Making Place: Women’s Patronage and Urban Formation in 18th-19th Century Lamu, Kenya

Abstract

Focused on questions of gender and representation, my dissertation investigates women’s patronage on the northern Kenyan coast in the century leading up to European colonialism. This study responds to and counters the dominant narrative in Swahili Coast studies that women largely disappeared from public life from the eighteenth century onwards. Through field and archival research, my project elucidates how specific, named women created wide-ranging religious, educational, and social networks that cut across ethnic and economic divides. In so doing, they created powerful spaces of gendered intimacy that shaped not only women’s relationships with each other, but also impacted the construction of political and religious authority throughout the towns in the Lamu archipelago. The first chapter considers the seventeenth-century commission of a siwa (ceremonial side-blown horn) by Mwana Darini, the daughter of the sultan of Pate town in the north of the archipelago. Initially blown during the circumcision rites of her first-born son, this elaborately carved, monumental instrument established royal inheritance through Mwana Darini’s lineage. It became such a powerful emblem of state that regional authority became tied to the location of this siwa–when it was transferred from Pate to Lamu in the nineteenth century, Lamu then became the economic and political seat of the archipelago. This chapter unravels the various oral histories attached to this potent instrument, emphasizing how Mwana Darini’s parallel acts of creation and procreation became the foundation by which future generations laid claim the sultanate. The second and third chapters explore female architectural patronage through the commission of two mosques by Mwana Mshamu in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mwana Mshamu’s first mosque served as an exclusively female religious space that offered women of various economic and ethnic backgrounds a permanent gathering point to form gendered intimacies and receive a religious and reproductive education. Her second commission instantiated religious networks that connected the Lamu archipelago with important centers of Islamic learning in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa with which both women and men were actively engaged. Reading into and against the structures, urban setting, and oral histories associated with each of these mosques underscores how eighteenth and nineteenth century women deftly navigated various religious and cultural sign systems connecting the archipelago to Central Africa, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula. Biographical readings of these three commissions highlight the diverse ways in which women not only integrated into, but also impacted various social, religious, and political networks within the western Indian Ocean in the early modern period. My dissertation thus emphasizes how African Muslim women actively shaped coastal communities through their patronage of portable and architectural arts.