Kenyan Isle Takes Visitors 200 Years Back in Time to World of Donkeys, Dhows

Life in this island town is much as it was 200 years ago, with the pace set by donkeys and dhows.

“If you went back 200 years in a time machine, it wouldn’t be that different,” said Ann Pulver, an American who has helped draft a historic preservation plan for the old part of Lamu.

Visitors come to the Indian Ocean island off Kenya in dhows propelled by lateen sails or by air. Cars are left on the mainland. The narrow streets are passable only by donkeys and pedestrians.

But the streets are lined with 18th- and 19th-Century stone houses, some in need of restoration but many with handsome courtyards and ornately carved wooden doors--remnants of a wealthy past.

Jimbi Katana, assistant curator of Lamu’s museum, said even the poorest of the old town’s homeowners are proud that they live in stone houses rather than the mud and thatch huts proliferating on Lamu’s outskirts.

Wood carving--including doors, chests and furniture--is one of the island’s thriving crafts, along with jewelry-making and basketry, sold along the main shopping thoroughfare, a street about 10 feet wide a block from the harbor.

The harbor is the hub of Lamu’s economy, and fishing is its largest industry. Virtually all the town’s imports, ranging from appliances to soft drinks, arrive by dhow, which also carry Lamu’s products to Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports.

But the old town’s commercial and political importance is only a faint glimmer of what it was in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, when Lamu was one of a string of feudal states along the East African coast.

Known to the ancients as Zinj, or the land of the black people, the city states traded with points east by exploiting the monsoon winds that blow, alternatively, six months in each direction and drive dhows as steadily as engines do other boats.

A main preoccupation of the city states, judging from old chronicles, was waging war against each other.

The “Pate Chronicle,” named for a nearby island and covering events in the Lamu island group from 1204 to the 19th Century, is mostly a record of quarrels and wars.

“A good Lamu man,” the chronicle says, “has a thousand wiles, so a bad Lamu man, what will he be like?”

Most of Lamu’s current population of 13,000 is Muslim, and it has been described as the most devout Islamic community in East Africa. The women and older girls wear black robes. Prayer calls echo along the seafront promenade from the more than 20 mosques in town.

Beer is available but only a few men drink it. Many men wear fezzes and kikois , colorful cloths wrapped around the waist in place of trousers.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Lamu was popular with hippies, to the dismay of many conservative Muslims. Even today, nude sunbathers use the vast, uncrowded beaches.

Some local social workers and teachers have voiced concern that an increase in tourism is corrupting the town’s young people.

They cite the “beach boys” who hire themselves out as guides and in some cases turn to drugs, alcohol and male prostitution.

“What sort of fathers they will make in the future is anybody’s guess,” Lamu social worker Fatma Omar Mzee remarked.

Lamu’s more than 1,000 donkeys play a crucial role in transporting cargo around the island, and even serve as ambulances.

But many owners don’t feed their donkeys properly, and they roam the marketplace, the alleyways and the town garbage dump in search of food.