Introduction

The aim of this study is threefold. First, it is a reevaluation of ethnicity and identity at the coast of Kenya, focusing on the false identity of “Black Arabs” that has been invented among the Swahili people of the coast of Kenya. The study reveals that while there is a copious collection of cultural and social histories with strong indications of ethnic tensions in Kenya, the coast of Kenya has often been seen as homogenous and cohesive. Studies have privileged the records of descendants of Arabs and Muslim archival and written sources, while ignoring the everyday experiences of descendants of Africans and their role in defining their identity and historical processes. My contention is that the ordinary voices of African folk have not found their way into historical studies at the coast of Kenya.

Second, through a discussion of the way people define themselves, the study seeks to throw light on how identity has increasingly become fluid and flexible, creating new multicultural and hybrid threads that are highly visible in the urban areas at the coast of Kenya. I believe that addressing these critical issues of cultural identity is pivotal at a time when we can see deepening patterns of cultural balkanization and all kinds of violence—a product of the uncertainty precipitated by the proliferation of difference as a consequence of globalization. The objective is to affirm that contrary to previous studies, which have embellished, valorized, and sanitized the dominant Swahili coastal culture as fixed, static, and unchanging, there has been a great deal of hybridity and multiculturalism that has been added to the Swahili culture through the diffusion of mainly African ideas and that has not been interrogated.