Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the reported target of the U.S.
airstrikes in Somalia and the alleged planner of the bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Nairobi and the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam in
1998, seems to have been recently teaching either on or near Lamu, an island
quite close to the southern Somali border. Though a speck of an island,
Lamu has been of interest in recent years as a gateway between Somali and
Kenya. Then there's the frequent traffic between the island and the Middle
East. (That flow of life from Lamu to the Persian Gulf has been going on
for centuries now. As I remember it, the heating and cooling of the Himalayas
created great winds that pushed and pulled boats between the two places.)
I mention Lamu because the island was the setting for my master's thesis on how life on the 19th century Swahili coast was shaped by East African slavery. The idea of that paper was that while "slave" was a more mutable role on the Swahili coast than it was in the American South and the Caribbean, the 'slave state' was so enmeshed in the religous and cultural life of Lamu that the social role of former slaves and their descendants carried on with force long after the end of recognized slavery. I don't have much more to add to the story at this point, but mentioning Lamu at least gives me a chance to post a photo of me on the island with an ass that I bought there:
I mention Lamu because the island was the setting for my master's thesis on how life on the 19th century Swahili coast was shaped by East African slavery. The idea of that paper was that while "slave" was a more mutable role on the Swahili coast than it was in the American South and the Caribbean, the 'slave state' was so enmeshed in the religous and cultural life of Lamu that the social role of former slaves and their descendants carried on with force long after the end of recognized slavery. I don't have much more to add to the story at this point, but mentioning Lamu at least gives me a chance to post a photo of me on the island with an ass that I bought there:
