It’s an hour’s sail by speedboat
from Shela on Lamu island to Pate on Pate island. A rich bed of sea grasses
fringe the island where Yellow-billed storks and the African fish eagle and
many other waterbirds feed on the rich shoreline and Bajuni boys race their
dhows, fashioned from plastic debris and banana stalks for rudders in the
creek.
The
local Bajuni fishermen show us huge stingrays with their heads chopped off, a
blue-spotted smaller one, crabs and lobsters. Dhow-men paint their favourite
star on the hull – Jeniffer Lopez sails alongside Mausam and other with the
dhowi-eye nailed n to protect them from the evils at sea.
Pate island spans centuries of
civilization with Arab and Portuguese invasions to give it its present
character.
Pate island is much bigger than its
more famous cousin, Lamu island. For most of the past, the two islands were at
loggerheads trying to conquer each other with the final battle played out in
the well-known Battle of Shela in 1813 where the Pate army was slaughtered on
the Shela beach because the nabhwani errored on the tides and the retreating
army was caught on the dry sands.
Little has changed over the
centuries in this town that once boasted wealth beyond belief. For more than a
millennia Arab, Indian, Chinese and much later Portuguese fleets sailed in
regularly for mangrove, turtle shells, ivory, rhino horn, slaves and more. Today,
there’s an M-Pesa office operated by a young woman and dhows still being built
by hand.
Centuries-old coral houses lined
narrow alleys. A disused administrative office from the colonial days is close
to a blackboard with chalk-scribbled handwriting announcing a Bollywood movie. Rich
farms of bananas and other tropical fruits are interspersed with abandoned
ruins of an ancient sultanate. By the mosque, there’s a motley of crumbling
graves with sacred verses from the Koran.
The upper village is the Portuguese
section where many could pass for Indians, Chinese or Portuguese. It’s given
rise to a spate of excavations and research from the current Chinese to search
for evidence of Chinese ancestry on the island. On the European side, after
Vasco da Gama’s ‘discovery’ of the sea-route to India via Africa at the close
of the 15th century, Pate came under Portuguese .
In the crumbling centuries-old
sultanate, there a grand mansion that
could have been a nobleman’s house with the remain of the zidaka and
etched doorways and columns. There’s an ornate mihrab facing Mecca and a
smaller one near it. On an outer wall, is the remain of an elaborate washroom.
Other towns on Pate Island are Faza,
Siyu and Shanga which were trading ports during the monsoon trade dating thousands
of years. The town of Shanga is a ten-minute sail from Pate village and the word
is reputed to originate from Shangai, like the Chinese one.
Landing on-shore the very sands
that the Nabhwani of Pate tried to invade Lamu from Shela, we relax in the cool
baraza of Banana House. It’s tranquil as we wander around the green garden and
the yoga room where Monika Fauth teached yoga with a smile. On the wall is the
OM instead of the dhowi designed by Monika husband Banana (nickname for eating
too many bananas as a child). Relaxing under the stars on the swinging Lamu
beds on the penthouse suite, Monika relates her own story into Lamu and her
eventual home.
Lamu’s splendor ebbed away with the end of its slave
trade in 1907 but trade in mangrove, ivory, rhino horn, turtle shells continued
between the Arab world and India until the ban in mangrove in the 1970s.
Lamu Stone Town is a World Heritage
Site. The town was founded in the 14th
century and it contains many fine examples of Swahili
architecture. The old city is inscribed on the World Heritage List
as "the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East
Africa".
Kenya’s second seaport at Manda Bay, in Lamu kicked off this year. Three
berths will be constructed initially of the planned 32 berths.
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