The snaky alleyways of Lamu’s old town, a World Heritage site. Kenya is planning to build the biggest port in East Africa here.
No offense to puretheory (the photo is beautiful) but I didn’t like this article. The writer doesn’t seem to be discussing the pros and cons of a new port but lamenting the destruction of his personal Swahili wonderland. He claims Lamu has not yet been spoiled by modernity. As if, perhaps, Dar es Salaam—one of the most dynamic cities in Africa, where Swahili is a living and evolving language—is a lost cause.
Lamu, to Gettleman, is “an outpost of pure Swahili culture.” As if culture can be pure, nevermind one that takes the cosmopolitan history of Indian Ocean trade: Shirazi Arabs meets Bantu, meets half a millenium of European colonialism meets global Islam, as a creation story. He later names some of those pure traits: rotting fruit, donkey shit and squalid poverty.
He goes on to bash Chinese investment, dismiss local people’s hopes of job creation and then calls Lamu-ites “unsuited to the mechanized world.” All this written in half-hearted objective journalese.
The more I think of this, the more racist and absurd it seems.
