Mombasa to Lamu: a nostalgic journey up the coast of Kenya

09.11.2024 - 11:25 / cntraveler.com

In the now faded photo: my mum, demure in an off-white, gold-trimmed sari, hands half-hidden in a swirl of henna; my dad, suit wrinkled, sporting Jackie O sunglasses borrowed from my auntie to block out the Mombasa sun. It's August 4, 1973, their wedding day. I stand in the same spot 50 years later, under the whitewashed arches of Tamarind, then and now “the best seafood restaurant on the whole coast of Kenya,” Mohamed, my taxi driver, tells me categorically. The views from here have not changed much in the last half century. Across the glinting blue of the creek, on Mombasa Island, colonial mansions hide behind a tangle of trees, and the boxy flat-roofed buildings of Old Town, discolored by the salt-laden Indian Ocean air, press up intimately against each other. Wood fishing boats bob in quiet inlets where my parents once spent weekends learning to water-ski.

It was an improbable romance. My father had moved from rural England to Mombasa to seek his fortune; my mother was part of the town's close-knit, conservative Indian Bohra community. They fell in love and somehow convinced my grandparents to allow them to marry. In Swahili, I am nusu-nusu. Half-half. Half-English, half-Kenyan, half-brown, half-white, half-Muslim, half-foreign, half-local. But the story of the Swahili coast has always been one of movement and exchange, of people, stories, and traditions swept along by the tireless trade winds—the steady northeasterly kaskazi; the antithetical, southwesterly kusi; and the transitional matalai.

These winds filled the sails of traders from India, Persia, and Arabia, and later propelled the boats of colonizers from Portugal, Oman, and Great Britain, carrying rice, cotton cloth, new construction techniques, and Islam down the east coast of Africa; sending ivory, spices, gold, and timber, as well as enslaved people, the other way. My parents inadvertently followed those ancient routes, leaving Mombasa for Oman in 1974, detouring up the coast of the Arabian Gulf via Sharjah, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, and settling in Cyprus in the 1980s. Childhood visits to Kenya were a mission in themselves—three days of connecting flights and interminable transits in Athens, Cairo, and Nairobi before arriving, bleary-eyed and bad-tempered, in Mombasa.

The swimming pool at Dhow House, a private villa rental on Lamu Island

Peponi Hotel in Shela village has been a Lamu institution since the 1960s

I fell hopelessly in love with Kenya early on—its freewheeling spirit, infinite beaches, and sprawling national parks—and have returned often. But my mum's Alzheimer's diagnosis has turned her memories into precious, untrustable things, making links to this part of my heritage feel more tenuous than before. Suddenly I am conscious of