Jacob Silverman

Kenya Journal: Ali and Ali of Lamu

On first meeting, Ali Samosa sounds like a Swahili Ron Burgundy. “I’m famous,” he says. “I am very well known here.” He adds, with a proud grin, “You can read about me in Lonely Planet.”

Ali is a restaurateur, who serves lunch and dinner, by appointment, at his home in Shela village, on Lamu Island, Kenya. His wife does the cooking, but Ali is the host and impresario, promising potential customers a sumptuous and home-cooked Swahili meal unlike any they’ve had on Lamu. Eating till one must beg for a respite is encouraged.

We met Ali in the interior courtyard of the Janataan Hotel, where we had gone to ask a question (since resolved) about our bill for our stay at a guesthouse owned by the hotel. His brother owned the hotel while his uncle ran the Stopover Hotel, which happened to be the hotel we stayed in after Janataan.[i]

We later learned that Ali is not the only one of his kind. Paying our bill near the entrance to Hapa-Hapa, one of several restaurants known for fresh fish and juices on the Lamu town waterfront, a sixty-something man leaning against a table of Maasai crafts smiled at us and said, “I am waiting for you to finish and would like to talk.”

He introduced himself as Ali Hippy and proceeded to give a speech nearly identical to Ali Samosa’s: “I’m famous… traditional Swahili cuisine… a meal like you’ve never had… you will be welcomed into my home… find me in the Lonely Planet.” But after a couple minutes, Ali Samosa’s cross-island rival began to differentiate himself. He told us he had been doing this business for 36 years — his name came from some vaguely described association with Western travelers from the hippy era’s halcyon days — and promised “traditional” — that word slathered on every tourist attraction and souvenir like a child’s coat of sunscreen — music, which he would then follow with some of his own guitar playing and singing. “I play Rolling Stones,” he said. “You like Rolling Stones?”

We were leaving the next afternoon for the mainland. We told him that we were sorry but couldn’t join him and the growing party (he had already booked some customers) at his house. When we mentioned that we were eating at Ali Samosa’s that evening, his face brightened and he complimented his younger counterpart. He wished us well and asked us to enjoy the island and to return in future years. (It’s a sentiment that we heard from many Lamu residents whose services we turned down, but it always felt genuine.)
 

We took a motorboat back to Shela village and ran into Ali Samosa outside the Peponi Hotel, the epicenter for tourist life in Shela and a gathering point for those locals wishing to sell something — a sunset dhow ride, a trip to Lamu town, a day of snorkeling and barbecued fish around Manda Toto, some artwork or a bottle of wine purchased on the mainland.[ii] Ali Samosa said that he looked forward to having us for dinner that evening, though when we mentioned that we had just met Ali Hippy, his face collapsed into a slight frown. Yes, Ali Hippy had been doing this work for a long time, Ali Samosa said, compared to Samosa’s decade or so, and deserved credit for that, but it was clear there was something about the older man that ours did not like.

“Lonely Planet does not speak well of him,” Samosa said, as if it were a grave indictment.[iii]

Later I began to think that the difference was something personal, perhaps Ali Hippy’s more flamboyant style — e.g. his chosen surname, his love for Western music, his multiple wives. (I think that I remember a stylish cane leaning against that table of Maasai crafts, next to Ali Hippy.) Ali Samosa, who also called himself Ali Sambusa, after the Kiswahili word for “samosa” (he received his nickname, as a young man, for his success at selling samosas to tourists on Lamu’s beaches), was clearly quite devout. Like Ali Hippy and many middle-aged and older men on the island, he wore a Muslim skullcap. He went to mosque several times a day, beginning at 5am. In our first meeting, he told us that he felt that divorce was a rising problem among his community and among the worst things that could happen to Muslims. (He spoke of divorce almost as if it were a plague, something that struck unexpectedly and painfully, although he seemed to expect that couples should be able to work out their problems.) And, as we were eventually told a couple times, Ali had been introduced to his future wife only once — on their wedding day. This custom had since been abandoned; it was difficult to tell if Ali thought was a pity. As for his own marriage, he described it as happy, having lasted 15 years, with a decade being seen as a sort of event horizon: if you make it that long, he said, it will last.

Although he did not acknowledge the difference explicitly, Ali Hippy appeared, in Ali Samosa’s eyes, to represent a more Westernized version of the at-home restaurateur introducing tourists to classic Swahili food and culture, which is taken seriously on Lamu. Many of the island’s buildings are very well preserved, if pockmarked and sometimes crumbling, — Lamu town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site — and residents of Shela speak of the exodus of their ancestors from Takwa, across the bay on Manda Island, as if it had occurred in recent memory rather than several centuries earlier. (The diminishment of fresh water caused the move. The ruins are a popular attraction, with Lamu’s beach boys offering rides there for a few hundred shillings, if one bargains properly.)

But Ali Samosa’s changed mood may have been something else entirely. Although he still greeted my girlfriend and me pleasantly, he seemed noticeably downcast compared to the previous day, when he had exuberantly sold us on his family’s cooking, in part by pressing into our hands a worn blue guestbook containing, in a dozen languages, brief messages of ecstatic praise from customers past. Even so, Ali met us outside our hotel at 7pm, the appointed time, and politely escorted us through the village’s byzantine alleyways to his house, which overlooks a primary school.

He led us up an exterior staircase into a large rectangular room that contained three tables and room for 20-odd diners. We were the only people there for dinner, which may have been a disappointment for Ali. I asked him if I could take pictures, and he said that I was welcome but asked me to please wait until all the food was on the table. From the vaunted guestbook to the hotel-to-home chaperoning, he was keen to impart an impression of humble sophistication and hospitality.

Ali became animated when he began bringing out the dishes from a long hallway and arraying them on our table. The food was abundant and delicious — bhajia, coconut rice, prawn chapatti (a dish that Ali had said was available nowhere else on the island), a tangy coconut sauce with the consistency of oatmeal, a hearty fish stew, samosas (naturally), and three types of fresh juice, mango-passion, tamarind, and lime. The tamarind juice, a dark nutty color, a little spicy, and wonderfully cold, was something that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

When he wasn’t bringing us food and cheering us to gorge ourselves, Ali sat in a white plastic chair in the corner of the room. Sweating from effort and the heat, staring a bit dazedly into space, occasionally running a hand over his scalp, he thoughtfully responded to each of our questions about the food, the island, his family.[iv] Through his answers, a clearer image of Ali’s mood and mindset appeared. He believed in tradition, in the sanctity of his religion, but he also, like many of the island’s residents, appreciated the business that tourists brought to the island. When I asked if he thought tourists were generally respectful, he said, simply, “No.”[v]

For Ali, foreigners — who he said now make up 30 percent of Shela village, though he may have been including tourists in an estimate that still seemed high — fall into two categories. Those who come and show interest and respect towards the island and its Swahili culture are certainly welcome; Ali’s livelihood depends on them. But the enormous mansions cropping up around Shela and across the bay on Manda island, which had almost no permanent structures only a decade earlier, were more troublesome, though not all were bad. Prince Caroline of Monaco, who owns more than one mansion in Shela, is appreciated because her homes are used as hotels when she is not around, which provides jobs. On the other hand, the mansions — many of them owned by French tycoons, including one supposedly owned by the Peugeot family — that were only occupied one or two months a year were unsightly and wasteful. I heard this sentiment from other Lamu residents of varying backgrounds — everyone on Lamu knows who owns what, be it a house or a boat, and where that person comes from — so it did not surprise me coming from Ali.

As we ate and talked, Ali offered us a book of photographs to look at. Victims of time and the island’s humidity, the photographs had faded, the colors washed out and yellowed. Ali pointed out pictures of himself as a young samosa-seller on the beach, the place he earned, or laid claim to, his name. There were photos of his brother and family members, as well as two photos in opposing plastic sleeves that Ali said were of “very famous men,” one of a man with a red-brown beard staring at the camera with an artist’s soulful eyes; the other, more faded, was of a tall grey-haired man, surrounded by attendants, and standing at an oblique angle to the camera. Ali looked at us, smiling expectantly, but we had no idea who they were until finally he gave us the answer: “Kris Christopher” — meaning Kristofferson — “and Omar Sharif.” They had been on the island, he said, to film a movie.

There was another photo that Ali lingered over: an aerial shot of Lamu beach from a few decades earlier, the town far smaller, with large gaps between buildings, like missing teeth, and the Peponi Hotel as the only building on the waterfront. For Ali, it was a visual record of a prelapsarian time.

The rest of our dinner proceeded apace. We took some photos of the food and indulged in a meal that was, as promised, among the best we’d had on the island. Ali was a very fine host, even if his wife, the cook, was nowhere in sight. Dessert appeared: a large flan-like creation studded with raisins.

After we finished eating, I asked Ali about the proposed massive port project near Lamu that would surely alter the island’s balance — if there is a balance at all — between tourism and sustainability. Ali was not in favor of the project but thought that the islanders would have little say. It was the exact sentiment I had heard from Jamal, a charismatic 23-year-old dhow captain, who thought that the government would impose its will if it chose to while channeling little money to the islanders. Lamu would be overrun by foreign businesses and port workers — there was even talk, Jamal said, of fully dredging Manda Toto, a prime snorkeling and picnicking spot. Whether true or not (the notion of doing away with an entire island, even a small one, seemed beyond the pale), the local fish stocks, which the island depended on for sustenance, as part of its deeply revered culture, and for income, were sure to suffer from the inevitable pollution.[vi]

As we spoke and waited for our stomachs to shift from painful distension to something like normal satiation (the dessert, while delicious, had done us in), Ali placed a red guestbook on the table, which we enthusiastically signed. As he vowed he would, he had earned his rave review. Looking at the previous entries, I noticed that the previous day’s dinner had been attended by a Russian couple, who had praised Ali in Russian. (He requests that everyone write in their mother tongues, the better to convince prospective customers.) Business seemed steady but on the light side.

We said goodbye to the house and Ali led us back to our hotel. Chickens scrambled through the dark around our feet, scavenging among the trash and pebbles for something that could be called food. The island’s donkeys, generally left to their own peculiar devices at night, had begun to drift toward sleep, settling down in open courtyards or straddling quiet alleys. A muezzin had called out a few minutes earlier, so we were not surprised when Ali indicated that he would go and pray in the mosque a few steps from our hotel. Sometime in the interim, the skullcap had returned to his head. He wished us well on our honeymoon — it wasn’t, but the sentiment was welcome — and he walked up the mosque’s steps, gracefully slipped out of his shoes, greeted a man, and disappeared inside.

[i] Lamu is a small community, with many people claiming kinship to one another; while Ali’s family appears to have been very successful compared to many locals — Janataan is a beautiful hotel, with airy, tastefully appointed, sun-washed rooms for $40 or more a night — it’s also possible that he was using “uncle,” in reference to the Stopover proprietor, as a general term for a cousin or other relative, as seems to be the practice among some Kenyans.

[ii] Alcohol is only served in a few hotels and restaurants on the island — Peponi among them — and is almost impossible to find in stores. Most of the island’s population is Muslim and relatively traditional, meaning that they teetotal; many of the women wear headscarves or chadors, some embellished with bright fabrics or colorful stitching.

[iii] In fact, Lonely Planet is not unkind to Ali Hippy. To wit: “some people come away quite satisified, but plenty are put off instantly by the sales pitch!” The same could be said of someone peddling services in practically any context. The guidebook also calls Ali Samosa “a lot smoother than his Lamu counterpart,” which is true, though in our brief meeting, Ali Hippy, with his portly build, easy smile, and constant assurances that he would not be offended if we refused his offer, had his own welcoming charm.

[iv] He and his wife had tried for children but had none. “Inshallah,” they would one day succeed. The difficulty clearly pained him.

[v] Out of sensitivity to the island’s customs, tourists are sometimes warned against wearing swimsuits away from the beach. A dramatically worded sign in Peponi Hotel, which is owned by a Danish-British family, warns that revealing clothing will help to “destroy” the island’s culture. The beach, and Peponi itself, are generally exceptions to dress code guidelines. During high season, Peponi can sometimes feature comparatively raucous nightlife. On New Years Eve, a young woman, whose parents own the hotel and who had been intermittently serving as a waitress alongside the local males the hotel employs, danced on top of one of the hotel’s bars. The locals who do drink often appear at Peponi, engaging with each other and making easy conversation with tourists. Some also smoke cigarettes or chew miraa, the local variant of qat. Some wander off down the beach or into an alley to smoke marijuana. (The tendency for some attractive but solitary middle-aged, female tourists to be accompanied throughout their trips by a young Lamu male is a fascinating byproduct of this socialization — and grist for another piece.)

[vi] Some good articles have appeared in the last year about the proposed port project, including one by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times.

(I’ll be traveling in Kenya through mid-February and periodically will write pieces about my experiences, which may appear here and elsewhere. This is the first.)