The politics of skeletons and ruination: living (with) debris of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Up until the 1990s, the Two Fishes Hotel on the South Kenya Coast was among the ten major hotels in Diani Beach. Today, the consequences of capitalist ruination on tourism can be observed in the decay of some once prospering hotels along on one of East Africa’s most popular tourist shores. In this article, I engage with the ruins of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach by taking as point of departure what the people who live with the ruins can tell us about how they affect their lives. I explore what their perspectives reveal about processes of deterioration and revitalization of capitalist projects like tourism, how affect and agency are engendered in them, and consider how they relate to online observations from a Facebook group dedicated to the ruins of this specific hotel. I argue that the various reappropriations of contemporary liminal spaces like hotels in decay show how infrastructures in the process of ruination have a social life of their own, reflect and give context to the wider political circumstances they are embedded in, and speak to individual and societal socio-economic challenges beyond national borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• ruins
• capitalism
• tourism
• absence
• Diani Beach
• Kenya

As an obvious crack in an infrastructurally prospering scenery, the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach on the South Kenya Coast stood out to me immediately. As one compound in visible decay amidst running luxury lodges the space of the former hotel also caught my attention because, unlike its neighbouring plots, it had no fence that separated it from the beach front. In Diani Beach, where large touristic hotels line the beachfront, hotel ruins that were created through fires, abandonment, expropriation or other scenarios, have become matter out of place – a question of marginal, potentially only accidental, touristic experience. Touristic infrastructure in decay suggests a porousness in the tourism order that superficially dominates this space.

As Póra Pétursdóttir aptly describes, ‘these modern concrete installations stand in sharp contrast to the peripheral landscapes in which they obtrude in as well as to our preferred perception of those landscapes’.¹ This happens too in densely populated tourist areas like Diani Beach, where such neglected touristic ‘concrete installations’, for an array of reasons, are left to decompose, ‘disassemble and rot’² over decades while they are bordered by functioning hotels on both ends. In fact, it is those ‘working infrastructures – hotels in full operation or not (yet) prone to ruination – that ‘can make visible ruptures and breakdowns in local social fabrics’.³

In this article, and by means of drawing on the example of the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel, I focus on this sharp contrast between the working touristic infrastructures in Diani Beach and those that visibly broke down. I propose to understand ruination not as a finalized state, but as an ongoing accumulation of absences that affects the people who live with them in various ways. Absences like those of income, tourists, investors, fences etc., and particularly in combination and accumulation, may add up to a state that can be considered ‘ruination’. However, ruination, as with the variety of factors that may make and unmake it, is never static and always in flux, with the ebb and flow of work opportunities, touristic seasons, or fences being built and coming down.

Ruins, or the debris that remains of infrastructure, are as alive as their environments. Nevertheless, infrastructures may go through, or back and forth between, different stages of ruination, as do the people who live amid and with them. Following this, I aim to think beyond Yael Navaro-Yashin’s understanding of ruination as ‘the material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation’ and focus instead on what she emphasizes as ‘the subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war or violence’.⁴ Additionally, I want to think with ruins by means of the concept of the skeleton (gofu) that was the Swahili term employed by my interlocutors to name the hotel’s remains. In Diani Beach it is precisely those lingering residual affects of the ruin – or skeleton – of the Two Fishes Hotel that continue to shape the lives of those who are cohabiting in the spaces of ruination. Materiality and sociality – hotels and tourists – are entangled and co-affect each other, especially in times of absence and decay.

In Diani Beach, hotel ruins embody a countercycle of the infrastructure they were intended as and result in ‘matter that enable the movement of other matter’.⁵ The creation, and equally so the ruination of tourist infrastructure in Diani through both external and local investors and staff is a political project that cannot be considered separately from the local economy. By zooming in on one specific hotel ruin in a space of otherwise flourishing touristic endeavours, this article responds to laments such as those by Shannon Dawdy, who argues that the ‘social life of modern ruins is underdeveloped’⁶ and that anthropologists should explore what so-called ruins of modernity may ‘tell us about the downturns of economic cycles, the social life they generate, or the politics of their creation’.⁷

New infrastructures ‘are promises made in the present about our future’⁸, they are socio-material sites undergoing transformation. Ruination, in return, as Stoler pointed out, ‘is a corrosive process that weighs on the future and shapes the present’.⁹ Touristic infrastructure, as a specific form of capitalist modernity, promises employment and economic development for local communities as well as leisure and touristic holiday experiences, while it also engenders inevitable capitalist ruination when unemployment strikes or tourists go elsewhere. In Diani Beach these (un)doings and sometimes broken or unfulfilled promises of infrastructures – this ruination – can be observed in the changing economic cycles of the beach economy, the rules attached to its respective social life, and the political powers that coerce and counter their construction.

In this article, I draw on two in-depth interviews conducted in September 2019 with two male cohabitants of the Two Fishes Hotel ruin, several informal conversations along the beachfront of Diani, and data gathered from public social media discussions. All these accounts help to contextualize the ruins in their specific discourse, offer interpretations of them, consider their politicization and inherent conflicts, as well as their historical framings.¹⁰ These insights serve to explore the politics of skeletons and ruination by means of some aspects of space and its shifting and fluid nature between the private and the public; the order of space – or the ‘disordering effects of ruination’¹¹ – in regard to so-called assigned zones and their management; and the notion of stuckness, or waithood, as a temporal space, that seems to be closely intertwined with the material manifestation of an accumulation of absences.

The accounts I explore make clear that, much like elsewhere, on the South Kenya Coast ruination has become a dominant process that affects people’s future-making possibilities and that suspends the creation of economic security now and later. This suspension materializes in people’s lives when their aspirations and general hope of achieving something,¹² gets obstructed by the conditions in which they find themselves. When people let go of promises and stop cultivating hope to achieve certain ways in which they want to live their lives, aspiration is replaced by suspension. And this suspension can be well-observed in the hotel ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel.

The ‘Two Fishes Hotel’: a skeleton on the South Kenya coast

The hotel

‘This hotel was burned down (hii hoteli ikachomeka)’, the younger men of the two – one possibly in his late 30s and the other one at least 10 years older – introduces the Two Fishes Hotel ruin to me when I enter the plot for the first time. ‘We both used to work here (tulikuwa tunafanya kazi hapa)’, the other man proceeds, and adds that he used to be gardener, and the younger guy was responsible for the pool area. I want to know why they are still around, if losing their jobs was not exactly a recent event (Figure 1):

We used to work here but we were not paid … and in the end the manager ran off with all the money … he doesn’t live here anymore. He went to Australia. Far away. He ran away and his life is no longer here. It was a big case, because still there are so many former employees like us, who have not received a compensation until today. We are still waiting.¹³

Before the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach burned down in 1997, it was a popular tourist destination on the South Kenya Coast about an hour South of Mombasa. Originally it had started off as Diani Beach Hotel and as the third largest hotel – alongside Jadini (1937) and Tradewinds (1940)¹⁴ – to be built in Diani in the 1940s altogether. A South African couple – Mr. and Mrs. Fish – bought it soon after, renamed it to suit them and resold it again by 1946.¹⁵ In her work on Germans on the Kenya coast Nina Berman clarifies:

Figure 1. The centre point of the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotels, Diani Beach, Kenya. Photo by the author, September 2019.

Two Fishes was particularly popular with Germans. In 1978, it was bought by a Mr. Sommer, Gerhard Matthiessen, and two others. After the latter three investors left the hotel in 1982, Sommer continued to run it alone. After he died, it was owned by an African Kenyan company. It burned down in late 1997 or early 1998, and locals have clearly agreed that the fire was due to arson. Two Fishes was one of the first hotels that allowed mixed couples to rent rooms. Currently, a beach bar called Kim4Love is run on the plot [this is now also a ruin].¹⁶

Tourism development in Diani started off in the early 1960s and took up further after independence in 1963, when road developments and electricity supplies made the area more accessible for tourism. It was strongly driven by German hotel ownership, significantly until the late 1980s. As Berman¹⁷ points out, by 2013 only 13 of the then 20 major hotels of that touristic peak period remained in operation.

In the late 1990s tourism declined in Diani Beach.¹⁸ According to a German newspaper article from 1999, the Kenyan tourism industry collapsed by 50% within one year only. Thirty charter flights landing in Mombasa per week went down to only five flights that same year, compared to 1997 – a year and a half earlier.¹⁹ Election-linked violence and terror attacks by extremist groups followed by travel restrictions to the area further contributed to a hard to predict and unpopular to invest in development on the Kenyan coast. Today the Diani area includes Kenyans of different ethnicities who migrated there in response to the promise of a tourism-related economy.²⁰

The skeleton

Since its closure more than 20 years ago, the Two Fishes Hotel, or rather its compound and what is left of it, has not yet found a new buyer or investor. As one of my conversation partners explained, ‘the government regulations (masharti) are too strict’, and that these days, they ‘don’t get any more tourists (hatupati wageni)’ on this very strip of the beach. What remains, and what was present upon my visits in 2019, is the ruin of what once was the Two Fishes Hotel.

A ‘ruin’, or a ‘skeleton’, is referred to as gofu in Swahili. While the BAKIZA Dictionary for Standard Swahili explains gofu simply as ‘the remains of a building after collapsing’²¹ (my translation),²² the Swahili-French dictionary by Charles Sacleux (1939) adds further layers to that notion. Herein, /gofu/ is recorded as both noun and adjective. As a noun (plural, magofu) it is described as: ‘Person or animal old and gaunt, having only skin on bones, emaciated and good for nothing (my translation)²³; (…) Skeleton of a person. Those people are (nothing but) skeletons. What is this skeleton of? Skeleton of a horse. Skeleton of a cow’²⁴ (my translation).²⁵ The adjective version /-gofu/ is noted to refer to: ‘An emaciated person. An emaciated tree, old and half-dead tree. Old house, house (hut) in ruins, abandoned’²⁶ (my translation).²⁷

So more than the material remains of a collapsed or destroyed building, here gofu – a ruin – can be both a state of a living or a dead being. This range between possible stages of aliveness and death inherent in gofu suggests a broad spectrum of ruination that designates a fluid instead of a fixed state to a place or person. The adjective definition further qualifies this by again locating the state of ruin within a living thing, and, if at all, in a liminal space between life and death. These translations and explanations complicate and widen the notion of the ruin to describe both a static state and a process, both possible within humans and non-humans, but intrinsically linking those spheres.

Sacleux also relates gofu to the nouns: /gofya/, which describes ‘an impotent person (a person without strength because of illness, of old age)’²⁸ (my translation)²⁹; /gondofu/ meaning: ‘person or animal exhausted by disease and who is no longer good for anything’³⁰ (my translation)³¹; and /mnyogofu/, describing ‘a person without energy, limp, flabby, (…) either physically due to fatigue or illness’³² (my translation).³³ These links suggest again that a state or process of ruination and skeleton-like-ness, may only be a temporary physical state of illness or the absence of well-being. If care should return or illness should pass, a pre-ruin or pre-skeleton state may be recovered.

I take as a point of departure this linguistic proximity and indeterminate temporality of infrastructural and a human ruins, or skeletons, that is evident in Swahili. Understanding ruination by means of putting the notion of gofu at the heart of the discussion allows a foregrounding of the more-than-material aspects of ruination and the interwovenness with the human worlds ruins are inseparable parts of.

Ruination as accumulation of absences: living with debris in Diani Beach

That ruination can be understood as an accumulation of absences and ruins themselves as infrastructures in fluid states between life and death was evident in the conversations I had with the two men who were waiting, and somewhat trapped in a state of suspension, in the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel. The men were sticking around in the hope for a remuneration, for pay that was never received more than 20 years ago, for a compensation from a manager who had long disappeared and remained out of reach. Echoing what Danny Hoffman describes for the case of the Ministry of Defense building in Monrovia, Liberia, the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel did not exclusively become a site for staking direct political claims to alternative visions of the beach front, but to some extent also remained unavailable to such configurations due to the suspension upheld by the men waiting.³⁴

Post-promises: ruination as suspension of futures

‘It is a big challenge when a large hotel like this one here dies (hoteli kufa kama hii)’, the two men in the hotel ruin explained the complexity of their situation to me. ‘And this one was huge. Now it is only a skeleton (gofu)’. Explaining further on their practice of waiting and not-working: ‘We don’t get any visitors here, so we go fishing (kuvua samaki) to survive (ili tupate riziki). But now we can’t even go fishing because we don’t have the money to repair our boat (pesa kwa repair ya boti)’. So there is no work to do, with tourism having declined, and alternatives, like going fishing for a living, can’t be pursued, when there is no money with which to repair boats first (Figure 2).

Figure 2. View from the Two Fishes Hotel ruin onto Diani Beach, Kenya. Photo by the author, September 2019.

What my interlocutors made clear resonates with, for example, what Anne Storch writes on Ruination and Amusement, echoing Ann Laura Stoler’s³⁵ work, that ruination, through abandonment and exclusion, is also a subjectively experienced concept, and not simply manifested in the material.³⁶ Ruination becomes the state that comes after promises could not be lived up to, and the consequences of that situation, such as suspended plans of an envisioned future, must be faced. Stoler emphasizes the ambiguity that is inherent in ruination and that shows through the concept being ‘an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it’ and thus ‘an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss’.³⁷ Particularly the link between ruination and loss ties into the subjectively experienced challenges the former employees of the hotel face. Loss, or rather an accumulation of losses, or absences, seems at the heart of a situation of ruination that living with tourist debris in Diani Beach engenders.

I ask the men about current happenings in the Two Fishes ruin – whether people do something with it; if the buildings are used in alternative ways or if they just lay empty; who spends time on the compound; and if there are any plans for the future. They explain:

Well, people sleep here. But the security guards are there. The manager employed them. Even though he ran away, he is trying to protect his space and whatever he left here, like the beds for example. All this still belongs to somebody.³⁸

The absences, or losses, that make up the state of ruination of the Two Fishes Hotel, thus include not only the issue of non-compensated working-hours that was followed by the burning of the hotel and a loss of employment, but also entails the lingering absence of the previous owner of the hotel. Their absence, which is described as far from complete and mostly partial through their continuing control over the hotel grounds by means of having security guards protect the property, fosters a state of suspension that prevents the Two Fishes state of ruination from being complete. Thus, despite the partial “death” of the hotel, its remains continue to live on in different ways and are actively and passively appropriated from near and far. That ruins ‘can be lively despite announcements of their death’³⁹ is evident here.

Zoning the beach: ruination as political reconfiguration

While the men calmly tell me their stories, I want to know more about this apparent physical and temporal space of liminality between unemployment and informal economy they seem to be lingering in. ‘We cannot just work anywhere’, they elaborate, ‘everybody has their own zone (kila mtu ana zone yake), and everybody is looking to make a living (anatafuta riziki). You cannot just decide that you will work here or there by yourself’. Again, I follow up, and ask for more details on this apparent order of public space – that, with their further explanations, turns out to be a system of zones. ‘Well’, they say, ‘the space just doesn’t belong to you (mahali si kwako). There are different zones (zone tofauti). And in every zone you will be known as a member of that specific space (memba wa hapo mahali). You couldn’t just go and get work there or look for it. People know each other here’.

And they add: ‘We didn’t use to have these zones (kulikuwa hakuna zones), but they put them into place, when robberies of tourists increased (kuna wale wizi wa kuibia wageni) on the beaches. Then we decided that it was better to start zones and register people for the sections they work in. And now we have full security’. The concept of zones intrigues me, and I inquire further on how they are implemented.

The local party members established the zones so we would know who belongs where. There are more than 20 zones now, because they reach along the whole beach. From Likoni, to Wasini, to Msambweni. Every zone is different. Sometimes it’s just one hotel, sometimes it’s several, and they always go with the according section of the beach. There are contracts. If you want to work in a different zone you have to apply. It is necessary to pay a fee to the party first. And we do not have those means. If we had it, then we would already have paid for one of the zones where there are many tourists. We would have searched/made a living. But you have to pay before you can look for work. Now where are you supposed to get 20.000 KSh from if you don’t have work?⁴⁰

I later discover, that the one-off entrance fee to the local party for switching zones depends on the business you operate. I was told that 10.000 KSh was the standard price if you ran boat safaris or the like; 5.000 KSh if you engaged in smaller business. Particularly for people in ‘ruined’ zones, that are characterized by prolonged situations of unemployment, such a spatial regulation may also turn counterproductive when the payment of entrance fees to a different zone becomes less likely or impossible. The search for labour opportunities is further complicated and may even be obstructed, so that ultimately exiting a state of stuckness and unemployment, or a situation of personal ruination, is not possible. Finally, the fact that zones were said to be created by local party members – likely in the position of selected local authorities – suggests a potentially deeper entanglement of Diani, specifically, and Kenyan Coastal politics, more broadly, with religious, ethnic and racial categories.⁴¹ If coastal space and people are indeed registered and regulated along the lines of local political powers, then tourism on the South Kenya Coast must also be considered an inherently political practice (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Former hotel room complex on the premises of the Two Fishes Hotel ruin, Diani Beach, Kenya. Photo by the author, September 2019.

Between public and private: ruination as spatial reorganization

Ultimately, I want to know more about the nature of the space we are sitting in, as my conversation partners keep repeatedly using the terms public and private. And precisely this character between private and public realm, as well as the possible transformation from on state to the other, seem to matter as we speak.⁴² ‘For now, this space is public because the hotel has died (imekufa). But after some time when something new will be built like a tourist hotel then people like us will not be able to come here anymore’. Asking what they mean by the term ‘public’ (they had used the English word), at least temporarily, with which they designate the area of ruination we are sitting in, they explain further:

Public is free for anyone and means that the space does not belong to any one person but to the government, to the society. It means that everyone who comes here can enter freely, may stay, and do small business. Here, Two Fishes, is public at the moment, but when they will start building again it will be private again. At the moment everybody comes here. School classes for example. Those guys can’t just go to a different zone and a tourist hotel with all the children. The children would make noise in a space that people have come to relax in. When they come with the children, they need to find a public space like here.⁴³

We are sitting in a ruin that has turned into a form of commons. It resembles the concept of a park, or at least a space that is known for its freedom from the touristic regulation that applies to its neighbouring spaces. Thinking with Stoler, what happens here, is that the ruins ‘become repositories of public knowledge and new concentrations of public declaration’⁴⁴ and that, to some extent, ‘inform social modes of organization by functioning in other ways than they once did’.⁴⁵

The situation also resonates with how Brian Godfrey and Olivia Arguinzoni regard public-private distinctions of beachfronts in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil as contextual rather than clear-cut, pointing out that publicly accessible places such as a shopping mall – or a hotel ruin – may still be privately owned, as is also the case for the Two Fishes compound. Their complication of the private-public distinction shows how institutional forces contribute to shape and transform public spaces.⁴⁶ This absence of a certain fixed set of rules that assigns concrete meaning to what a hotel is to be used for, erases, or at least destabilizes, the boundaries between public and private spheres as they are woven through the beach area. Private spaces on the opposite, like the neighbouring running hotels, are not accessible for the men who speak to me:

We cannot just come through the door because they will tell us ‘Trespass’. It’s only for the tourists. But in the past, you were free to go in and look around. But today’s environment doesn’t allow this anymore. They say it causes problems because life has changed.⁴⁷

And just before we end our conversation, one of the men adds what strikes me regarding its subtle subversiveness on the power relations of space.

But at the ruins, you, if you come alone, you cannot just enter yourself. But if you go with me, you can get in immediately. When there is a sign that reads ‘closed’ you can’t get in, you need to find someone.⁴⁸

Edensor has pointed to the ambiguity that is inherent in ruins, as despite their state of decay and apparent loss of value, their neglect and disorderliness, they neither call for sanctions on their acceptable use or interpretation.⁴⁹ This is evident in my conversation partner’s claim of power over the space of the ruin that is tied to restriction its accessibility and making it conditional of a gate-keeper and a potential benefit that will remain with the ruin-dweller. The somewhat public space of the ruins, in opposition to the private regulated hotel spaces, seems to be reclaimed in a diametrically opposing way that redistributes the power of spatial regulation to those excluded from the prosperity of the tourist industry. Further, the shifts in the individual and shared designations of certain beachfront spaces contribute to a regulation not just of the relationships between local Kenyan inhabitants and tourists, but also among those local people who move within those spaces in different capacities. Diani Beach thus ends up being a ‘complicated public space’,⁵⁰ with changing degrees of privacy incorporated in it.

Remembering ruins on social media

With the outbreak of the Corona pandemic in early 2020 unfortunately making follow up fieldtrips to the Two Fishes Hotel ruin in Diani Beach impossible, I turned to researching the web, and more specifically social media sphere, for traces or commemorations of this once popular hotel. This not only helped to triangulate the information I had been able to gain from the conversations with my two central conversation partners, but it also allowed me to add an additional layer of reflection on the ruins that tapped into the memory practices cultivated by former and more recent tourists, who either stayed at the Two Fishes Hotel during its operating era or who came (back) to explore its ruins in the present. In February 2021 I posted the following on Twitter:

Currently thinking and writing about the ‘ruin’ of the Two Fishes Hotel in Diani Beach, Kenya. Any leads – get in touch. #infrastructure #ruination #tourism #Kenya #Diani #TwoFishes #Swahili #anthropology.⁵¹

A few weeks later a white male Twitter user commented on the post: ‘There’s a Facebook group, have you joined it?’, which was accompanied by another response by an anonymous male user, thanking the person to make me aware of the group, adding the link⁵² to it (Figure 4).

Figure 4. The deserted complex of the former Two Fishes Hotels, Diani Beach, Kenya. Photo by the author, September 2019.

I followed the link and found the public Facebook group called “Two Fishes Hotel Diani Beach”, which was created on 16 October 2009, is administered by a man and a woman with what appear to be German names, and at the time of writing this article counts 302 members, with most of the discussions in the group taking place in German. A text in German in the ‘About This Group’ section explains:

In the evening hours of 26.11.1997, the “Two Fishes” Hotel at Diani Beach burnt down. The cause of the fire remains unknown at present. It was reported, that the African employees of the hotel, who had not received their loans⁵³ for months, set fire to the kitchen as a form of protest. The fact that military arrived immediately after the fire started could confirm this suppositions. Deacon Lothar Wilczek⁵⁴ (my translation)⁵⁵

The Deacon’s message echoes my two interlocutors’ accounts who similarly recounted the reason for the Two Fishes Hotel burning down being the suspended payment of salaries to the hotel staff, including themselves and confirms the narrative of the fire having been an act of refusal to this enforced state of financial suspension.

The group generally appears to be a random selection of written or visual contributions from former (predominantly white, German) Two Fishes Hotel guests, that intend to commemorate the place. A photo album titled “Hotel 2 fishes”,⁵⁶ that was initially posted to a page called “Our lost places/ Zeitzeugen” in February 2016, holds 108 photographs of the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel. The photos show the decaying hotel compound from a variety of possible angles, and with an occasional Western-looking tourist posing amidst the debris. The album’s description reads:

For us by far the most exciting photo tour of a ruin yet. We would probably had faced one or several problems, had we not come with our Security [Guard]. In the end we had to pay protection money, so that we were allowed to leave the premises again because [it is] private property.⁵⁷ (my translation)

The Two Fishes Hotel burned for the first time in 1997. In 1999 there was a second fire which destroyed a large part of the compound. Since then the hotel has been falling apart together with the compound. It is being guarded by a Masai, because all the furniture is still packed together inside the hotel rooms. At the time of the second fire the hotel property was just being sold by a German to a Kenyan. However, because the ownership status was not clear there were huge issues with the insurance.⁵⁸ (my translation)

The Two Fishes Hotel ruin, so it seems, has been a popular site of tourism nostalgia and commemoration for several years now. Instead of tourism having ‘died’ as a result of the ruination of the hotel compound, ‘ruin tourism’ appears to have grown in response to the situation. A sense of adventure and wonder and on a different register than an ‘orderly’ and ordinary functioning touristic hotel infrastructure would provide, has come to life. The “Our lost places / Zeitzeugen” photo album “Hotel 2 fishes” is accompanied by an exchange of group members in English and German that further frame the context of negotiating these images⁵⁹:

A: Really Sad how it has now become a total ruin …  … . Looking at the pictures the best thing would remove the complete complex and rebuild rather than refurbish.

B: But I think the biggest problem is the political. There are more ruins on Diani Beach. It is always sad that so many buildings, older, simply expire so, although you could still make a lot darau . Often there is a money problem, sometimes the problems are but also elsewhere.

A: Too true it has always been political in MBA. Especially during Moi's period. Remember how long the Castle was shut down? Then ASC hotels and all the corrupt dealings & wheelings … . Kenya's biggest problem MONEY MONEY MONEY a Richmans Game????????

C: I still remember the fire well. What was being told back then was that the employees had not received any money for a longer period of time, and in that way [by causing the fire] wanted to announce their dissatisfaction.⁶⁰ (my translation)

A: That sounds similar to what happened at the African Safari Club Hotel on the North Coast.⁶¹ (my translation)

The suggested notion of the ‘total ruin’ is here linked to the larger political situation and individual factors that condition that potential state of total ruination. At the same time references to other ruins on Diani Beach and on other Kenya coastal strips suggests a broader applicability of the phenomenon as one stage on a spectrum of touristic activity. The entanglement of affect and memory in this brief exchange also shows how individual touristic experiences and knowledge of political-historical factors and events become part of an alternative conversation about places like Diani beach that are less commonly discussed in critical political terms in public domains like Facebook, but rather for their catering to tourists’ holiday fantasies.

Another multilingual exchange of 53 comments mostly from 2016 with some additional ones from 2021 between group members who from their Facebook profiles appear to be predominantly white German/ European middle-aged group members, who either visited the Two Fishes Hotel in the 1980s or 1990s, returned at a later stage – some also recently – to explore the hotel’s ruins, accompanies the publicly accessible selection of photographs. Only in two cases, the speakers are Kenyan⁶²:

WM: Thanks for the many but sad photos that you have provided for us – The foundation and most of the buildings are still in a state worthy of renovation – The inventory was probably looted even before the fire – I don’t see any burnt remains of bed – closets – TVs-and many more⁶³ (my translation)

WM: All the furniture are crammed together in the rooms⁶⁴ (my translation)

WF: I was there early April taking photos but didn’t go into the buildings. Saturdays and Sundays everybody can access the compound even without paying “protection money”.⁶⁵ (my translation)

WM: Protection money NEVER I was just advised to not enter the buildings PROHIBITED!⁶⁶ (my translation)

WM: We had a security [guy] with us. The compound is watched by a couple of Masai. It was really worth it for us though. We usually also crawl around in ruins.⁶⁷ (my translation)

These observations around the general state of the hotel ruin and the protection and security situation of the compound is here paired with insights into individual interests into ruin exploration. This creates a sense of danger and adventure, which in itself may be considered a side-effect that beach holiday destinations like Diani Beach may not directly cater to but that are never the less produced as a part of the wider local tourist economy. Further comments point to additional themes and affects worth considering in this context:

KM: My mother was working oooh I remember Bush baby night club, I used to play football behind Bush baby. Really miss the place.

WF: Sad, it was a beautiful hotel back then. Just like Jadini and Afrikana! What is happening with tourism in Kenya?⁶⁸ (my translation)

WM: Tourism in Kenya is only running at 60%!⁶⁹ (my translation)

KM: The terrorists did a good job and the hotels and tour companies are to blame for demanding exorbitant rates even when they are only a third full. I don’t understand why some private cottages can demand 150 Euros for a night, how many people can still afford that?

WM: That is the Problem To expensive For a lot of People better 70 euro per Night that’s ok

KM: everybody misses this hotel, tourists came saw the hotel screamed in the end … (…) now it has become a house for the monkeys oooh so sad, across from it was a Disco and nice, big football pitch.⁷⁰ (my translation)

What stands out in this set of comments is the possibility to understand the idea of tourism itself as an affective object connotated both positively and negatively, while deeply intertwined with individual feelings and life situations of the local population who grow up or live in the vicinity of hotels, as well as larger regional politicized tropes of security threats. Particularly the Kenyan commentators’ laments that remember the hotel fondly and speak of it with pride point to the wide-reaching agency and indeterminate affects caused by the encounter with the ruin whether in real life or online.

The politics of the property itself and the possibilities of beach front investments are another topic of discussion in the group.

WM: Money Problem!

NC: Yes – as well – and can see many other problem as well. Also political.

WM: yes so sad.

NC: As with others on Diani Beach (ie Jadini – Trade Winds etc.)

KM: You can buy it and renovate.

NC: LOL … Another country it might be worth it but sad to say I would not invest in Kenya to risky and too much corruption for my liking … 

KM: Successful men are those who take risks.

NC: Not anymore with Kenya … IMHO … Plenty of better places to take risks also IMHO … 

KM: The property is cheap now but when tourism starts picking up again, it will be difficult to buy. Corruption should not worry you so much because I think only in Western Europe where corruption is not so bad.

NC: (…) And when it comes to legal recourse, both in the private and commercial circles it is slow and expensive in Kenya, with some cynicism about the objectivity of certain executive and judicial branch decisions. So anything cheap will no doubt be taken away at a later date as and when the political elite feel it wants to do … So thanks for the suggestion but No Thanks!

KM: I was just giving you a tip. I am aggressively buying plots at the beach now because they are cheap now before the price rise again. But again I am also Kenya hence I have better insight.

These considerations reflect political-legal context in which larger tourist endeavours are embedded and constraint by. The hesitation to buy land or invest in property in Kenya, the instability and fluctuation of prices depending on the state of the tourism industry, the fear and effect of corruption, and potential investors’ own positionality and belonging point to some of the potential challenges possibly contributing to the Two Fishes Hotel ruin not having been torn down or refurbished again and thus to explain its state of abeyance.

Finally, a contestation of the widespread story of the Two Fishes Hotel being burned down by its former employees by another commentator offers another angle on the potential ascription of responsibility and power among the different parties involved:

WF: Hard to believe that the employees are supposed to have caused a fire of that extent! I don’t believe it!⁷¹ (my translation)

WM: So we were told back then⁷² (my translation)

WF: I understand but it’s not logical … I do not know how high the salaries were but 1981 employees made around 400 KSH or about 28-29 DM [15 Euro]. Hotel had insurance no? The owner is not the loser but always the employees … That is just my opinion, a different logic … ⁷³ (my translation)

Voicing her disbelief in the general trope around the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel and shifting the blame away from the employees as responsible to the owner and the conditions caused by them – such as the low salaries – puts into question how blame and responsibility, cause and reaction, are distributed and understood in the first place.

The range of concerns reflected in these comments and brief exchanges allows an additional angle and some more nuance in considering the state of tourism on the Kenya Coast by way of the ruin of the Two Fishes Hotel. In February 2021one commentator writes: ‘No security anymore, you can freely walk around’. This eventual absence, or loss, of the final living processes of ruination – a securitization of the hotel premises by the absent owner from a distance – suggests a potential shift of on the fluid register of ruination towards a more final state of ruin.

Reflections on the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins in Diani Beach

Tourism and travel are an imperative for capitalism. As Yael Navaro-Yashin has reinstated with reference to Walter Benjamin, ‘ruination lies at the heart of modern regimes’.⁷⁴ Contemporary ruins like the skeleton of the Two Fishes Hotel thus may become, to some extent, a memento mori for our times, especially of tourist installations and as a sense of mortality might ensue in those managing and directing them. As the ruins point us to the perishable nature of capitalist endeavours, their impermanency and inherent failures, and the ephemerality of any livelihoods gained from such undertakings – most strikingly defined by the poverty they engender temporally or spatially – they sit in contrast to the ‘promises of ever-expanding flow and possibilities of social uplift’.⁷⁵ I have reflected on this impermanency and innate poverty and offered insights into how ruins can carry social meaning and aliveness by foregrounding and taking seriously the experiences of the two men who spoke to me in the ruins of the Two Fishes Hotel, and the commemorative conversations on the Two Fishes Hotel that exist across social media channels. These insights have made clear the extent to which there may indeed be possibilities of life in capitalist ruins⁷⁶ such as those of touristic infrastructure undergoing ruination. Touristic ruins, with tourism as a central factor of capitalist gain and loss in Diani beach, show what happens in practice when the singular asset of a place can no longer be produced and might therefore be abandoned – such as a hotel in a space of touristic decline.

My interlocutors’ perspectives have made clear that modernist hotel ruins, as capitalist ruins – in regard to Tsing, and closely related to ‘imperial debris’ – according to Stoler, may extend beyond places where the timber has been cut or the oil has run out, beyond boarded up schools or abandoned commercial districts⁷⁷ and are marked specifically by the people that are dispossessed or otherwise ‘laid to waste’ by them.⁷⁸ This ‘flip side of capitalism – not its opposite but its underside’⁷⁹ is one area of inquiry that comes to the fore when we pay attention to the holes in the fabric of functionality and turn to the margins often left unattended.

In a comment on Dawdy’s article, Severin Fowles makes the interesting claim, that what capitalism has not learned is ‘to recycle and deal with its own waste’.⁸⁰ That this equally applies for the tourism sector, or rather those parts of it that are undergoing ruination, has shown in the accounts I presented. And it is even more than capitalist also the imperial formations that are inherent in hierarchical models of capitalist economy – such as tourism – that persist and linger ‘in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives’⁸¹ when despite a ruination of 20 years and an absence of the former powers that managed it, precisely those continue to structure its existence despite their lack of presence.

The accounts from within the ‘modern ruin’ of Two Fishes have emphasized, as Dawdy puts it well, the ‘failures and impermanency of capitalism and the necessary poverty it engenders temporally or spatially, in contrast to its promises of ever-expanding flow and possibilities of social uplift’.⁸² How this is expressed in observations of shifting notions of the public and the private, and alternative system of spatial regulation through zones, and the adversity that people who live in relation to the ruins face and struggle to escape have shown this clearly.

There is a need for further account of ‘why and how ruins are not only made but also erased, commemorated, lived in, commodified, and recycled’, for they could tell us ‘at least as much about society as the processes that created the original edifices’.⁸³ Not simply the impermanence of space and tourism, but more so the fluidity of designation of meaning, has underlined the agentive character of ruin, or ruination, as a processual realm that is defined by an accumulation of absences or losses such as those of boundaries, salaries, tourists, or investors.

The accounts of my conversation partners have shown that ruins are ‘tears in the spaciotemporal fabric through which new social forms can emerge’.⁸⁴ Whatever liminal state of reappropriation they may be in, are a further example for ruins of modernity. Ruins are thus not only, again with Dawdy, ‘a defining feature of the urban landscape’,⁸⁵ but more so, I would say, a defining feature of a capitalist landscape, that can be well observed on Diani Beach. And more than a feature of these, ruination ‘is a function of capitalism’s fastmoving frontiers’.⁸⁶

‘Attending to these ruins’ is thus inherently political and undermines both the ‘stability of modern, progressive time’⁸⁷ and of capitalist modernity as a static, complete process. As more than a process, the political project of ruination ‘lays waste to certain peoples and places, relations, and things’⁸⁸ by having rid itself of the processes that once kept them in a particular order. Paying adequate attention to infrastructures such as the ruins of the Two Fishes Hotel therefore means engaging with ‘a material and aspirational terrain for negotiating the promises and ethics of political authority, and the making and unmaking of political subjects’.⁸⁹ It is not just the material remains of the Two Fishes Hotel that have transformed in form and shape since it was built, but also the promises of progress from the 1980s or 90s that were attached to it in the first place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pétursdóttir, “Concrete Matters,” 39–40.

2 Edensor, “Waste Matter,” 317.

3 Strava, “A Tramway Called Atonement,” 26.

4 Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects,” 5.

5 Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 329.

6 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 773.

7 Ibid, 772.

8 Anand, Gupta, and Appel, “Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure”, 27.

9 Stoler, Imperial Debris, 194.

10 Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects,” 14f.

11 Edensor, “Waste Matter,” 311.

12 Archambault, “One Beer, One Block,” 693.

13 Tulikuwa tunafanya kazi lakini hatulipwi … mwisho yule meneja anachukua pesa … mwisho yule meneja alihama kabisa, haishi hapa tena. Alienda Australia. Mbali. Akakimbia kweli kweli. Maisha yake siyo ya huku tena. Ni kesi kubwa sasa … kwa sababu bado kuna wafanyakazi kama sisi na hatujapata. Bado tunasubiri.

14 Berman, “From Colonial to Neoliberal Times,” 4.

15 Berman, Germans on the Kenyan Coast, 33; 43.

16 Ibid, 217.

17 Ibid.

18 Akama, “The Evolution of Tourism in Kenya.”

19 https://www.abendblatt.de/archiv/1999/article204603111/Wie-ist-Kenia-noch-zu-retten.html.

20 Berman, “From Colonial to Neoliberal Times,” 2.

21 Masalio ya jengo baada ya kubomoka.

22 BAKIZA, Kamusi la Kiswahili Fasaha, 100.

23 Personne ou bête vielle et décharnée, n’ayant que la peau sur les os, émaciée et bonne à rien.

24 G. la mtu. Watu hawa mag. G. hili la nini? G. la farasi. G. la nombe.

25 Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français, 251.

26 Mtu mg. Mti mg., arbre vieux et à moitié mort. Nyumba g., maison (case) en ruines, abandonee.

27 Ibid.

28 Personne impotente (mtu asiye na nguvu kwa sababu ya ugondzwa, ya uzee).

29 Ibid.

30 Personne ou bête que la maladie a épuisée et qui n’est plus bonne á rien.

31 Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français, 252.

32 Personne sans énergie, molle, flasque, (…) soit au physique par suite de fatigue ou de maladie.

33 Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français, 579.

34 Hoffman, “The Ministry of Defense and the Limits of Occupation.”

35 Stoler, Imperial Debris.

36 Storch, “Ruination and Amusement,” 306.

37 Stoler, Imperial Debris, 195.

38 Wanalala. Lakini maaskari wapo. Wameajiriwa na meneja. Amekimbia lakini bado anajaribu kulinda eneo lake. Kwa sababu kuna mali vimebaki humu vitanda everything inside. Mali ya mtu.

39 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 6.

40 Watu wa chama wameweka zones hivi tujue huyu wetu, na huyu wetu. Zone zinapita ishirini kwa sababu ni beach yote. Na hii beach imeanzia Likoni, mpaka Wasini, mpaka Msambweni. Kila zone ni tofauti. Hivyo inategemea ni hoteli moja au mbili. Na zote inaenda na eneo la ufukwe. Kuna mkataba. Ukitaka kwenda Zone nyingine kabla ya kutokea hapa inabidi kuapply. Ni lazima nimlipia chama. Sisi hatuna ule uwezo. Tungekuwa na uwezo tungelipia hizi zone zile ambazo kuna wageni. Tungetafuta maisha. Lakini lazima kwanza ulipe kabla ya kutafuta kazi. Lakini upate wapi elfu 20 ikiwa huna kazi?

41 Willis and Mwakimako, “Kenya’s Coast.”

42 See also, Azoulay, “When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square.”

43 Public ni kwa kila mtu, si pa mtu, ya serikali tu, ya jamii. Nafahamu kila mwananchi ambayo atakuja wako free ya kuingia, ya kukaa, na kufanya biashara vidogo. Hapa saivi ni public, lakini labda baadae ikijengwa itakuwa private tena. Sasa hii kwa mahali sahii hakuna biashara yoyote ikiwa tu kama public na watu wote wanakuwa wanakuja. Ni shule, darasa la shule. Hawa hawawezi kwendu mule hotelini muna wageni, watoto watilia kelele na watu wenyewe wamekuja holiday kurelax. Wakija na watoto, lazima watafute mahali kama hapa kwenye public yoyote.

44 Stoler, Imperial Debris, 20.

45 Ibid, 22.

46 Godfrey and Arguinzoni, “Regulating Public Space on the Beachfronts,” 19.

47 Kuingia kwa mlango haiwezekani, wanasema Trespas. Ni ya watalii tu. Lakini zamani ukuwa free, unaweza kuangalia. Lakini mazingira ya siku hizi haiwezekani tena. Wanasema inaleta shida kwa sababu maisha imegeuka.

48 Lakini kwenye gofu kuingia kwa geti ikiwa ni wewe tu huwezi kuingia, lakini ukiwa na mimi unaingia mara moja. Ukisoma kile kibao Closed, huwezi kuingia. Lazima utafute mtu.

49 Edensor, “Waste Matter,” 317.

50 Godfrey and Arguinzoni, “Regulating Public Space on the Beachfronts,” 31.

51 https://twitter.com/Franziska_Fay/status/1357012235722366978.

52 https://www.facebook.com/groups/TwoFishesHotel.

53 In order to not distort my source, I retain all spelling and grammatical mistakes as they appear in the original comments on Facebook. ‘loan’, here, indicates a typical translation mistake for a German-speaker thinking of the German word ‘Lohn’ when translating ‘wage/ salary’ to ‘loan’.

54 Upon research Diakon Lothar Wilczek is a catholic deacon who has lived in Kenya for 25 years between 1990 and 2015.

55 In den Abendstunden des 26.11.1997, ist das "Two Fishes" Hotel am Diani Beach abgebrannt. Die Brandursache ist momentan noch ungeklärt. Es wird berichtet, daß die afrikanischen Beschäftigten des Hotels, die seit Monaten keinen Lohn erhalten haben, aus Protest in der Küche Feuer gelegt haben. Die Tatsache, daß sofort nach Ausbruch des Brandes Militär eintraf, könnte die Vermutung bestätigen. Diakon Lothar Wilczek.

56 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=ourlostplaces&set=a.1175430205802543.

57 Die bisher aufregenste Fototour einer Ruine für uns. Hätten wir nicht unseren Security mitgehabt hätten wir wohl ein oder mehrere Probleme bekommen. Am Ende mussten wir Schutzgeld zahlen, dass wir von der Anlge wieder runter konnten weil Privatgelände.

58 Das Hoel 2 fishes erlebte in 1997 sein ersten Brand. In 1999 kam ein zweites Feuer, welches einen großen Teil der Anlage zerstörte. Seit dem zerfällt das Hotel und die Anlage dort. Diese wird von einem Masai bewacht, da in den Hotelzimmern immernoch die gesamten Möbel u.a. zusammen gestellt sind. Zum Zeitpunkt des zwiten Brandes wurde die Anlage gerade von einem Deutschen an einen Kenianer verkauft. Da die Eigentumverhältnisse jedoch nicht geklärt waren gab es enorme Probleme mit der Versicherung.

59 At the time of revising this article, the comment section is no longer fully publicly accessible on Facebook and the positionality of the commentators could thus not be confirmed.

60 Ich kann mich noch gut an den Brand erinnern. Man sagte damals, dass die Belegschaft längere Zeit kein Gehalt bekommen hatte, und auf diese Weise ihren Unmut kundgetan hätte.

61 Das klingt ähnlich, was in African Safari Club Hotel an der Nordküste passiert ist.

62 In the following, I mark the presumed speakers’/ commentators’ positionality as WF (white female), WM (white male), KF (Kenyan female), KM (Kenyan male), or NC (not clear).

63 [heart] Danke [heart] für die vielen aber traurigen Bilder die du uns zur Verfügung gestellt hast - Das Fundament und die meisten Gebäude sind noch in einen restaurierungswerten Zustand - Das Inventar hat man vermutlich vor den Brand schon geblündert - ich sehe keine verkohlten Überreste von Betten-Schränke-TV-und vieles mehr.

64 Die ganzen Möbel sind in Zimmern zusammen gestaut.

65 War Anfang April da und habe Fotos gemacht, in die Gebäude bin ich allerdings nicht gegangen. Samstag und Sonntag kann jeder auf das Gelände auch ohne „Schutzgeld“ zu zahlen.

66 Schutzgeld NEVER mir wurde nur geraten nicht in die Gebäude zu Gehen VERBOTEN!

67 Wir hatten einen security mit. Die Anlage wird von einem paar Masai bewacht. Hat sich für uns aber auf jeden Fall gelohnt. Krabbeln sonst auch in Ruinen rum.

68 Traurig war ein wunderschönes Hotel, leider seinerzeit! Wie auch Jadini und Afrikana! Was ist los mit dem Tourismus in Kenia?

69 Tourismus in Kenia läuft nur auf 60%!

70 alle vermissen dieses Hotel, Touristen kamen sie sahen das Hotel Schrei am Ende … (…) jetzt ist wie das Haus Affen oooh zu traurig, ihm gegenüber eine Disco und schöne, große Fußballplatz war.

71 Schwer zu glauben das die Angestellten den Brand in diesen Ausmass verursacht haben! Ich glaube daran nicht!

72 So wurde uns es damals berichtet.

73 Ich verstehe aber es ist unlogisch … Ich weiß es nicht wie hoch jetzt die Gehälter waren aber 1981. verdiente Personal ca. 400 KSH oder ca. 28-29 DM. Hotel war doch versichert oder nicht? Der Besitzer ist kein Verlierer sonder immer die Arbeiter … Das ist nur meine Meinung, eine andere Logik … 

74 Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects,” 7.

75 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 772.

76 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

77 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 762.

78 Stoler, Imperial Debris, 21.

79 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 776.

80 Ibid, 781.

81 Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins,” 194.

82 Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 772.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid, 777.

85 Ibid, 762.

86 Ibid, 771.

87 Ibid, 762.

88 Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins,” 196.

89 Anand, Gupta, and Appel, “Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure,” 20.