Along the Line of Road: Expanding Rural Centres in Kenya's Coast Province

Extract

In a large area stretching north and west from Mombasa and inland from Kenya's coast, into Kilifi District, a number of small tradin centres have come to express recent changes in the relationship of Muslims to non-Muslims. The area is generally divisible into three ecological zones, identified as fishing, farming, and cattle-herding. Until Kenya's independence in 1963 the coastal strip up to about ten miles inland fell under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Zanzibar and so was dominated by Muslims. In this coastal zone fishing was, and to a large extent still is, carried out by Muslims, and farmland was held in freehold tenure by Muslims, many of whom employed non-Muslims from the hinterland to work for them, often in exchange for the use ofsome fertile coastal land. Behind the ten-mile coastal strip, non-Muslims farmed and herded cattle on land held in customary tenure. The coastal zone was thus a Muslim stronghold, yet with many non-Muslims later identified as ‘squatters’, while the hinterland wasa non-Muslim area. Since 1963 many non-Muslim ‘squatters’have been given legal rights to the land they occupy in the coastal zone, in the form of settlement scheme plots. Non-Muslims have also, since the coastal strip ceased to fall under Muslim political control, moved into trade or house-letting in the small urban centres which have expanded or sprung up in the zone.