HISTORIES OF A COPPER PENDANT

  by Martin Walsh

My Giriama copper pendant

There's a copper pendant hanging on my wall, one of the few examples of crafts(wo)manship that I've kept from Mombasa. I love its weight (c.75 g) and slinkiness: in my hands it feels like a miniature piece of chainmail. I can't remember now exactly when and where I bought it; maybe in the handicraft shop of Tototo Home Industries on Msanifu Kombo Street; or perhaps Labeka, the well-stocked craft shop on Moi Avenue whose owner was a member of Tototo's board. I worked with Tototo in 1985-88, studying the women's group programme that this Mombasa-based NGO ran with the support of World Education in Boston. The women's groups, scattered throughout what was then Kenya's Coast Province, supplied some of the local handicrafts that were sold in both shops (McCormack et al. 1986: 50-55; Walsh 1989: 375-376), including pendants made by Giriama women.

Kamba girl's apron (from Lindblom 1920)

I wrote a little about these pendants in my study of the Tototo-assisted women's groups and their enterprises (Walsh 1986; abridged in McCormack et al. 1986). They were generally referred to in Giriama (aka Giryama) as ndale, a name that one woman told me properly referred to the copper wire that they were manufactured with. The Reverends Krapf and Rebmann defined ndale as brass (or copper) beads (1887: 299), and noted the expression mudzele wa ndale as the name for a Kamba women's leather apron decorated with the same, and in Rabai the border of beads around a woman's dress (1887: 268). W. E. Taylor (1891: 16) likewise recorded ndale as a Giriama name for brass beads; while making it clear that the generic term for brass, ng'andu, could also refer to copper (ng'andu t'une, 'red brass', 1891: 20, 28). In her Giryama-English Dictionary Florence Deed also defines ndale as 'brass beads' (1964: 71), and has an entry for ngudhi, a 'neck ornament of ndale stitched on leather' (1964: 74).

These names are interesting because they provide clues to the history of these crafts and this particular kind of ornamentation. The Giriama term ndale is clearly related to Kamba nthale, glossed in a modern dictionary as 'brass or iron ornaments affixed to the clothes of women' (Mwau 2006:195), and in an older work as 'little brass or iron cylinders sometimes used in making old women's aprons and as ornaments on the straps of the nthũngĩ', a kind of small woven bag (A.I.M. 1939: 159, 161). According to Charles Hobley only the brass beads on a married woman's apron or kimengo were called nthale: iron beads had their own name (1910: 72). Gerhard Lindblom called these brass beads nzale (1920: 374), a local variant (or mistake) for nthale. He also illustrates a young women's neck collar called nguthi (1920: 377), a name clearly related to the Giriama ngudhi. In this case though the collar is made of iron chains, not beads or cylinders sewn onto leather. The Kamba are inland neighbours and have long been traders among the Giriama and other Mijikenda, and it may be that these items of adornment and their names were taken from them. Or they might have been introduced by the historical Segeju, a group of people closely related to the Kamba, who had a significant impact on Mijikenda society and language in the middle of the last millennium. Linguistic evidence suggests that the Segeju were adept at metal-working and transferred a number of related practices to the Mijikenda and the Giriama in particular (Walsh 2013: 35).

'Gohu elder's amulet', Cantor Art Center, Stanford University
(Accession No. 2012.114)

The ndale pendant in my possession is made of copper beads (twisted from wire) and copper chain threaded together with twine; there are also a few odd brass beads strung together with the copper ones. There's a pendant in the collection of the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University that is very similar in form, but is stitched on leather and includes a central panel of three cowrie shells. The online catalogue describes it as a 'Gohu elder's amulet', the gohu being one of the 'secret societies' that senior Giriama elders could be initiated into. Collected in 1978, it looks a lot older than this, or at least grimy and worn, so much so that it's not clear whether it was made of brass or copper beads and chain. In The Wrath of Koma, Maurice Kambishera Mumba's novel about tradition and tragedy in late colonial Kaumaland, the fictional Jibana 'medicineman' (mganga) Mokoli Mwiru uses a powerful talisman called 'Chiwele', inherited from his grandfather, to access the world of spirits and divine the spiritual affliction and possible courses of action open to his Kauma patient, Old Chembe (Mumba 1987: 6-13, 21-24, 112-113, 143). Chiwele, used here as a personal name, is described as 'a leathery object coated with small cowrie shells, which was dangling from his neck at the end of a short chain' (1987: 6). The cognate term kiwele, plural viwele, was used by modern Giriama producers as the generic name for the women's copper and brass pendants that they made (see below) and that many women first acquired when they were married. This perhaps represents the wider application of a term that was once more restricted in use, and referred originally to the chains hanging down from the amulets. Elsewhere in his novel Mumba refers to ndale as a kind of 'traditional necklace' worn by women (1987: 32, 146), and this indeed seems to be the more widely used name.      

Bomani in 1985

I could probably ferret more information out of the literature, and Mijikenda colleagues and scholars more familiar with their culture could no doubt tell me much more (please do!). I wasn't aware of any of this when I was first working for Tototo. I did, however, learn something about the contemporary making and marketing of Giriama ndale pendants when I was undertaking the third of my women's group case studies in a village some 20 km north of Malindi. Bomani Women's Group had its origins in an adult education class (ngombaru) that started in 1973; Tototo began working with the group in 1978, at the very beginning of its women's group programme. When I arrived to study the group in late 1985 it was best known for its bakery project: for a time this had been the showpiece of Tototo's programme. But the first enterprise that Tototo had fostered in Bomani involved the production and sale of ndale. Here's what I wrote about it in my 1986 report:

  More lucrative [than a group farm] while it lasted was the handicraft trade initiated by Tototo. This was based upon the production of traditional Giriama ndale necklaces for the tourist market. The women bought lengths of ndale copper wire from specialist producers and fashioned these into viwele, heavy pendants, and virangi, with brass and coloured beads added. 1½ feet of wire, bought for 1 sh, was enough to make 2 or 3 viwele, the commonest product, sold to Tototo for 10 sh each, while virangi fetched 20 sh. Women report being able to make up to 100 or 150 viwele in a week and at one point group members engaging in this trade are recorded as making between 35 sh and 500 sh each in a fortnight. Tototo shop records show that in 1978 14,969 sh was paid out to individuals and 920 sh to the group, which took the proceeds from one necklace in every batch an individual produced. This money was ploughed back into the bakery along with the money raised from group subscriptions. The women, however, produced more necklaces than the Tototo shop could sell, and after 2 years the trade came to a halt along with other forms of handicraft production which Tototo had attempted to introduce. Looking back upon this enterprise group members blame Tototo for its failure, an experience similar to Mkwiro's [another group that I studied]. The local, Malindi, market for necklaces remains small -- they are bought by Kamba middlemen and sold to tourists in the town -- and ndale production is not a significant source of income in Bomani; much the position when the group's trade with Tototo started. (1986:

A young member of Bomani Women's Group in 1985

There's more detail in my field notes, though group members gave different accounts of the sequence of events and the role of the various actors. According to Bomani's chairwoman, they were shown how to make ndale in 1978 by Daudi Mtingi, one of the three older men (wazee) who had started the adult education class that gave rise to the women's group. He was already marketing the ndale made by his two wives, who were founder group members, taking the pendants to Kamba middlemen in both Malindi and Mombasa. Tototo started taking them for sale in Mombasa in the same year: the pendants were collected every Thursday or sometimes taken to Mombasa by the group's secretary, Esther Kenga (who later became a Tototo employee).

According to another group member, Mary Ngonyo, they bought strings of ndale beads that had already been made by folding small lengths of copper ('red') or brass ('white') wire around pieces of thread (nyuzi) using a special instrument, and it was these strings that they bought at the price of a shilling for each length of around 1½ feet. The women then added coloured beads (virangi), bought in the local shops, to make neck pieces, and chains (viwele) to make the pendants, which were rather easier to produce. At first they just took them to Malindi for sale, but found it difficult to sell them. It was Esther Kenga who first wrote to and visited Tototo. There were around 20 women in Bomani Women's Group at this time. They were joined by women from the nearby village of Madzayani when they heard that there was a market for ndale, though after Tototo stopped taking the pendants they left to form their own group. As well as ndale, Tototo also persuaded the Bomani women to produce small woven bags, baskets, and straw hats for sale. But all this came to an end when Tototo told them to stop. By this time running the bakery had become the group's main focus. Some women continued to make both copper and brass ndale as well as other items of women's jewellery, and two or three years before I did my research Kamba buyers had begun coming directly to the village to purchase them. The group's chairwoman still kept a few pendants to show guests and in 1985 had presented some to a group of official visitors from Zimbabwe.

Feeding the next generation, Bomani 1985

The failure of collective marketing is an all too familiar tale. Selling local handicrafts was a great idea, but supply and demand weren't always well matched. Tototo's handicraft operation had problems of its own: staff often lacked key marketing and other business skills, and the shop wasn't particularly well run. To make matters worse, some managers were suspected to be dipping their hands into the till or fiddling the accounts -- widespread practices in an era of rampant corruption at every level of society. It's ironic that just as field staff were advising women's groups on how best to manage their various enterprises, their colleagues in Mombasa were sometimes struggling to manage the NGO's own affairs. Although Tototo received extensive help from World Education and other partners, the shop lost the comparative advantage that it once had, and the organisation itself was eventually closed down. Nevertheless, in the heyday of pendant production and marketing a fair number of these attractive handicrafts must have found their way into the hands -- and perhaps even around the necks -- of visitors to the coast. I imagine that they are still made in at least small quantities, though I can't see any evidence of this on the internet.

Kamba girl's necklace (from Lindblom 1920)

Disappointed though they were by Tototo's actions, the ndale episode wasn't an entirely negative one in the history of Bomani women's group and the evolution of local gender relations (and as it happens, greater disappointments were to come, detailed in my 1986 study). There are two particularly heartwarming stories that deserve to be told and remembered in this context.  One is the role that Daudi Mtingi played in fostering and supporting the adult education class, an associated nursery class, and then the women's group -- as well as introducing them to ndale production and marketing, he also provided significant assistance to the bakery business by injecting capital into it at a time when it was floundering, and then selflessly handing the profits over to the group. The second is a story that I've already told in brief in an article about the gendered control and use of income from group activities, which explains why women's income generation doesn't necessarily translate into their empowerment within joint households (Walsh 1987). Following a long personal struggle to attain economic independence and the right to educate her son, Bomani's chairwoman, Jumwa Kiti, encouraged group members to invest their profits from pendant sales in goats, and kept their money in safekeeping until they had accumulated enough to do so. This acted as a check on husbands' ability to commandeer their wives' ndale profits, and though it didn't stop some of them from later appropriating their wives' livestock, it did enable a number of group members to accumulate and exercise a degree of control over assets that wouldn't otherwise have been possible.

It's quite likely that the pendant hanging on my wall was made by one of those women, and possible that it contributed in its own small way to her greater empowerment and the improved welfare of her children. It might equally have been a token of hope that turned to disappointment, as her newly-acquired wealth was seized by a greedy husband or her expectations of greater profit were dashed by Tototo. And whatever the case, it may well have helped to line the pockets of one of that organisation's less scrupulous employees. I can only guess. But I feel much more satisfied having these and other possible histories to ponder than I would have done without knowing anything about my shining pendant's past.  

References

A.I.M. 1939. A Kikamba-English Dictionary. Compiled by: The Language Committee of the Africa Inland Mission in Ukamba (third unrevised edition, 1970). Nairobi: The Literary Centre of Kenya for The Afrolit Association.

Deed, Florence 1964. Giryama-English Dictionary. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.

Hobley, C. W. 1910. Ethnology of A-Kamba and Other East African Bantu Tribes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krapf, L. and Rebmann, J. 1887. A Nika-English Dictionary (edited by T. H. Sparshott). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Lindblom, Gerhard 1920. The Akamba in British East Africa: An Ethnological Monograph. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeri Aktiebolag.

McCormack, Jeanne, Martin Walsh and Candace Nelson 1986. Women's Group Enterprises: A Study of the Structure of Opportunity on the Kenya Coast. Boston: World Education, Inc.

Mumba, Maurice Kambishera 1987. The Wrath of Koma. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya.

Taylor, W. E. 1891. Giryama Vocabulary and Collections. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Walsh, Martin 1986. Interim Report for a Study of Income Generation and its Effects among Women’s Groups in Kenya’s Coast Province. Report to World Education Inc., Boston.

Walsh, Martin 1987. Buying power? Some outcomes of income for women. Reports (World Education Inc., Boston) 27: 14-16.

Walsh, Martin 1989. Tototo Home Industries: assistance strategies for the future. In C. K. Mann, M. S. Grindle and P. Shipton (eds.) Seeking Solutions: Framework and Cases for Small Enterprise Development Programs. West Hartford: Kumarian Press, Inc. 365-385.

Walsh, Martin 2013. The Segeju Complex? Linguistic evidence for the precolonial making of the Mijikenda. In Rebecca Gearhart and Linda Giles (eds.) Contesting Identities: The Mijikenda and Their Neighbors in Kenyan Coastal Society. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. 25-51.

THE WRATH OF THE ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

by Martin Walsh

I've just finished The Wrath of Koma, Maurice Kambishera Mumba's entertaining tale about tradition and tragedy among the Kauma, published by Heinemann Kenya in 1987. The back-cover blurb of the paperback introduces the story:

Old Chembe, a Kauma man from the Am[i]dzichenda people of the Kenya coast, is gravely worried about his son, Dundu, who appears to be going mad. He travels across many ridges to see Mokoli Mwiru, the famous medicineman, for a diagnosis of his son's problem. Mokoli Mwiru gives his diagnosis: Dundu, born after intercession to the ancestral sprits, is under the wrathful attack of the spirits who resent the ingratitude of Chembe's family. Mokoli Mwiru prescribes a ceremony of appeasement.

Old Chembe, weak and irresolute, botches the ceremony... What tragic fate awaits him, his son and his larger family as the unappeased spirits seeks their revenge?

I won't spoil the plot here. Although I bought this short novel in Mombasa shortly after it came out, this is the first time that I've read it from cover to cover. It may not be great literature, but I've enjoyed Mumba's story-telling, the tales-within-tales, the dissolution of the text into poetry, and his wry description of rural life and morality in the waning years of colonial rule. The Wrath of Koma is especially interesting for its anthropology, and not just because the Kauma are among the least written about of the Mijikenda. I've mined Mumba's tale in the past for ethnographic and in particular ethnoornithological tidbits (as in my 'Birds of omen and little flying animals with wings'), but there's much more in it that deserves to be exposed and analysed anthropologically. This includes passages that revolve around the gendered perceptions and motivations of spirit possession and the sometimes violent reactions of men to the claims made upon them. Hearing the distant sound of an exorcism ritual (kupunga pepo), the protagonist reflects on his own experience:

As the sound of the pepo drums faded in the background, becoming less and less audible as he plodded on, Old Chembe thought of the costs he had incurred in having pepo [possessory spirits] exorcised from his four wives.

  There were moments when Old Chembe wondered whether his wives had not conspired to feign that they were possessed by pepo so that they could acquire items which he had refused to buy for them. But Old Chembe was not like his eastern neighbour Jaramba, who once flogged his wives with his walking stick to exorcise the demons in them--none of them 'dared' to be possessed by pepo again after that! (p.29)

The text goes on to detail how Jaramba came to administer this punishment, and how Old Chembe acceded to requests for the treatment of his possessed wives despite his scepticism. This is literature grounded in the observation of everyday life, a fictionalised account that conjures up the so-called 'deprivation theory' of spiritual affliction (Lewis 1971: 72-89), and invites further analysis with reference to current understandings of gender-based violence and its genesis in the imbalances of power and gendered patterns of inequality in the domestic and public spheres. It's a pity that The Wrath of Koma isn't more widely known. Maurice Mumba was the Town Clerk of Mombasa when it was published, and didn't follow it up with another novel. I don't know what has become of him since. When I lived in Mombasa I actually bought three copies of his book, one to give to another anthropologist. Although I only used it for many years as a work of reference, I'm glad that I finally got round to reading it.

References

Lewis, Ioan M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Mumba, Maurice Kambishera 1987. The Wrath of Koma. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya.

Walsh, Martin 1992. Birds of omen and little flying animals with wings. East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin 22 (1): 2-9.

JIM ALLEN'S UNFINISHED WORK (and an unfinished conversation)

Languishing in a hospital bed recently, my feverish mind swirled with memories of earlier hospitalisations - my own and others' - many of them in East Africa. The institution I came to know best, as both patient and visitor, was Mombasa Hospital, memorably situated on the sea front next to Fort Jesus. If I close my eyes I can still feel the strong breeze blowing off the Indian Ocean into an upstairs ward. And I'll never forget my first visit there, the last time that I saw Jim Allen.

James de Vere Allen was an independent scholar who played a key role in the establishment of the Lamu Museum. He became an authority on coastal history and culture, and is perhaps best known now as the author of the posthumously published Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon (1993). When I first came to live in Mombasa in 1985 Jim was ensconced on his farm in Kwale, to the south-west of the town. For a long time I knew of him only through other researchers, all of whom described him in glowing terms. I only recall meeting Jim twice, once when he came to find me in the Jubilee Building on Moi Avenue, where I worked. A diary entry for 28 April 1988 records that I met him in the morning (was this the same occasion?) and gave him a copy of William Frank's Habari na Desturi za Waribe (1953) and (I presume from the cursory entry) Krapf and Rebmann's Nika-English Dictionary (1887) - the latter a photocopy for him to copy and then return. I also gave him my unpublished paper on 'Mijikenda origins' (written in March 1987, but not published until 1992); we must have discussed this at some point, as well as my research on the historical influence of the Segeju on the Mijikenda, but I can't now remember when.

James de Vere Allen Collection (http://archnet.org)

I didn't know that Jim was seriously ill until May 1990, a month before he died. I went to see him in Mombasa Hospital on Thursday 7th June. He looked terribly weak, but found the energy to talk briefly about our different views of Segeju history. We agreed to disagree and continue the conversation when he had "turned the corner" and got better. I squeezed his frail hand and left. That was the last time I saw Jim: he died the following Wednesday, the 13th June 1990. Although I didn't know Jim well, I felt cheated by his death and its rude interruption of our discussion of coastal history. I've regretted ever since that we didn't spend more time together.

As it happens, Jim had already drafted his magnum opus, Swahili Origins. A year or so before he died, knowing that he was seriously ill, he asked the anthropologist John Middleton to edit the sprawling typescript. The resulting book was published in 1993 with a somewhat apologetic preface by Middleton explaining its genesis and warning the reader of its author's unorthodoxy. Like other researchers I was and remain very critical of Swahili Origins. Here's part of what I wrote in a review article at the time:

James de Vere Allen Collection (http://archnet.org)

Before his untimely death in 1990 [...], Jim Allen had already made an outstanding contribution to Swahili studies. Among a variety of achievements, he played a key part in helping to overturn the traditional image, which still lingers in popular literature and tourist brochures, of Swahili culture as an exotic blend of Oriental and African influences in which the former have consistently dominated the latter. Linguists had long realised that Swahili was not a creole or pidgin combining Arabic, Persian and Bantu elements, but a Bantu language with a significant proportion of recent Arabic and other loanwords. Allen was among the first to trace the cultural and historical corollaries of this linguistic observation. In a series of articles published from the 1970s onwards he attacked the traditional emphasis upon exogenous, oriental influences ([an emphasis] encouraged, it must be said, by many Swahili speakers themselves), and highlighted instead the indigenous, African, roots of Swahili culture. The detailed implications of this paradigm shift are still being worked out by younger researchers, many of whom benefited directly from Jim Allen's personal interest and encouragement.

James de Vere Allen Collection (http://archnet.org)

The manuscript of Swahili Origins, having been edited by John Middleton and published posthumously, presents Allen's view of Swahili genesis and his alternative to the orientalist interpretation of Swahili history. The core of this gloriously detailed account is a hypothesis first outlined in his papers published in 1983 and 1984. Allen argues that Swahili society and culture, as well as various institutions among the Mijikenda and other neighbouring people, originated in the interaction between a polyethnic blend of pastoralists and their clients, including indigenous hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers. The dominant alliance of pastoralists included Cushitic speakers and the Segeju (whose contemporary representatives fall into two related groups, one speaking Daisu, a Central Kenya Bantu language, and the other speaking dialects of Swahili and/or Mijikenda). The culmination of this alliance was a unified state, called Great Shungwaya by Allen (after the name of the mythical homeland of various Swahili, Mijikenda and other coastal traditions) and estimated by him to have flourished some time between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Its sequel is hypothesised to have been a series of so-called successor states, relatively familiar to us from the historical record and ushering in the ethnic map of the region as we now know it.

James de Vere Allen Collection (http://archnet.org)

This hypothesis and Allen's idiosyncratic use of different historical sources to support it have already been widely criticised, indeed in some cases dismissed out of hand (as by Spear, 1983). In Swahili Origins Allen has expanded and amplified many details of his account, but done absolutely nothing to answer his critics, who would see Great Shungwaya as no more than a fantasy of his fertile imagination. It is all too easy to find fault with Allen's arguments and cast him as a kind of Erich von Däniken of Swahili studies. It is perhaps more useful to consider why Allen, a master of historical detail, should have clung to such a flawed hypothesis, and what subsequent influence it has had. Despite his work for the Lamu Museum and his living for many years on the Kenya coast, Allen was essentially an armchair historian, which helps to explain both his skill in uncovering obscure documentary references and his largely uncritical interpretation of them. Ironically his successful critique of the orientalist thesis of Swahili origins encouraged his promotion of an inflated account of the indigenous alternative, constructing an imaginary state to counter the traditional picture of coastal civilization as a ready-made import from overseas. To this extent Allen was an unwitting prisoner of the tradition which he sought to overthrow, and his understanding of the variety of everyday coastal life remained subordinate to a continuing fascination with the classical tradition of urban Swahili culture. (1993: 143-144)

Flawed though Jim Allen's thesis is, I remain captivated by the detail in his work, as a source for further exploration if nothing else. For many years I wondered what had been omitted from the original typescript. John Middleton described his editorial work as follows:

My actual 'editing' has comprised several actions. First, the shortening of the original manuscript by over a quarter, almost entirely by the deletion of repetitious sentences and paragraphs. Secondly, the omission of a long final chapter that was intended to be the summary of a second part of the book, seemingly not written: this chapter was clearly cobbled together during Jim's final illness, and is inconsequential, without footnotes, and wanders away from the Swahili: it is not in any sense a conclusion to the whole. Thirdly, the omission of four appendices that are marginal to the main account. In brief, I have shortened, but not 'edited' or 'revised', and I have tried to retain as many of Jim's comments on others' work and approaches as I could. This is a very personal work and I have tried to keep that characteristic. (1993: ix)

James de Vere Allen Collection (http://archnet.org)

Then, in autumn 2004, I met another of Jim Allen's friends at a conference in Oxford, the historian Ed Steinhart, and he told me that he had a copy of the unedited draft of Swahili Origins. On his return to the States Ed scanned the typescript and announced its availability to interested scholars on the H-Africa discussion network. Both of us also made electronic copies for deposit in different libraries (the University of Florida, Rhodes House in Oxford, the British Institute in Nairobi).  Comparison of this draft with the published work shows that aside from making the major excisions that he noted, John Middleton (who died himself in February 2009) had indeed remained largely faithful to Jim's text. The final chapter that he left out was entitled '"Galla incursions" and the demise of Shungwaya': readers can judge for themselves whether this omission and that of the appendices was justified. The version of this chapter in Ed Steinhart's typescript includes foootnotes; John Middleton's comments about their absence suggests that he was working with a different text. I must confess a personal interest in this chapter and especially its footnotes, because that's where Jim made reference to my draft paper on 'Mijikenda origins' and arguments about the influence of the Segeju on the Mijikenda. But seeing my name in his typescript is little comfort. I'd much rather that he'd turned that corner and stuck around to continue our conversation.

References

Allen, James de Vere 1983.  Shungwaya, the Mijikenda, and the traditions. International Journal of African Historical Studies 16 (3): 455-485.

Allen, James de Vere 1984. Shungwaya, the Segeju and Somali history. In T. Labahn (ed.) Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Somali Studies (Volume II: Archaeology and History). Hamburg: Helmut Buske. 35-72.

Allen, James de Vere 1993. Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon [edited by John Middleton]. London: James Currey.

Frank, William 1953. Habari na Desturi za Waribe. London: Sheldon Press.

Horton, Mark 1990. [Obituary of] James de Vere Allen 1936-1990. Azania 25: 108-109.

Krapf, L. and J. Rebmann 1887. Nika-English Dictionary. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Middleton, John 1993. Preface. In Allen 1993: vii-ix.

Spear, Thomas 1983. A Reply by Thomas Spear [appended to Allen 1983]. International Journal of African Historical Studies 16 (3): 484.

Walsh, Martin 1992. Mijikenda origins: a review of the evidence. Transafrican Journal of History 21: 1-18.

Walsh, Martin 1993. Becoming Swahili and Mijikenda [a review article]. Azania 28: 143-147.

MICE-HUNTING, RAT-TRAPPING, RODENT-ROASTING

Twenty-five years ago I went to a World Food Day celebration at Kaloleni in the palm-covered hills to the north of Mombasa. The meeting was presided over by the Kaloleni Divisonal Officer and attended mainly by government agricultural staff and the members of women's groups from the surrounding area. The centrepiece was a display of local foods which everyone was invited to inspect and then taste - after the obligatory singing, speechifying, certificate-giving, and distribution of bottles of sugary-sweet soda. Apart from purple maize cobs and meal of a kind that might have excited Barbara McClintock, the most notable of the local delicacies on offer were roasted rodents. At a glance these looked like grilled fish, but I was assured that they were indeed kadzora (pl. udzora) as this "wild rat" was called in Giriama and other northern Mijikenda dialects. The D.O., who was a Luhya from western Kenya, began his speech by referring to the wide variety of foods on display, "plus kadzora", implying that this particular kind of bushmeat didn't quite qualify. Diets divide cultures and subcultures, and the consumption of rodents and other unusual foods is a marker of social difference that is a staple (no pun intended) of everyday humour (kadzora has now made it onto online chat forums) and of 'human interest' stories in the media (e.g. Lukumbo 1995; Ringa 2004).

Coincidentally, walking back from the meeting in Kaloleni to Chilulu, in Jibana location, we passed some children digging for kadzora. I was told that they could also be caught at night in traps made with a coconut shell. On another day, walking to nearby Tsakarolovu (where anthropologist David Parkin worked), I again saw signs of digging for kadzora, and was told that the burrows could be up to a metre in length. One of my companions asserted that kadzora was in fact a Giriama name for an animal that Jibana and Chonyi speakers called pingi (I now doubt this, for reasons discussed below). I had no idea at the time what kind of "wild rat" this might be. The Rev. W. E. Taylor defined Giriama kadzora as a "mole" (1891: 63); Florence Deed as both a "mole" (presumably after Taylor) and a "little black field rat" (1964: 25).The only zoological clue I have since found comes from an old collection at Wema in the Tana Delta where kadzora was given as a Lower Pokomo name for the zebra mouse Lemniscomys griselda (Allen and Lawrence 1936: 106). Lower Pokomo and Northern Mijikenda are neighbouring and closely related groups of dialects, and it may well be that Giriama kadzora also refers to zebra mice and/or other edible murids (cf. Kingdon 1997: 213).

Writing circa 1914, Arthur Champion described a Giriama small mammal trap as follows:

  A most efficacious rat trap is made by splitting down the end of a thick sapling into eight sectors. These are opened out and thin pliant twigs are woven in and out in the manner of a hurdle till a funnel some six or eight inches long is formed. A string made of sisal fibre is attached to the other end of the sapling, which is bent over like a bow. A noose [...] is made at the other end of the string and held by a peg resting against a notch in a small stick or thorn on which is fixed a grain of maize. The slack of the noose is so placed that the rat must put its head and neck right through in order to get at the grain. The slightest agitation of the grain releases the peg, the sapling straightens and the noose tightens. (Champion 1967: 46)

I didn't get my hands on one of these until November 1991, during a family visit to Gede (Gedi) Ruins when we wandered into the artificial 'Giriama village' where groups of tourists pay for dance performances (we watched one that was already paid for) and are sold various knick-knacks and handicrafts. Among the tourist tat were some functional items, including small mammal traps (Giriama muhoto, pl. mihoto). Two types of trap were for sale: the funnel trap described by Champion (muhoto wa mbugu, where mbugu is the creeper it is woven with), and one in which the funnel was replaced by the empty half-shell of a baobab fruit (muhoto wa uyu), with its lovely velvety exterior. Taylor's dictionary also refers to this type (1891: 106), while Deed alludes to similar traps in which the body is supplied by a half-coconut (1964: 60) - the kind I was told about on the way to Chilulu. The funnel trap is depicted in a popular book about the Mijikenda (Mwangudza 1983: 18, Fig. 5); the baobab-shell type in studies of the utilisation of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, near to Gede (e.g. Mogaka 1991: 58). Mogaka also illustrates what appears to be a larger version of the funnel type, called kizimba and baited with small mammals to catch medium-sized mammals (1991: 55, 59; 1992: 23, 26). A "Tumbatu Monkey Trap", described by Ingrams from the north of Unguja island, Zanzibar, is similar in design and construction: it comprises a baited peg and noose inside a wicker funnel; when sprung the noose tightens on the monkey's hand (1931: 294-295). I've also discussed these parallels in my paper on 'Island subsistence' (2007: 92). According to studies in the Arabuko-Sokoke, the smaller traps are used to catch elephant shrews and small mongoose as well as rats and mice (Mogaka 1992: 23; Fitzgibbon et al. 1995; 2000).

I elicited the Giriama names of the traps from one of the sellers, who hailed from a village just north of Malindi. I also wrote down the names of different components: the sisal string (lugwe lwa konje), bait (chambo), and the peg used to set the trap (katoyo ka muhoto). He said that they were used to catch both kadzora and the tastier tali, a field-mouse "much esteemed by the Giryamas as a great delicacy" according to Taylor (1891: 64). The tali (thali in current orthography) has been identified at Gede as the Fringe-tailed gerbil, Tatera robusta (syn. Gerbilliscus robustus) (Costich 1977: 12). My Giriama informant contrasted these with the light-colored, long-snouted p'inji, which dies when it crosses a path and is inedible. This creature is a common ingredient in the making of Giriama arrow poison, and although I didn't know it at the time, is a generic name for shrews, inlcuding the white-toothed shrews, Crocidura spp. (cf. Walsh 1992). Giriama p'inji is cognate with Jibana / Chonyi pingi (see above), and I would be surprised if they didn't have the same basic range of reference. Shrews are insectivores, not rodents, but this distinction isn't made by Mijikenda speakers, nor, to my knowledge, is it recognised in other East African ethnotaxonomies.

There are no doubt other edible rodents that he did not mention. I came across one of the largest in our garden in Nyali, Mombasa, in May the following year. This was a dead giant pouched rat - I assumed an immature or small female Cricetomys gambianus - 67 cm from the end of its nose to the tip of its tail, 35 cm of which was the length of its tail. It had puncture marks under one of its eyes and on one of its back legs, and I wondered whether it had been killed by a snake. I stuck it in the fork of a tree. Karisa, our Giriama-speaking gardener, identified it immediately as k'uhe (pl. k'uhe), the largest kind of rat that he knew. He added that two kinds are recognised: the k'uhe which comes out with the moon, and collects a lot of food, and the k'uhe of dark nights - there being nothing to distinguish them other than this difference in their behaviour. Yes, he said, k'uhe are eaten, and like other rodents roasted in their skins once the fur has been scraped off. A single rat can feed four people. Now there's something to chew on for another World Food Day.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to James Walsh for digging out the photo from our trip to Gede Ruins as well as the funnel trap he purchased there. Not long after they were written Liz Wiley kindly sent me copies of the KIFCON reports about the utilisation of the Arabuko-Sokoke. I am also grateful to John Fanshawe for sharing later papers about the research there.

References

Allen, Glover M. and Barbara Lawrence 1936. Scientific results of an expedition to rain forest regions in eastern Africa. III: Mammals. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College 79 (3): 31-126.

Champion, Arthur M. 1967. The Agiryama of Kenya (RAI Occasional Paper No. 25, John Middleton ed.). London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

Costich, Denise E. 1977. A checklist of mammals in Gedi National Park with KiGiriama names. East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin (January / February): 12-13.

Deed, Florence 1964. Giryama-English Dictionary. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. [page numbers refer to the printout of an electronic copy.]

FitzGibbon, Clare D., Hezron Mogaka and John H. Fanshawe 1995. Subsistence hunting in Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, Kenya, and its effects on mammal populations. Conservation Biology 9 (5): 1116-1126.

FitzGibbon, Clare D., Hezron Mogaka and John H. Fanshawe 2000. Threatened mammals, subsistence harvesting, and high human population densities: a recipe for disaster? In John G. Robinson and Elizabeth L. Bennett (eds.) Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests. New York: Columbia University Press. 154-167.

Ingrams, W. H. 1931. Zanzibar: Its History and Its People. London: Frank Cass.

Kingdon, Jonathan 1997. The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals. San Diego: Academic Press.

Lukumbo, Lucas 1995. Man who eats, sells rats talks [sic]. Daily News (Dar es Salaam), Wednesday 26 April 1995: 6. [An article about a Makua rat-catcher and roaster in Mpindimbi village, Masasi district, Mtwara region.]

Mogaka, Hezron R. 1991. Local Utilization of Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve. Report to the Kenya Indigenous Forest Conservation Project (KIFCON), Forest Department, Kenya.

Mogaka, Hezron R. 1992. A Report on a Study of Hunting in Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve. Report to the Kenya Indigenous Forest Conservation Project (KIFCON), Forest Department, Kenya.

Mwangudza, Johnson A. 1983. Mijikenda (Kenya's People, Margaret Sharman ed.). London: Evans Brothers Limited.

Ringa, Mathias 2004. Kilifi village where mice is [sic] a delicacy. The Standard (Nairobi), 4 November 2004.

Taylor, W. E. 1891. Giriama Vocabulary and Collections. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Walsh, Martin 1992. Elephant shrews and arrow poison. East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin 22 (2): 18-21.

Walsh, Martin 2007. Island subsistence: hunting, trapping and the translocation of wildlife in the western Indian Ocean. Azania 42: 83-113. (With an online appendix: Island mammal lists and local names.)

TROPICAL SHELLS GALORE

My home town, Southport, is a sleepy seaside resort on the north-west coast of England with too many golf courses and a sea front ruined by moronic planners. Among the town's many attractions are a number of tacky shops selling seashells and other tourist tat by the seashore, or rather where the seashore was when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Apart from buying the odd stick of rock and saucy postcard, I'd never really take much notice of these flagships of seaside culture. Not, that is, until the day in the late 1980s that I wandered down the narrow alleyway and up the fire escape that led to the shell shop that was furthest from the retreating sea.

Tropical Shells Galore had evidently been established without much thought for the second of the four Ps of marketing (Place). I'd passed the sign advertising its conchological wares countless times in my youth, but it was a second-hand bookshop that took me into the alleyway, and a hand-painted warning in up-country Swahili - "Mbwa kali!" ("Fierce dog!") - that drew me up the metal stairs for the first time. Entering the first-floor doorway, I found myself inside not just an emporium of tropical shells, but a cross between a cabinet of curiosities and a contemporary curio shop. The Borgesian catalogue in the shop's brochure (click on the image below to read the list) gives some idea of the wonders it contained - exotic and unusual objects from East Africa, the Indian Ocean and assorted other places, including an unnamed British borstal for young delinquents. I remember in particular the model dhow and turtle shell, familiar from tourist shops and restaurants on the East African coast. Others recall the 'witchdoctor', wreathed in incense, who made wishes come true when you pressed a coin into his hand.

The keeper of these curios was an unassuming man, but he had a tale to tell. During the war Rex Grundy had served in the RAF and ended up settling in Kenya, where he ran a hotel on the coast near Mombasa and exported shells for button-making and other purposes. In 1958 he packed up and sailed back to England, opening Tropical Shells Galore with the stock and other knick-knacks that he'd come home with. He continued importing shells and made his own shell ornaments that he sold by mail-order: apparently a more lucrative business than the shop (perhaps not so surprising given its concealed location, though Rex Grundy is said to have been a less than enthusiastic salesman).

Unfortunately I didn't get another chance to ask him about his life in Kenya. The next time I came home from Mombasa the shop was closed and emptied of its contents, the victim of a landlord's plans for redevelopment. The second-hand bookshop I used to visit was also closed, but subsequently reopened in another building in the alleyway.  The bookseller, Tony Parkinson, inherited the mantle of Tropical Shells Galore, and now sells shells, minerals, fossils, and (among other things) a small selection of antiquities and ethnographic objects, in addition to three floors-worth of books. I go there whenever I'm back in Southport, but still miss the old tropical shell shop.

If the curio shops of East Africa and the (post)colonial diaspora haven't already been studied, then they should be. Likewise the history of the shell trade and its analogues (many species of marine mollusc on the Kenya coast have declined in abundance and/or size since the start of the tourist boom in the 1970s, and the collection and purchase of seashells and other marine curios is now discouraged).  Looking around the room in Cambridge that I'm sitting in now, I realise that it resembles a compact version of Tropical Shells Galore and Parkinson's of Southport ("Booksellers, Naturalists & Antiquarians") without the shells, and that my jumbled writing has something in common with these museums of personal memory and imagining. The only difference is that I'm not selling anything. Not yet.

الحمد لله ربّ العالمين

Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin

DIANI BEACH: A FORGOTTEN LAND GRAB?

Last week I met Robin Palmer, who maintains Oxfam’s ‘Land Rights in Africa’ webpage and is the author of a stimulating think-piece on land grabs: ‘A New Scramble for Africa?’ (2010). This, and another paper that he forwarded (Zoomers 2010), set me thinking about the different kinds of land alienation that I’ve come across in East Africa. The case that troubles me most is the expansion of Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park (Walsh 2008; 2012). I’ve also been exercised by the negative consequences of land adjudication in Mbeere (Walsh 1993), and of commercial ranching near Mount Kasigau (unpublished field notes), both in Kenya. In an earlier note (‘Giriama Bird Names’) I referred briefly to the ongoing conflict over a land grab for the cultivation of a biofuel crop (Jatropha curcas) in Dakatcha (inland of Malindi, on the Kenya coast). But the land grab on the coast whose deleterious impacts I know most about is the development of the ‘Diani Complex’ of luxury tourist hotels and amenities south of Mombasa.

In August-September 1985 I lived with and studied Agwiraye women’s group in the village of Mwamambi in Diani Location, by the main road from Mombasa and on the outskirts of Ukunda, about 3 km inland of Diani beach and its ‘tourist paradise’. Here’s how I began my description of the local economy:

Mwamambi is surrounded by alienated land. To the north and west are thousands of acres of farmland first alienated during the colonial period. One of these plantations, a few hundred metres inland of Agwiraye’s meeting-place and known by the name of its present Indian owner, Kaslak, was the scene of violent clashes in the early 1970s when a group of Kikuyu land speculators tried to enforce the removal of local Digo squatting and farming illegally on land which they still claim as theirs. But the most disruptive alienation in recent years, altering the entire character of the local economy, took place under President Kenyatta in 1972. This comprised the decision to convert the whole of the area between the main highway and the beach into a tourist paradise under the name of the Diani Complex. The Complex, stretching some 10 km from Kongo to Kinondo, was subdivided into 4 strips or ‘beaches’. Beach 1, a 1 km wide strip along the shore, has become the site of more than 10 major hotels. Beach 2, ¼ km wide, comprises an access road and the services along this. Beaches 3 and 4 cover the rest of the land inland to the main road. From here locals were to be resettled along the road and to the west on land designated as a Reserve, where most of Agwiraye’s members live and the group meets. However, development on beaches 3 and 4 was stopped in 1978 by the new President [Moi] and Digo continue to live and farm there. But the damage was done. Locals lost land on beaches 1 and 2, some selling and some receiving compensation. Otherwise considerable uncertainty remains over land rights in the area, and only some landowners have been issued with title deeds.

Before this development the local Digo grew most of their grain crops (especially maize) ‘chini’, on the rocky land just inland of the sea, and tended coconut palms interspersed with other crops (including cassava and rice) ‘juu’, on the land rising up from the main road. Young men sought wage labour in Mombasa and elsewhere, eventually settling down to look after their land and derive some income from the sale of copra, dried coconut kernel. This pattern has now been thoroughly transformed. The beach hotels have brought an influx of migrant workers from up-country, Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Kamba, spawning the rapid growth of settlement and services along the main highway, especially in Ukunda. Digo have also found work in these hotels and the sector which has grown up around them. Many, already suffering from land pressure, have sold their land to immigrant entrepreneurs, while others, more canny, have built accommodation to rent out to immigrant workers. The result is an incipient class division, partly, but not entirely, along ethnic lines.

This has had a further, detrimental, effect upon local agriculture. Because many men, young and old, are now in paid employment they have little time to devote to their fields. Consequently a lot of land between palms which used to be under cultivation has reverted to bush: the women alone cannot clear and cultivate all of it. This uncultivated land, including large areas of alienated land, harbours wild animals which are damaging to crops: monkeys, warthogs and wild boar. It also encourages the few local stock owners, who would have once grazed their animals far inland, to leave them to roam in between the homesteads. Meanwhile men are no longer free to guard the crops at night, while the culling of wild animals is discouraged by the government and prohibited without a licence. Women, especially those with small children, are unable to guard the crops themselves. As a result a very high proportion of women’s agricultural enterprises fail, including those right next to their homes, the crops being eaten or trampled by animals before they are ready for harvesting. (Walsh 1986: 26-27)

As I went on to write, the members of Agwiraye women’s group were seriously affected by this. Most of them had husbands who were employed or absent for other reasons, and a number didn’t have husbands at all. Their farming suffered accordingly: over half of members’ fields weren’t cultivated in 1985, in many cases because of the threat from wild animals:

The result is a vicious circle. Because such a high proportion of agricultural enterprises fail, households are becoming increasingly dependent for their subsistence upon food staples purchased from the local shops. Thus household members, particularly men, are under increasing pressure to find and remain in wage employment, one of the major causes of local agricultural decline in the first place. This has a somewhat different effect upon gender relations than the well known scenario in which women with labour-migrant husbands find themselves bearing a much heavier agricultural burden in order to stay alive. In Mwamambi most of the working men continue to live at home and do the shopping themselves to feed their households. The burden of agricultural labour upon their wives is reduced, and in 1985 a few group members had abandoned cultivation altogether. But women without working husbands are not so fortunate: a fact reflected [...] in the difficulty they experience in sustaining membership of the women’s group. (Walsh 1986: 28-30)

Leaving aside the specific features of this case, it’s a depressingly familiar story. The bitterness and simmering resentment that I found in Mwamambi are reproduced up and down the Kenya coast. As we now know, the different alienations of land – and the feelings of alienation – experienced by the people of the coast, and the Digo in particular, provided a fertile ground for political manipulation and the eruption of widespread violence and ethnic cleansing in August-November 1997 (Kenya Human Rights Commission 1997; 1998; Human Rights Watch 2002). But there seems to have been relatively little research on the Diani case since the 1980s (cf. Migot-Adholla et al. 1982), and while writing this note I’ve struggled to find online references to the social and economic consequences of hotel development there (Hannan 2008 is a rare exception). Instead the good works of The Colobus Trust, established in 1997 to protect the Diani population of the Angolan colobus (Colobus angolensis), are ubiquitous.

Unless they’re documented and commemorated, land grabs are readily erased from the collective memory of all but their victims. In August 1987 I discussed local land alienations and their negative impacts with a group of Lutheran World Relief volunteers staying in one of the Diani beach hotels. I can’t remember which hotel it was, but I do recall drawing my young audience’s attention to the magnificent coconut palms in its well-manicured grounds. These were once the property of local farmers, as was the land below them, but now they were excluded from the hotel premises, and the nuts went unharvested except by hotel staff instructed to make sure that they didn’t drop on the heads of unsuspecting holidaymakers. For obvious reasons, this isn’t the kind of information that you’re likely to read in a hotel brochure or get from a tourist rep. I’ve visited and stayed in my fair share of beach hotels in East Africa, often when working as a development consultant. It’s easy to enjoy these carefully prepared representations of exotic Africa when you can afford it and don’t know or care about the backstory. And the same goes for other processed and packaged products of land grabbing, including many wildlife safaris and ecotours (for which see Igoe et al. 2010; Igoe 2010).

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Robin Palmer and Jim Igoe for kindly sharing the recent papers referred to in this note. And my apologies to everyone who can’t readily access commercially published journal articles.

References

Hannan, Lucy 2008. Trouble in Paradise / Tourism and Minorities: A Kenya Case Study. In Ishbel Matheson (ed.) State of the World’s Minorities 2008. Minority Rights Group International. 28-39.

Human Rights Watch 2002. Playing with Fire: Weapons Proliferation, Political Violence, and Human Rights in Kenya. New York: Human Rights Watch.

Igoe, James, Katja Neves and Dan Brockington 2010. A Spectacular Eco-tour around the Historic Bloc: Theorising the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion. Antipode 42 (3): 486-512.

Igoe, James 2010. The Spectacle of Nature inthe Global Economy of Appearances: Anthropological Engagements with theSpectacular Mediations of Transnational Conservation. Critique of Anthropology 30 (4): 375-397.

Kenya Human Rights Commission 1997. Kayas of Deprivation, Kayas of Blood: Violence, Ethnicity and the State in Coastal Kenya. Nairobi: Kenya Human Rights Commission.

Kenya Human Rights Commission 1998. Kayas Revisited: A Post-election Balance Sheet. Nairobi: Kenya Human Rights Commission.

Migot-Adholla, S. E., Katama G. C. Mkangi and Joseph Mbindyo 1982. Study of Tourism in Kenya: With Emphasis on the Attitudes of Residents of the Kenya Coast (IDS Consultancy Reports No. 7). Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.

Palmer, Robin 2010. A New Scramble for Africa? Mokoro Newsletter 52 (May 2010): 4-5.

Walsh, Martin 1986. Interim Report for a Study of Income Generation and its Effects among Women’s Groups in Kenya’s Coast Province. Report to World Education Inc., Boston.

Walsh, Martin 1987. Development in Diani and its Lessons. Presentation to a seminar on ‘Issues in Development’, Lutheran World Relief Volunteer Conference, Diani Beach, 27 August 1987.

Walsh, Martin 1993. The Social and Economic Impacts of Land Reform: A Kenyan Case Study. Paper presented to the East African Seminar Series, African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge, 9 November 1993.

Walsh, Martin 2008. Pastoralism and Policy Processes in Tanzania: Mbarali Case Study. Report to the Tanzania National Resource Forum (TNRF), Arusha.

Walsh, Martin 2012. The Not-So-Great-Ruaha and Hidden Histories of an Environmental Panic in Tanzania. Journal of Eastern African Studies 6 (2): 303-335.

Zoomers, Annelies 2010. Globalisation and the Foreignisation of Space: Seven Processes Driving the Current Global Land Grab. Journal of Peasant Studies 37 (2): 429-447.