combination was logical and to the advantage of both. The Arab community of Lamu, especially their elders, lived in an atmosphere of sedate resignation, addicted to ceremonial and acutely conscious of the dignity of life. It was a pleasant enough change to be there, provided one could get away on safari.12
It was well after 1920 when the first motorcar reached Malindi, and none had as yet got as far as Lamu. As there were no lorries on the coast, the transport of produce was by sea-going dhow and the occasional steamer; the only alternative was by head-load porterage. Large dhows from Oman still visited the coast ports to sell carpets and other merchandise and generally, on the return journey, they carried mangrove poles for Arabia. Dhows of that size, however, were now seldom built on the Kenya coast. In 1923 there were, I believe, only three of 60 tons or more on the register at Lamu and only one in the course of construction. There were also about a dozen on the 40 tons register, but most were under 20 tons. While the ownership of the dhows remained in Arab or Swahili hands they were usually run on family lines and paid off, if not handsomely, at least well enough. There was a happy-go-lucky spirit and well-understood rules about the respective shares and responsibilities of owner, captain and crew, and they worked well so long as they had a common interest. But Indian traders with a keener sense of business had bought out many of the owners and squabbles arose with the crews. All too often they ended with crews taking advances and getting deeper and deeper in the owner's debt. It was necessary, therefore, to negotiate an amnesty from time to time, if the industry was not to be ruined.
As for the fishing industry, it carried on using its traditional methods of traps, nets and boats. Regulations were made from time to time but on the whole it went on without much innovation or control except for some improvement in the better organisation of the fish markets. It was not until about the 1930s, with Japanese and other non-Africans taking an interest, that signs of expansion began to appear.
The slow pace of change on the coast had its exception in Mombasa. By 1924, the date of my first posting there, a period of considerable economic and constructional expansion was already in progress. With the assistance of substantial loans, the first two deep-water berths at the port of Kilindini were nearing completion and the whole of that area was being redesigned and reconstructed.13 At the same time a new town plan was being worked out, and a little later a substantial sum was provided for road widening and such other improvements in the Arab old town as were practicable without destroying its original character.
***
When I renewed my acquaintance with the coast in 1933 there were signs of moderate, but definite, improvement in all coast districts, particularly in the fields of agriculture and public health. A new hospital had been built at Kilifi with two British doctors and a nursing sister, and all up and down the coast there was evidence that health measures, combined with bush clearing and cultivation and the consequent opening up of the landscape into wider prospects was having good effect. Malaria was well under control, and disfiguring diseases such as yaws and elephantiasis were far less commonly seen. The general African population, among whom were now large numbers of Luo from Nyanza Province employed on public works or on European sisal plantations, appeared better fed and more alert. Cotton at Malindi, once a failure, was now being grown with success under supervision of the agricultural department. Sisal plantations under corporate ownership had survived a series of poor prices and were also expanding. Road transport facilities had been much improved. Even the livestock industry was not being entirely neglected: a fly-free route had been found through Lamu district for the export of slaughter stock to Zanzibar and at Mazeras on the railway a cooperative dairy, established by the joint efforts of the Nyika native council and the veterinary department, was taking an increasing part in the Mombasa milk supply. Every year more holiday-makers, both European and Asian, were coming from the highlands to the coast in search of ‘sea air and sanity’. In short, the corner had been turned and there was no more fear of the Coast ‘going back’.
1 The best guides to the historical status of the coastal strip and how it then affected coastal politics in the colonial period are A. I. Salim, Swahili-speaking Peoples of Kenya's Coast, 1895–1965 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973) and James R. Brennan, ‘Lowering the Sultan's flag: Sovereignty and decolonization in coastal Kenya’, Comparative Studies in Society and History l (2008), pp. 831–61.
2 For the international commercial history of the coast, see the references to Chapter 1 above. For the history of the local peoples and their settlements, the most enthusiastic is James de Vere Allen, Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon (London: James Currey, 1993); for more sober assessments, see John Sutton, A Thousand Years of East Africa and Mark Horton, Shanga: The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa (London: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1990 & 1996, respectively).
3 The authoritative work on this process, Cooper's From Slaves to Squatters, adds to this analysis the initiative shown by ex-slaves in exploiting the uncertain property rights to which Fazan refers. For a wider social history of the coast in Fazan's day that argues that internal struggles between Africans, between generations or between patrons and clients, were the motor of what Fazan and his colleagues saw as decline, see Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Fazan's memories are especially useful here, since historians have not paid as much attention to the coast in the colonial period as to upcountry Kenya.
4 For the Islamic legal system in coastal Kenya, see also Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change, Chapter IV.
5 Now called Mijikenda. Historians differ as to when the Mijikenda first became aware of themselves as one people. Spear, Kaya Complex, argues that this consciousness grew in the nineteenth century while Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda, believes it to have been a colonial phenomenon.
6 The indeterminacy of title at the coast made land-grabbing easy for political elites in the 1990s, for which see Karuti Kanyinga, ‘The land question in Kenya: Struggles, accumulation and changing politics’ (Roskilde University: PhD dissertation, 1998).
7 For a history of what was of as much concern to African elders as to colonial officials, see Justin Willis, Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa 1850–1999 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).
8 Unlike the twenty-first-century threats to both elephant and rhino.
9 Another under-researched people, in whom Fazan clearly took great interest.
10 Since independence the large settlement of Kikuyu in the Tana River basin has caused great political controversy.
11 The eradication of yaws, latterly with the aid of penicillin, was one of the indisputable benefits of colonialism.
12 Lamu, now a UNESCO World Heritage site under threat from oil-related development, is thought to be the oldest continually inhabited town in Kenya, dating from the twelfth century CE. See Patricia Romero, Lamu: History, Society and Family in an East African Port City (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997).
13 Fazan here passes over one of the several Kenya controversies – some say scandals – over the triangular relationship between concession, capital investment and profit in pursuit of ‘development’. Government concessions of (African) land were intended to attract private investors; if private capital were then risked in developing the land the question then became one of how the subsequent utility and profit should be shared between (white) private and (white) public interests. The case here relates to the creation of Mombasa's port facilities, initially on the shorefront of a concession earlier made to Ewart Grogan. For opposing views, the first focusing on scandal and the second emphasising the risks and costs of entrepreneurship, see William McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within: A Short Political History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), Chapters IX and XV, and Paice, Lost Lion, Chapter 20.