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UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center andRegents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts. S~WAHILI ART OF LAMU I Si I -. " % g L , * -\ ^H ?LLi k.) s 7* s sS DOOR POSTS, WITH SHALLOW GEOMETRIC RELIEF AND FLORAL MO1L amu town is situated on the eastern shore of Lamu island, just south of latitude 2?S., about one kilometre off Kenya's coast. It is one of the coast's most ancient ports of gold, spice, ivory, and slave trading, which, for the 8 ast two millenia, has been attracting seafaring merchants from many parts of the world. Until the beginning of this century, Lamu was a slave society par excellence, consisting of a minority of waungwana, the town's mercantile aristocracy, and a majority of watumwa, its slaves. At its golden age, Lamu's mansioned city was the renowned home of literature, law, theology, and art.This article is an attempt to describe and define Swahili art, through the medium of Lamu.' For various reasons, Lamu is a good location for a study of this sort. It is comfortably placed between the dead or dying towns of Manda and Pate, and the modernized, diversified city of Mombasa. It is one of the world's few places where physical structures reflect a set of circumstances not yet deformed by the rapid processes of progress, or the influx of tourists.The first known reference to Lamu is contained in a second century Greco-Egyptian shipping guide, Periplus of the Erithrean Sea, which describes the island as an anchorage for Arab traders. From later documents we learn that trade connections with Arabia continued, and migration in both directions followed. A zinj (African) uprising in Basrah suggests the existence of a large African settlement along the Persian gulf by the ninth century A.D. We also have evidence of migrations to the coast of large numbers of Arabs, (probably fleeing the chaos following Mohammed's death) at about the same time. Later observations by Arab geogra-.?'S phers suggest that the coast became Islamized during the thirteenth century. From archeological evidence we know that it was following an Indian Ocean pattern. For the first time, great Islamic states in Egypt, India, Sumatra, and Malaya were emerging as Indian Ocean powers. P^l ~By the fifteenth century Lamu was an established urban center; a large fortified stone town possessing an active harbor and a "Qadhi" who visited Mecca in 1441. An inscription reading 1370 A.D. on Lamu's Powani mosque supports this. Examination of later documents shows that the town enjoyed steady development, reaching its zenith during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the beg...
