Looking for Pumpkin Pie in the Kenyan dirt

Blogs, I think, very often become either diaries or soapboxes.  This propensity made me dread blogging a little bit initially; I didn’t want to turn into one of those people who just has too many feelings… One of those people who keeps seven Livejournals to leach the poison of their anguish and turmoil  from their blood.

Neither did I want to become someone who preaches to their imagined Internet audience of billions about exactly what humankind is doing wrong politically, economically, spiritually, emotionally, environmentally, recreationally, and nutritionally.  Personally, I don’t really have a better plan in mind for your life.  Sorry.  I’m busy enough trying to sort out my own—an endeavor clouded by all of those emotions clouding my head all the time, just longing to be freed into the Elysian Fields of Feelings: cyberspace.

Just kidding.

Honestly, I just feel as though the beast we call blogging is pregnant with triplets named ranting, raving, and complaining.  And while that may be unavoidable or even cathartic at times, I never wanted to be the wet nurse to any of those babies. Ew.

Luckily, my experiences so far have allowed me to avoid that role.  I’ve come upon some really interesting things that will allow me to produce two truly excellent research papers at the end of this experience.  At this point, they’re still just little tidbits—hints at creolization that will require further research.  But these “pumpkin tarts” are still sweet to find, especially this early on.

In Oka’s 2008 dissertation, Resilience and Adaptation of Trade Networks in East African and South Asian Port Polities, 1500-1800 C.E., he mentions that cloth was manufactured on the Swahili Coast in two main ways.  One way was entirely indigenous from start to finish—from sheep to sweater, if you will.  The other way involved importing finished cloths from South Asia, deconstructing them, and reweaving the threads into cloth again in ways that suited local tastes and preferences.  Timothy Insoll mentions this as well, in his book The Archaeology of Sub-Saharan Africa.  When I read about this technique, it fascinated me: here is a behavior that is essentially a literal interpretation of the process of creolization.  The action of taking something that seems complete, stripping it down to its basic components, and making use of the same materials (along with one’s own—the tools used to re-weave would have been indigenous) to create something unique and new—this is the theoretical model of creolization acted out almost as if some second millennium Swahili textile manufacturer knew Allison Mickel would really appreciate a metaphor to weave through a research paper in 2009.  Thanks, Swahili textile manufacturer! And I didn’t even have the foresight to bring Afterbite with me.

Even better: spindle whorls and looms (tools used for cloth manufacture) have been recovered at Mtwapa, the site where I’m participating in excavations.  And Chap told me that based on documentary evidence, it’s likely that people at Mtwapa were mostly participating in the second form of cloth textile production—the my-research-wrapped-up-in-a-tidy-bow one.  Bingo!

Meanwhile, I’ve now been to Mtwapa and toured half the site, and the walls of the houses, along with many doorways, are still standing from 800 or more years ago.  Immediately, the doorways struck me—they aren’t square, like I’ve seen in most places in Kenya.  They’re arched, but they come to a point at the top.  They look, in fact, like a lot of doorways that I’ve seen from the Middle East, and, I later found out, like doorways from India.  Chap explained to me that people were moving around so much and learning from each other, studying in places like Baghdad and taking home more than just lessons in Islam, plus trading with people from all around the Indian Ocean Doorways like those at Mtwapa represent the convalescence of cultural contributions from this whole area.  Before, I had mainly been focusing on the African and Arab factors in this story of culture creation.  I had largely forgotten about India—a player as important in the creation of this pumpkin pie as the Reddi Whip!  These doorways sound like an important thing to research more when I get home.

Doorways were also discussed at the Fort Jesus Museum—a museum created in 1960 from a fortress that was built by the Portuguese in 1593.  The fortress was captured by Omani Arabs in 1698, and the museum had an exhibit on Omani culture and contributions to the area.  One of the glass cases had lots of silver jewelry worn by Omani women.  I asked the man showing us around the museum if Swahili women wore jewelry like that, and he said that they did.  I also asked him if he thought that they always had done so, or if it had changed since the Omani Arabs arrived.  He told me he thought it was mostly because the Omanis had introduced it.  Now, I clearly can’t cite that kind of source, and it’s not quite creolization, since I didn’t probe for information on East African contributions to the jewelry, but at least I have some more terms to type into JSTOR when I get home!

Not only am I with newfound research direction, but I have a writing direction as well.  Since the Charles Center was generous enough to fund my entire summer with both a Monroe scholarship and a Charles Center International Scholarship, I’ll be writing two research papers when I get home, on two different topics.  The subjects are distinct but overlapping (both dealing with creolization and the Swahili Coast), so I was struggling with how to produce two satisfactorily different and interesting projects.  But what I’ve decided to do is to write one paper on Mtwapa, the site I’m excavating at, in specific, and one on the creolization processes visible in the contemporary Indian Ocean systems at large.  This way, I’ll be able to make the most of both my archaeological experience and my library research. 

Today, I drank out of a coconut and watched the sun set over Mombasa’s old town.  If I have overflowing feelings, they’re fueled by the taste of shwarma at Tarboush Café and the sight of a tiny monkey trying to steal my artifact-washing toothbrush.  Anakula hapi.