The Stone Town of Lamu

Lamu, on a low island close to the coast of what is now Kenya, is one of the oldest and best-preserved of the Swahili stone towns, the string of Muslim trading settlements that grew up along the East African coast from early Islamic times, from the Horn down toward the lands south of the equator. Along this coast an African people, the Swahili, in centuries of contact, trade and intermarriage with the Arab and Persian merchants who came down on the monsoon winds, formed a distinctive coastal civilisation, Islamic in faith and law, African in root, with its own Bantu language, Swahili, written in the Arabic script, and its own art and architecture of coral-stone. The stone towns were built of coral rag and lime: close-packed towns of flat-roofed houses, plain on the outside but cool and finely finished within and entered through massive wooden doors carved with intricate ornament, threaded by narrow shaded lanes too tight for wheeled traffic, where people and laden donkeys pass, and set with mosques and, often, a fort by the water. They lived by the sea and the monsoon trade, sending out mangrove poles, ivory and the goods of the African interior and taking in the cloth, beads and wares of Arabia, Persia, India and beyond, full members of the commercial and religious world of the Indian Ocean. Lamu is unusual in that it has been continuously inhabited down to the present, so that its old town survives as a living Swahili-Muslim community. This scene depicts the stone town of Lamu and its seafront. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.