![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Much of the scholarly literature on race and decolonization in East Africa focuses on how this period created new and exacerbated existing racial tensions, divisions and conflicts between diverse coastal communities that came to increasingly identify or be identified as “African” or “Arab.” While this article will examine such a moment in which these two groups came into conflict, it will also consider the possibility and nature of solidarity between Arabs and Africans in late-colonial East Africa. The tension surrounding race and decolonization in Mombasa and the wider Kenyan coast during this period was influenced by Mwambao, a movement advocating for coastal autonomy as independence approached. This article will focus on how the politics of mwambao and race came to shape the ways in which African vendors and hawkers in Mombasa mobilized against a municipal council that had become increasingly authoritarian in its administration of “informal” industries, especially those relating to food, policing them through fines, harassment and the demolition of the structures in which they conducted business. In their struggle to remain in operation in the city, African traders identified the municipal council as an institution that not only repressed them, but also provided structural privileges to Arab traders. Consequently, when the Mombasa African Traders Association (MATA) organized a boycott in 1961 to focus attention on its members’ grievances and pressure the municipal council, the association targeted not only city authorities, but also Arab businesses. Part of MATA’s concern with Arab traders was they saw them as colluding with Mwambao activists, which they feared meant that Arab advantages in the governing structures of the city would be carried through independence. However, in the face of a wider coastal context that was moving towards conflict and at times even violence between these groups, this article will examine how African and Arab traders in Mombasa were able to alternatively fashion a class-based and anti-colonial solidarity.
Acknowledgements
Time for writing this article was made possible while I was a Nicholson Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 2015–2016 academic year. I would like to thank the participants who commented on an earlier version of this paper when it was presented at the “Where I fare well, there is my home: migration, past and present” conference at Duke University on 4 March 2016. I also received helpful commentary on this project during a workshop on 29 March 2016 as part of my time as a Nicholson Fellow with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Kenya National Archives, Coast Province, held at the Mombasa Records Centre (KNA-Coast)/UY/18/20: C. Ojwando-Abuor, Secretary, Mombasa African Traders Association (MATA), to A. V. Ratcliff, Town Clerk (TC), Mombasa, 10 May 1960.
2. This state effort at urban development and vendor and hawker struggles to circumvent it are examined in chapter three of Smart, “Consuming Capitalism.” For the state project to socially engineer a “respectable” working class in Mombasa, see Cooper, On the African Waterfront.
3. For the recent scholarship on race, decolonization and political power on the East African coast, see Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Willis and Gona, “Pwani C Kenya?”; Glassman, War of Words; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan's Flag”; and Brennan, Taifa. Frederick Cooper has demonstrated that the social and political conditions of the decolonizing coast could, but need not necessarily, produce violent conflict through his comparison of the lead-up to the Zanzibar Revolution with the situation in the rural areas near Malindi, Kenya in which similar social conditions prevailed, but resulted instead in “an uneasy standoff” rather than outright racial violence. However, such a “standoff” should not be mistaken for actual solidarity, which is the subject of this article. See Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 273–94, quote from 292.
4. For this literature on coastal East Africa, specifically, see Brennan, Taifa; Glassman, War of Words; and Cooper, “Cloves, Cashews and Conflict,” in From Slaves to Squatters, 273–94.
5. Ibid.
6. For radical workers’ movements that became compartmentalized into the bureaucracy of trade unions in late-colonial Kenya, see Hyde, “Undercurrents to Independence.” For this idea more generally, see Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 167–96.
7. Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 168.
8. On the continued salience of these racial political structures and the question of who “belongs” on the coast during the post-colonial period in Mombasa and the wider region, see Willis and Gona, “Pwani C Kenya?” and Smart, “Consuming Capitalism,” 239–304.
9. Ojwando-Abuor to Ratcliff.
10. For confirmation of Ojwando-Abuor's critique that Africans were underrepresented on the Municipal Council of Mombasa, see Library of the Kenya National Archives, Nairobi (Library-KNA)/RW/301/SRE: Fred Burke, “The Development of Municipal Governance in Mombasa,” in Mombasa Social Survey, Part I (Cyclostyled, 1957), 130–5.
11. Ojwando-Abuor to Ratcliff.
12. For attempts to use the new institutions of development to bureaucratize and compartmentalize African social movements, see Hyde, “Undercurrents to Independence”; Cooper, On the African Waterfront; Glassman, War of Words, 119; and, at the level of comparative empire in Africa, see Cooper’s Decolonization in African Society. Other examples of this compartmentalizing of radicalism through bureaucratization in colonial Kenya can be seen in the fishing co-operative societies that were introduced in Nyanza Province near Lake Victoria in an attempt to control the fishing industry, a subject I will explore in a forthcoming project. See the file: Kenya National Archives, Nairobi (KNA-Nairobi/DC/KSM/1/32/30): “Trades and Customs; Cooperative Societies and Trade Unions.”
13. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: African Affairs Officer, Mombasa, Memo, RE; Letter reference C1/1/60, dated 10/5/60, 14 June 1960.
14. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: C. D. Rosenwald, Medical Officer of Health, Mombasa, to the Chairman and Members of the Health Committee, 6 July 1960.
15. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: A. V. Ratcliff, Town Clerk to the Secretary, MATA, 25 August 1960.
16. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: C. Ojwando-Abuor, Secretary, MATA, to the Town Clerk, Mombasa, 17 October 1960.
17. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Let’s Get Together to Face Mombasa Civic Authorities,” Daily Nation, 30 March 1961, KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “‘He Would Not See Us,’ say Mutungi,” Daily Nation, 4 April 1961, KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: J. S. Macartney, for Permanent Secretary, to the Town Clerk, Mombasa, 7 April 1961, KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “‘Reform’ Warning to Council,” Daily Nation, 15 April 1961, and KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Strong Case for African Traders-Chokwe,” Mombasa Times, 15 April 1961.
18. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Boycott Municipal Canteens Told Traders Angered at Attitude of Town Council,” Mombasa Times, 17 April 1961, and KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Mombasa African Traders Angry: ‘No Confidence in Municipality,’” Daily Nation, 17 April 1961.
19. Glassman, War of Words, 160–6.
20. For broader treatments of mwambao, see Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag,” and Salim, “The Movement for ‘Mwambao’.”
21. “Boycott Municipal Canteens,” Mombasa Times.
22. For slavery and the process of abolition on the Kenyan coast and in Zanzibar, see Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, and his Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa.
23. “Boycott Municipal Canteens,” Mombasa Times, and “Mombasa African Traders Angry,” Daily Nation. Again, for decolonization and race in colonial coastal Kenya and Zanzibar, see Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag”; and Glassman, War of Words.
24. “Boycott Municipal Canteens,” Mombasa Times.
25. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: A. V. Ratcliff, Town Clerk, Mombasa, to the Permanent Secretary, Nairobi, 21 April 1961, and KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Traders Hear about Effect of Boycott,” Daily Nation, 19 May 1961.
26. Cooper, On the African Waterfront.
27. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Withdraw Call for Boycott,” Daily Nation, 20 April 1961.
28. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: Alfons Muli, “Letters to the Editor: Boycott Plan,” Mombasa Times, 22 May 1961.
29. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Traders Hear about Effect of Boycott,” Daily Nation, 19 May 1961.
30. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Coast Hopes to Beat Boycott,” Daily Nation, 18 May 1961; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag,” 846; and Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil,” 249–51.
31. “Coast Hopes to Beat Boycott,” Daily Nation.
32. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Leaders Support Proposed Boycott,” Mombasa Times, 24 May 1961.
33. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “African Traders Call Off Arab Boycott,” Daily Nation, 29 May 1961.
34. Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones and Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, 273–94.
35. For this background on the formation of tea hawking in postwar Mombasa, as well as of street-food and prepared-food cultures more generally, see chapter three in Smart, “Consuming Capitalism,” and for brief references on such histories in Mombasa and Kenya more generally, see Willis, Mombasa, 168, 186, 197; White, Comforts of Home, 79–102; Strobel, Muslim Women, 129; Janmohamed, “A History of Mombasa,” 115–88; and Burja, “Women ‘Entrepreneurs’,” 222.
36. According to a 1958 census, Africans were 61.8% of the population of Mombasa Municipality, compared to Arabs as the second largest group, accounting for 17.8% of the city's residents. Library-KNA/RW/301/SRE: G. M. Wilson, “Demographic Factors and Population,” in Mombasa Social Survey, 146.
37. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Arab Traders Back Coast Peace Talks,” Daily Nation, 31 May 1961.
38. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: News Brief, Daily Nation, 19 May 1961 and KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Town Clerk to Meet Delegation,” Daily Nation, 30 May 1961.
39. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: News Brief, Mombasa Times, 1 June 1961.
40. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Canteen Ban Partly Effective,” Mombasa Times, 2 June 1961.
41. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “No Deadlock Says Coast Town Clerk,” Daily Nation, 2 June 1961.
42. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Boycott Has Failed,” Daily Nation, 3 June 1961.
43. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Facts about African Trade,” Mombasa Times, 3 June 1961.
44. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: “Call for New Elections in Association,” Daily Nation, 5 June 1961.
45. KNA-Nairobi/UY/12/338: Minutes of the General Purposes Committee (GPC), Mombasa Municipal Council (MMC), 10 May 1961.
46. KNA-Coast/UY/18/20: Kamau Thiongo, Secretary, MATA, to the Town Clerk, Mombasa, 18 October 1962.
47. For conflations of nation and race elsewhere in East Africa at this time, see Brennan, Taifa.
48. KNA/CQ/9/3: Coast News Story No. 248/61, 10 October 1961, KNA-Nairobi/CQ/9/3/9: Saleh Omar Salmeen, President, Arab Traders Association, Mombasa to District Commissioner, Mombasa, 11 October, 1961 and Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag,” 850.
49. Willis and Gona, “Pwani C Kenya” and Smart, “Consuming Capitalism,” 284–6.
50. Ajulu, “Politicised Ethnicity.”
51. Hyde, “Undercurrents to Independence,” 483–4.
52. Ajulu, “Politicised Ethnicity.”
53. Branch, Kenya, 183–286 and Klopp, “Remember the Destruction.”
54. Lynch, I Say to You.
55. Branch, Kenya, 183–286 and Smart, “Consuming Capitalism,” 239–304. For the Rift Valley, see Lynch, I Say to You.
56. Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint,” 168.
57. Biko, I Write What I Like, 48–53.