The memories of slavery and the slave trade in East Africa are still deeply ingrained in local and regional oral traditions. These have significant impacts on the lives of many people in the region today as they grapple with socioeconomic and political concerns and identity construction. Undeniably, an understanding of the diverse forms and consequences of slavery and the slave trade would help us appreciate our varied histories and shared legacies, thus uniting people to address the adverse impacts of those historic events. However, skepticism towards research on slavery and the slave trade abounds because of the sensitive nature of the topic, the near material invisibility of the practice, and the general lack of documentary sources, especially for the pre-nineteenth century period.

The Legacy of Slavery in Coastal Kenya by Professor Herman Ogoti Kiriama is a timely intervention and scholarly piece on this topic in Eastern Africa. This eight-chapter book examines the ways in which people’s memories, identities, and heritage in coastal Kenya’s Shimoni village and Frere Town are linked to slavery and the slave trade. Kiriama uses archival evidence, oral traditions, and archaeological remains in a triangulated manner to analyze these issues. Importantly, this well-written book uncovers the long-neglected voices and perspectives of the local community in discussions of slavery and the slave trade. The book’s main conclusion is that memories, identities, and the heritage of traumatic events like slavery are malleable.

According to the author, there is a cave that the people of Shimoni remember to have served as a slave pen during the Indian Ocean Arab-led slave trade. Although the local community has opened the cave for tourists, with the resulting income used for social services in the villages, some members of the community, including the Shimoni boat operators who take tourists to marine park sites, deny the cave narratives. This denial—according to Professor Kiriama—is designed to discourage tourists from visiting the cave and instead flock to the marine parks, so that boat operators can maximize their income. The book additionally shows how the issue of land access exacerbates contestations of memories, identities, and heritage assets related to slavery and the slave trade in Shimoni.

The colonial land policies gave land titles to individuals of Arab ancestry, condemning the indigenous people as squatters. As a result, these “squatters” are loudly proclaiming the history of the slave trade in Shimoni to undermine the legitimacy of land ownership patterns with tainted links to slavery. The indigenous Digo, in particular, use their heritage claims to the cave to press for land rights from the government. They contend that their grandfathers used the cave for prayers (“Mwanangoto” spirit) when Omani and other Arab slavers gave them a hard time. Conversely, Arab descendants in Shimoni (the Wasini) contest the negative portrayal of Arabs in the cave narratives. Like the boat operators, they agitate for alternative tourist sightseeing, including the boardwalk over coral rocks, instead of the Shimoni cave and its associated slavery stories.

Kirima’s book also discusses the establishment of Frere Town, on the outskirts of Mombasa, in 1874 as a settlement for freed slaves under the aegis of the Church Missionary Society. However, the identities of liberated slave descendants (henceforth, Freetownians) have been in a state of flux depending on prevailing circumstances. During the colonial period, Freetownians were proud owners of the “liberated slave descendants” identity, with their English names mostly borrowed from the missionaries—as benefactors—who took care of their grandparents. Such an identity did, in fact, confer a lofty status to the bearers since their grandparents—freed slaves working under church missionaries—played a crucial role as converts in the spread of formal education and Christianity and served in various colonial government posts in colonial Kenya. After independence, however, most of the Freetownians dropped their English names for indigenous African ones.

According to Kiriama, with the indigenous people in power, Freetownians feared continuing to display their connections with the colonial government as they could be isolated. Yet, by doing so, they were inadvertently rejecting their strong link with the church while also forfeiting their identity as descendants of freed slaves. According to the author, the Freetownians have recently returned to their original identity by claiming their deep bond with the Emmanuel Church, which was built by their freed slave forefathers. As in Shimoni, this shift is due to ongoing politics surrounding land ownership in Frere Town, compelling Freetownians to prove their indigeneity, thus going back to the church as their most revered heritage. The book details how Freetownians are indeed working hard to hold onto their leadership roles within the church, including suing the Anglican Church of Kenya for attempting to introduce new church leaders from outside the Freetownian community.

What key lessons does The Legacy of Slavery in Coastal Kenya provide? To begin with, the book shows that slave status, as a social category, can be hidden or not, depending on the impact it might engender. In Shimoni and Frere Town, such a status seemed advantageous to its bearers in post-independence land access struggles. The book also reveals how people often “remember” (and tell) what is important to enhance their claims and “forget” (not tell) what is not supportive. Moreover, we learn that identity is malleable; it fluctuates based on context. In fact, Shimoni people construct multiple identities to give meaning to their lives. During the colonial period, Shirazi descendants, who were longtime settlers before the nineteenth century slave trade, were happy to identify themselves as Arabs, since such identity conferred higher status and access to resources from the colonial government (as examined some years ago by Justin Willis [1993]). After independence, they renounced this identity, claiming to belong to the Digo ethnicity to evade victimization for having been part of the slave trade that other Arabs actively controlled.

The book also provides insights into how people choose what they treat as their heritage—and present it in a manner they find appropriate to their needs. In Shimoni and Frere Town, locals have chosen the cave and the church, respectively, as emblems of their indigeneity to the exclusion of other vestiges of history linked to slavery and the slave trade in those landscapes, including colonial administrative buildings. In this regard, Kirima is apt to question UNESCO’s listing criteria for World Heritage properties, particularly what constitutes “Outstanding Universal Value” (OUV). The point raised here is that without involving and listening to local groups in conversations about the assets they value most on the landscape and how they delineate their boundaries, such criteria would remain subjective and indeed fail to capture important localized nuances attached to places.

Methodologically, the book draws most of its value by deeply engaging with oral traditions, histories, and material evidence as sources. This is the crux of African historical archaeology. Its strength further lies in how the author contextualizes emerging concepts in heritage discourse such as “heritage from below,” “authorized heritage discourse,” “polyvocality,” “subaltern heritage discourse,” and “technology of governance.” The book vividly highlights how contested memories of traumatic events such as slavery can significantly influence the political landscape of an area. The Shimoni slavery narratives that influenced the 1992 and 1997 Kenyan elections and subsequent violence, in fact, mimic the situation reported in Zanzibar by Rhodes (2018) where the ruling Revolutionary Party perpetuates the narrative of a racial community with a shared history of oppression under Arab exploitation. These ideological legacies allow claimants of African or Arab heritage to justify (often violently) political activity—rightly or wrongly—as the inevitable consequence of slavery.

Some adjustments in structure could have further improved the presentation of myriad of issues covered in the book. For instance, there could have been a better flow of data by starting with a chapter on archival material, then moving on to oral traditions, before progressing to archaeological evidence. There are passages in the text that are rather, reducing the overall impact of the argument. For instance, oral and written sources (p. 24) are followed by what appears to be unconnected subjects of “internal slavery” and “historical landscape” in Chapter One. Some archival data is in Chapter Two instead of Chapter Five, which is mostly dedicated to such information. One also wonders why Chapter Three (Oral Traditions) only covers Shimoni, and not Frere Town. Ideally, the map on page 83 could have come earlier in the book to help a reader to grasp the locations under review from the outset. Even the discussion of some archaeological materials, from Kichangani for example, precedes their presentation. Chapter Eight (Conclusion) has no label despite being described as such in Chapter One.

With all that said, The Legacy of Slavery in Coastal Kenya is a readable book, well-written in plain language, and free of jargon that would put off readers. Heritage practitioners, professional historians, archaeologists, and postgraduate students will find this book useful and will not regret having it on their shelves.