RIFT VALLEY INSTITUTE MEETING REPORT JANUARY 2017 Cultural Identity: Kenya and the coast BY HANNAH WADDILOVE Lamu Island on Kenya’s coast. Panellists Key points Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir (Historian) • Lack of popular knowledge on the coast’s long history impedes understanding of Stanbuli Abdullahi Nassir (Civil Society/Human contemporary grievances. Rights Activist) • Claims to coastal sovereignty have been used politically but fall prey to divisions among Moderator coastal communities. Billy Kahora (Kwani Trust) • Struggles to define coastal cultural identity damage the drive to demand political and Introduction economic rights. During 2010 and 2011, a secessionist campaign led • Concerns about economic marginalization are by a group calling itself the Mombasa Republican acute for mega-infrastructure projects. Council (MRC) dominated debates about coastal politics. As a result of local grievances, the MRC’s • The failure of coastal representatives has contributed to the region’s marginal political call for secession attracted a degree of public status on the national stage. sympathy on the coast. Debates emerged that portrayed two contrasting agreement with the British colonialists to govern images of Kenya: the inclusive nation which the Ten-Mile strip in return for rents. In most embraces the coast, and a distinctive up-country interpretations, the British assurance to protect world which is culturally and politically remote the property and land rights of the Sultan’s from the coast. subject people meant only those of Arab descent. For Stanbuli, it was the root of contemporary On 7 December 2016, the Rift Valley Forum and injustices over racial hierarchies and land rights at Kwani Trust hosted a public forum in Mombasa to the coast, at the continued expense of indigenous discuss the place of the Kenyan coast in Kenya’s communities. public imagination, and how this has shaped attitudes, media representations, and most The social divisions codified by such agreements importantly, government policy on the coast, highlighted the double bind of marginalization felt including current security strategies, land and in contemporary coastal communities. These intra- infrastructure. community divisions, along racial and ethnic lines, complicate how coastal communities perceive their Background political marginalization from the world of up- country Kenya. The widely held notion that the coast is different from up-country Kenya has a long history. From its distinct colonial experience as a separately ‘Pwani si Kenya’ governed protectorate under the Sultan of The spirit of coastal autonomy apparent in Zanzibar, to its unique economic relationship with such historical agreements has also been a the Indian Ocean littoral and the Middle East, prominent and popular focus of coastal politics the coast has a particular history of international with regionalist agendas. As Mao explained, the cultural and religious exchange. MRC was not the first manifestation of this. Claims of coastal sovereignty, backed by fears of Today, the meaning of a distinctive coastal world marginalization within the Kenyan state, have is also manifest in widespread perceptions among emerged at times of anticipated political change, populations at the coast of political, economic and from independence to contemporary elections. identity-based marginalization from the Kenyan nation. As the forum discussion revealed, however, In the years before independence in the 1950s, the idea that the coast is different portrays a the Coast People’s Party (CPP) sought to protect monolithic image of coastal cultural identity, which the coast’s special geographical status, while in conceals the politically active debates over this the early 1990s, the Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) highly contested question. expressed specific grievances with regards to the place of Muslims at the coast. While the MRC’s Historical context use of the phrase Pwani si Kenya (the coast is not Kenya) expressed their explicitly secessionist The coast’s long, distinctive political and economic agenda in 2011–2012, Mao argued that it could also history is an important source of local pride. be posed as a question of whether the coast is part Identifying key milestones in that history, however, of Kenya, given developmental marginalization. Stanbuli began by stressing the general lack of knowledge on its details. From coastal human The construction of a shared coastal history is at settlement in the first century, to the fifteenth the centre of efforts to unite coastal communities century conquest by the Portuguese, and the Sultan in order to push contemporary political agendas of Zanzibar’s nominal rule over the poorly defined on coastal difference or sovereignty. However, the Ten-Mile strip. As elsewhere in Kenya, claims to limited gains of political parties and movements historical knowledge play an important role in the during the coast’s post-independence history demand for perceived rights. For Stanbuli, the lack reflect the difficulty of overcoming the coast’s own of historical awareness was central to the coastal social divisions to unite as a political bloc against difficulties of organising politically. the rest of Kenya. On significant historical agreements, Stanbuli highlighted the Sultan of Zanzibar’s 1895 2 RIFT VALLEY INSTITUTE MEETING REPORT • JANUARY 2017 have better economic resource access and that the Cultural identity and misunderstandings government does not invest in coastal people. Efforts to harness claims to coastal autonomy Panellists expressed similar concerns, giving invariably seek to project an inclusive sense of examples of closed-down factories such as the coastal peoples, including Africans, Arabs and Ramisi sugar factory in Kwale and the cashew Asians. However, as the contributions from the nut factory in Kilifi. Stanbuli drew a distinction panellists and the audience made clear, there is a between economic investments that create jobs and lively and politically charged debate about what mega-infrastructure projects, such as the standard constitutes coastal identity and who its members gauge railway (SGR) from Mombasa to Nairobi. are—whether it is a Swahili culture, an Islamic Such major projects, he argued, do not benefit one, or based around the dynamics and traditions coastal people and can be dismissed as ‘doing of fluid ethnic groups. politics’—potentially a reference to the major Both panellists stressed and recognized the corruption scandals connected to the SGR. social and political importance of understanding The controversial Lamu Port project, an integral ‘who coastal people are’ but lamented what they part of the Lamu Port and Lamu–Southern Sudan– referred to as the death of culture in most coastal Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), was an communities. The perception that Lamu more example given by Mao. In contrast to the alleged actively invested in its culture reflected both the compensation provided to miraa (khat) farmers long-established traditions around festivals but from Meru when the UK banned the substance, also the imperatives of maintaining these for he argued, Lamu residents have so far been given tourism. no compensation for their displacement and land. In seeking to play a role in the public debate on The anticipated inward migration into Lamu from awareness of cultural identity, Mao’s 2000 poem up-country Kenyans was another source of local Uzinduzi (Awareness) provided some reflections: concern. ‘…it is true that the coast people live like foreigners here… many don’t value us… Coast and the state let’s ask ourselves why this is so and find The panellists’ contributions also underlined the ways to solve this.’ level of marginalization and mistrust between ‘coastals’ and the state’s administration and The place of the coast in the wider Kenyan public security arms. Both are perceived as being run imagination, argued Mao, reproduces stereotypes by—and for—up-country Kenyans. Such claims of coastal people as lazy and ‘living an easy life’. are acute with regards to the former provincial The danger, Mao argued, is that ‘when something administration. As Mao argued, there has only is told over and over, no matter how false, it been one Swahili administrator in Lamu since becomes a reality.’ The self-perception of coastal independence and all other local field officials have people is that they are ‘divided and suffering’, been from elsewhere. and that they do not wish to be engulfed into the idea of a Kenyan national culture that has been Questions from the audience on security and how perceived as oppressive. the panellists viewed the problem at the coast elicited responses further highlighting the extent of Development marginalization mistrust. Misinformation surrounding what caused and what happened during the Mpeketoni attack in Claims of political and economic marginalization June 2014, for example, has added to perceptions can be found across Kenya. At the coast, however, that the government is exaggerating Lamu’s the uniquely long struggle for definition of cultural security threat to damage the local economy. The identity appears intricately connected to the conduct of the police was said to be particularly region’s struggle for economic access to public poor, including accusations of taking bribes to and private resources. Complaints of economic release criminals. Stanbuli, however, emphasised marginalisation have long dominated coastal that a ‘frustrated person can be misused’ and will politics, including claims that up-country people