MAMA SAMAKI

This lovely fish lady passed our gate this morning and I just couldn't resist taking her photo.  The large barracuda fish was beautiful for a start, and combined with her bunch of small silvery ones, the way she balances her top-heavy, plastic bucket on her head, and her colourful kanga, it was a quotidien yet heart-warming sight.

There are many ladies like Mama Samaki in Takaungu.  In fact it is probably one of the most common ways that Giriama women manage to bring in just enough daily income to feed their families.  Every day, women walk as much as 10 kilometres from the outlying hamlets to the beaches and inlets of Takaungu, where local fishermen in their hand-hewn, mango wood dugouts come in to sell their catch. The fish in Mama Samaki's bucket is unusual in its quanitity and quality, so she probably had a special order from one of the 'well-to-do' Swahili families today.  The average woman will buy about 2 or 3kg of fish, more often than not 'Mpanga'. This is named after the Panga or machete knife - carried by almost everyone around here -  due to its long, flat shape and silver colour.  Mpanga is very common because it is caught near the shore, as most of the dugout fishermen are afraid to venture far out to sea due to the poor condition of their boats.  Mpanga is full of tiny bones and not the nicest fish to eat, but it is cheap, and that is the point for just about everyone trying to eke out a living in Takaungu.

So the average woman will walk 5km, more often than not bare-footed and carrying a baby on her back, and buy about 2 kg of Mpanga for 100 Kenya Shillings - about US$1.20 at the current rate. Carrying her purchase in a bucket topped with banana leaves to shade it from the sun, she will walk the 5km home again, where she will cut up her fish into approximately 15 to 20 small pieces. After completing her daily chores of carrying water, collecting firewood, bathing children etc., she will walk again to a public spot:  a junction in a forest pathway, a shady corner near the little creek ferry where returning workers from Kilifi, the nearest town , pass at evening time, or perhaps a spot on the main village street if her home is not too far away for her to return to at night.

She will carry her charcoal stove or  jiko with her, and, squatting beside it,  she will roast her fish over the charcoal, cooking it through and through until it is dry and chewy but wonderfully flavoured from the charcoal and slow cooking method.  Ready as people are returning from the fields or work, she will sell each piece for 10 Shillings, reaping  a  profit of about 50 to 100 Shillings, though she still has to pay for the charcoal, oil and salt.  And this of course is as long as she does not reward herself for her time or labour.  She is satisfied, because her meagre $1.20  is just enough for her to purchase her maize meal or chappati flour and perhaps a few vegetables to cook up an accompanying stew - all just enough to give her family their one decent meal of the day.  Once that is done, the family income is gone and  tomorrow she will have to start again.  But this is Takaungu where everyone is accustomed to living just one day at a time . . .

WHAT IS ZINJ?

A mythical land; an ancient paleontological find; a once important, but long forgotten player in Indian Ocean history; a cultural connection; a warm, humid, tropical strip of East African coastline where limpid, turquoise waters lap coconut strewn, white sand beaches; a little workshop in a tiny coastal village in Kenya, where an unlikely couple strive to make work and trade change local lives.  A place where African ingenuity is allowed to flourish and beautiful African bead and leather creations are brought to bear . . . .
Named in the Periplus, AD50, describing the trade links between Arabia, Asia and the East African coast, The Land of Zinj was the name given by the Arabs to the coastal area between Southern Somalia and Northern Mozambique, when they first began to settle around 500AD. And it has been this process of trade and cultural interrelations between Arab, Asian and the indigenous Bantu people that has given this coast its unique and fascinating character ever since.

The village of Takaungu – or ‘Takaungu Trading Centre’ as it is known on official documents -  lies at the heart of this cultural exchange:  homeland to the indigenous Giriama people who have farmed and fished here for millennia;  family seat of the Mazrui family, the Omani rulers of Zinj for over two hundred years, who originally settled Takaungu as slave traders; and home, for the last two hundred years, to Swahili families whose traditional livelihoods of trade and fishing continue to give them strong links to Lamu, Pemba island and beyond.  

Takaungu was also once the home of a strong Bohra community, whose large and beautiful mosque in the very centre of the dusty village is now only visited by the one remaining member of the community, who is also owner of the main village hardware, grocers, haberdashery and ‘just about everything in one’ shop.  All the other Bohra have long migrated to Mombasa, Nairobi, London and beyond in endless pursuit of education, professions, money and the modern world.  The image of  the octogenarian Mzee Mohammedali in his kanzu and distinctive Bohra kofia as he shuffles down the village street every evening for prayers, clasping a huge old key in his hand to let himself - all alone - into a mosque built for hundreds, is perhaps one of the most poignantly symbolic images of Zinj today: dusty, dishevelled, forgotten, insignificant, tenacious, resilient, enduring . . . .





Bohra: Dawoodi Bohras, the community most prevalent on the E. African coast, are a subsect of Shia Islam originating from a 16th century schism. Dawoodi Bohras have a blend of cultures, including Yemeni, Egyptian, African, and Indian. They have their own language which is derived from Urdu, Gujarati and Persian.


Kanzu: a long white garment traditionally worn by Muslim men for prayers, especially on Fridays and special holy days


Kofia: the traditional round ‘pillbox’ cap worn by Muslim men with their kanzus. While the majority Sunni Muslims of the E. African coast wear kofias in a wide variety of patterns and colours, the Bohra sect all use a particular white and gold one.

SLIPSTREAM

I went swimming in the creek today. It was the clearest most translucent, turquoise water, and I took off across the creek to the mangroves. My favourite place is sitting on an old mangrove branch that reaches horizontally out into the creek, half in the deep shade and half in the sunshine. Today the tide was a high one, so I could sit on the branch with the warm water up to my neck – just delicious.
From there I gazed out at the slipstream gathering pace as the tide surged into the creek and my thoughts quickly got carried along by it, mesmerized by the beautiful, moving water. I could feel the energy of the slipstream moving constantly past me as I soaked, just beyond it, in a quiet, cool eddy. In the distance beyond was the village side of the creek and I could see barefoot men pushing heavy, mkokoteni handcarts of building materials around, moving slowly in the heat of the afternoon, a few fishermen mending nets, and some of the old Mzee’s sitting on their favourite baraza waiting for the hadana to call for four o’clock prayers. With that scene in the distance, beyond the slipstream, I couldn’t help but become aware of the metaphor of life, constantly moving forward, and how our  uman struggle - at least the modern one - is to get into it, join the centre where things are moving and be swept along on an exciting journey. I thought about how so many of us, for whatever reason, never really make it to that energetic centre of the life path, but are just left out in the quiet eddies beyond.  

For the people of Takaungu that is surely the case. The globalised 21st century, high tech world of movers and shakers churns on, while here the lack of education, opportunity, money, knowledge, awareness, technology, land, water – even voice - leaves them behind, floundering in circular, swirling eddies where the water always flows back to where it began. . . .

 

Mkokoteni – large handcart made of mangrove wood and pulled by two or three 

Mzee – literally ‘old man’, but a term of respect used for the elders of the village
Baraza – a long stone bench, often used for meetings, hence the same Kiswahili word for bench and meeting

 Hadana – the muezzin’s call to prayer