The Kenya-Somalia border
Eastern crossing
Jan 6th 2009
Eastern crossing
Jan 6th 2009
Monday
(Paradise ?)
THIS is a diary of a week in paradise. Not heavenly paradise, or Eden, but a third usage of the term: tropical paradise. Today, I am in Lamu on the north coast of Kenya. This narrow, blistering archipelago has been on the posh end of the hippy trail since the 1970s. For centuries before that, a mongrel mix arrived on the trade winds: Omanis, Yemenis, Persians, Indians, Malays, Comorians, Somalis, Africans from the length of the Swahili coast, Portuguese, Germans, and British. Some added to the rich Sufi traditions of Lamu’s mosques; all played a part in fashioning an urban culture alternately pious and decadent, which even now has no need for cars and is only incidentally electrified.
For tourists, Lamu is what happens when “Arabian Nights” meets “The Blue Lagoon”, with Africa looming planetary and red just across the tidal channel. For the rich, it is a playground at the donkey-shit-littered end of a circuit that starts with Gstaad. Some of the same hippies who were here in the 1970s have since come into money and returned to build palatial villas along the Shela beach, on the ocean side of Lamu Island.
Lamu tolerates a seamy undertow of sex and drugs, with rock-hard beach boys doing some of the delivering, as long as it stays behind closed doors. And during the Christmas season, when the weather is hot and clear, a few of the wealthiest families in Europe congregate at Shela to swim, snorkel, fish, and, especially, to party. Lights of the social scene, such as Prince Ernst of Hanover, bring with them a peculiarly modern court of nobles, financiers and supermodels.
ShutterstockParadise?
My plan is different. I am interested in the proximity of purgatory to paradise. I want to head north to the Somali border and find out what the villagers—hunter-gatherer Boni people—and Kenyan border patrols in the remote Kiunga district think about the resurgence of jihadist fighters in the mangrove swamps just across the border. Might they invade Kenya? What then?
These were the same fighters, the Shabab (Youth), who formed the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which in 2006 briefly ruled much of south and central Somalia, before being cut apart by United States and Ethiopian air strikes. Somalia is too dangerous now for me to do any useful reporting. Yet it is the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and, I believe, one of its most pressing strategic concerns. If Somalia is allowed to fail, there will be no intervention for other failing states in Africa.
First, though, I have to get up there. A speedboat is the only way, leaving in the morning between the tides. That gives me an evening in Lamu. I meet a friend, Andrew, who has turned his back on a career in London publishing to restore and sell houses in Lamu town. After a couple of drinks we push past absent donkeys and wind through the narrow alleys to his splendid home for dinner. The best town houses have four floors, with a courtyard below and a roof garden to catch the ocean breeze.
In Andrew’s study, so suspended, are piles of books, journals, and maps. We find Ras Chiamboni, the village on the Somali side of the border where jihadist fighters have been trained, on a colonial-era nautical chart. This was a time when Chiamboni was Italian. It might have been for that reason, or in reference to the phallic spit of land extending out from the village, that the British knew it as Dick’s Head.
Later, when Andrew walks me back to my hotel, the town has become labyrinthine. An open sewer trickles alongside, choked here and there with dung and fetid strips of plastic. We pass men bedding down in the doorways of their homes, the better to watch the stars above and the passers-by. Other perfectly restored homes await their owners’ return from Zurich or Antwerp. With such contrasts between the intimately local and the showily global, Lamu would be a fine place for a modern nativity.
Tuesday
A BLINDING dawn in paradise. I sip mango juice and take notes as the paramount chief of Lamu district, Jamal Fankupy, explains some of the challenges of his job. The chief’s office is where the desperate pitch up. It is at the centre of almost every African soap opera, even if in reality the stories are demeaning and sometimes horrific: a girl whose insides are ripped up by an illegal abortion, a case of incest, illiterate men swindled by documents they could not read, and endless land disputes.
I ask Jamal about the attentions of the United States, which has a military base an hour’s speedboat ride away from Lamu town, on the African mainland. The base’s overt hearts-and-minds mission may be a cover to allow a secret commando unit, Taskforce 88, easy access to speedboats and a helipad for “black ops” insertions into Somalia. Jamal says the Americans are good friends. He is grateful for the primary schools they build.
AFP
The Lamu archipelago was the hiding place for Fazul Mohammed , a Comorian believed to be a leader of al-Qaeda in east Africa. The FBI believes Fazul was one of the operatives responsible for the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, which killed 213 and wounded 5000, nearly all of them Kenyans. It also accuses him of carrying out an attack on a hotel in Mombasa in 2002, which killed 15. He is one of the FBI’s most wanted, with a $5m bounty on his head. He moves between Somalia and Kenya at sea on shark fishing boats or trading dhows. He may also have entered on foot through the bush. He holds several passports under different aliases. He was nearly caught in a recent raid in Malindi, further down the Kenyan coast.
Even if Fazul is caught, intelligence types in Nairobi will remain nervous about Lamu. It is impossible to track the movement of radicals into and out of Somalia. Some think a terrorist attack on the town is only a matter of time.
Jamal thinks such fears are overdone. He does not believe jihadist fighters in Somalia will cross into Kenya. “They would lose more than they could gain.” Nor is he concerned about a Mumbai-style attack, aimed at killing some foreigners and scaring the rest away. “Lamu is one of the greatest centres of Muslim learning and culture in Africa,” he says. “It is a Muslim town. Muslims would suffer more than anyone. They would have to think very hard about such an attack.”
We turn to the day-to-day challenges of life in paradise. “The main problem is transport. Just getting access to remoter villages is hard. You’re always trying to catch the tides. If you delay you get stuck.” He checks the time on his mobile phone. “Speaking of which, it is time for you to go. I will walk with you to the jetty.”
Jamal introduces me to Ali Mzungo, a speedboat captain. After some negotiation, Ali agrees to take me north to Kiunga district and to sleep out for a night or two on the boat while I stay ashore. He is in a hurry. “The tides,” he says. I throw my bag into his Miami blue skiff and jump down. Ali hands down a box of papayas, white bread, and margarine.
We pound away over the tidal channel and up the dredged course between the mainland and Manda island, which elephants cross at low tide, then north along the western shore of Pate island. We rip past the shark-fishing boats then out into open waters, smacking hard into the swell.
Ali is concerned. We’ve waited too long. The water is sluicing out of the mangrove swamp like the last grains from a sand-timer when at last we reach Kiwaiyu Island. We need to somehow work our way through the swamp now or wait until the night for the turning of the tide. Ali jumps out and beckons me to follow. Together we push the boat through knee-deep shallows towards the infested narrows of the swamp. We hop back in. Very slowly, with extreme caution, Ali edges forward down the channel and across the still sinking waters of a wide lagoon, until at last we reach an azure cut of deep water on the far side. We blur then past Kiwaiyu’s dreamy “eco-lodges”, pound north, and come to a halt on a white beach south of the border at Kiunga, a spot chosen partly because it is the end of mobile-phone reception in Kenya.
I wade ashore. The sun is sinking but still the sweat pours off me. Paradise is as hot as hell. What I need now is a slug of water and a hut to hang my mosquito net.
THIS is a diary of a week in paradise. Not heavenly paradise, or Eden, but a third usage of the term: tropical paradise. Today, I am in Lamu on the north coast of Kenya. This narrow, blistering archipelago has been on the posh end of the hippy trail since the 1970s. For centuries before that, a mongrel mix arrived on the trade winds: Omanis, Yemenis, Persians, Indians, Malays, Comorians, Somalis, Africans from the length of the Swahili coast, Portuguese, Germans, and British. Some added to the rich Sufi traditions of Lamu’s mosques; all played a part in fashioning an urban culture alternately pious and decadent, which even now has no need for cars and is only incidentally electrified.
For tourists, Lamu is what happens when “Arabian Nights” meets “The Blue Lagoon”, with Africa looming planetary and red just across the tidal channel. For the rich, it is a playground at the donkey-shit-littered end of a circuit that starts with Gstaad. Some of the same hippies who were here in the 1970s have since come into money and returned to build palatial villas along the Shela beach, on the ocean side of Lamu Island.
Lamu tolerates a seamy undertow of sex and drugs, with rock-hard beach boys doing some of the delivering, as long as it stays behind closed doors. And during the Christmas season, when the weather is hot and clear, a few of the wealthiest families in Europe congregate at Shela to swim, snorkel, fish, and, especially, to party. Lights of the social scene, such as Prince Ernst of Hanover, bring with them a peculiarly modern court of nobles, financiers and supermodels.
ShutterstockParadise?
My plan is different. I am interested in the proximity of purgatory to paradise. I want to head north to the Somali border and find out what the villagers—hunter-gatherer Boni people—and Kenyan border patrols in the remote Kiunga district think about the resurgence of jihadist fighters in the mangrove swamps just across the border. Might they invade Kenya? What then?
These were the same fighters, the Shabab (Youth), who formed the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which in 2006 briefly ruled much of south and central Somalia, before being cut apart by United States and Ethiopian air strikes. Somalia is too dangerous now for me to do any useful reporting. Yet it is the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and, I believe, one of its most pressing strategic concerns. If Somalia is allowed to fail, there will be no intervention for other failing states in Africa.
First, though, I have to get up there. A speedboat is the only way, leaving in the morning between the tides. That gives me an evening in Lamu. I meet a friend, Andrew, who has turned his back on a career in London publishing to restore and sell houses in Lamu town. After a couple of drinks we push past absent donkeys and wind through the narrow alleys to his splendid home for dinner. The best town houses have four floors, with a courtyard below and a roof garden to catch the ocean breeze.
In Andrew’s study, so suspended, are piles of books, journals, and maps. We find Ras Chiamboni, the village on the Somali side of the border where jihadist fighters have been trained, on a colonial-era nautical chart. This was a time when Chiamboni was Italian. It might have been for that reason, or in reference to the phallic spit of land extending out from the village, that the British knew it as Dick’s Head.
Later, when Andrew walks me back to my hotel, the town has become labyrinthine. An open sewer trickles alongside, choked here and there with dung and fetid strips of plastic. We pass men bedding down in the doorways of their homes, the better to watch the stars above and the passers-by. Other perfectly restored homes await their owners’ return from Zurich or Antwerp. With such contrasts between the intimately local and the showily global, Lamu would be a fine place for a modern nativity.
Tuesday
A BLINDING dawn in paradise. I sip mango juice and take notes as the paramount chief of Lamu district, Jamal Fankupy, explains some of the challenges of his job. The chief’s office is where the desperate pitch up. It is at the centre of almost every African soap opera, even if in reality the stories are demeaning and sometimes horrific: a girl whose insides are ripped up by an illegal abortion, a case of incest, illiterate men swindled by documents they could not read, and endless land disputes.
I ask Jamal about the attentions of the United States, which has a military base an hour’s speedboat ride away from Lamu town, on the African mainland. The base’s overt hearts-and-minds mission may be a cover to allow a secret commando unit, Taskforce 88, easy access to speedboats and a helipad for “black ops” insertions into Somalia. Jamal says the Americans are good friends. He is grateful for the primary schools they build.
AFP
The Lamu archipelago was the hiding place for Fazul Mohammed , a Comorian believed to be a leader of al-Qaeda in east Africa. The FBI believes Fazul was one of the operatives responsible for the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, which killed 213 and wounded 5000, nearly all of them Kenyans. It also accuses him of carrying out an attack on a hotel in Mombasa in 2002, which killed 15. He is one of the FBI’s most wanted, with a $5m bounty on his head. He moves between Somalia and Kenya at sea on shark fishing boats or trading dhows. He may also have entered on foot through the bush. He holds several passports under different aliases. He was nearly caught in a recent raid in Malindi, further down the Kenyan coast.
Even if Fazul is caught, intelligence types in Nairobi will remain nervous about Lamu. It is impossible to track the movement of radicals into and out of Somalia. Some think a terrorist attack on the town is only a matter of time.
Jamal thinks such fears are overdone. He does not believe jihadist fighters in Somalia will cross into Kenya. “They would lose more than they could gain.” Nor is he concerned about a Mumbai-style attack, aimed at killing some foreigners and scaring the rest away. “Lamu is one of the greatest centres of Muslim learning and culture in Africa,” he says. “It is a Muslim town. Muslims would suffer more than anyone. They would have to think very hard about such an attack.”
We turn to the day-to-day challenges of life in paradise. “The main problem is transport. Just getting access to remoter villages is hard. You’re always trying to catch the tides. If you delay you get stuck.” He checks the time on his mobile phone. “Speaking of which, it is time for you to go. I will walk with you to the jetty.”
Jamal introduces me to Ali Mzungo, a speedboat captain. After some negotiation, Ali agrees to take me north to Kiunga district and to sleep out for a night or two on the boat while I stay ashore. He is in a hurry. “The tides,” he says. I throw my bag into his Miami blue skiff and jump down. Ali hands down a box of papayas, white bread, and margarine.
We pound away over the tidal channel and up the dredged course between the mainland and Manda island, which elephants cross at low tide, then north along the western shore of Pate island. We rip past the shark-fishing boats then out into open waters, smacking hard into the swell.
Ali is concerned. We’ve waited too long. The water is sluicing out of the mangrove swamp like the last grains from a sand-timer when at last we reach Kiwaiyu Island. We need to somehow work our way through the swamp now or wait until the night for the turning of the tide. Ali jumps out and beckons me to follow. Together we push the boat through knee-deep shallows towards the infested narrows of the swamp. We hop back in. Very slowly, with extreme caution, Ali edges forward down the channel and across the still sinking waters of a wide lagoon, until at last we reach an azure cut of deep water on the far side. We blur then past Kiwaiyu’s dreamy “eco-lodges”, pound north, and come to a halt on a white beach south of the border at Kiunga, a spot chosen partly because it is the end of mobile-phone reception in Kenya.
I wade ashore. The sun is sinking but still the sweat pours off me. Paradise is as hot as hell. What I need now is a slug of water and a hut to hang my mosquito net.
