Heritage, Tourism, and Slavery at Shimoni: Narrative and Metanarrative on the East African Coast

Abstract

There's a hole in the side of Africa, where the walls will speak if you only listen Walls that tell a tale so sad, that the tears on the cheeks of Africa glisten Stand and hear a million slaves, tell you how they walked so far That many died in misery, while the rest were sold in Zanzibar Shimoni, oh Shimoni, You have to find the answer and the answer has been written down in ShimoniWhen Kenya-born singer-songwriter Roger Whittaker sang these doleful words in 1983, the village of Shimoni was a relatively quiet backwater on the southern Kenya coast, known primarily for its deep-sea fishing club. It is now a much larger and busier place, where tourists come to see the ‘slave cave’ that gives Shimoni its name (Swahilishimo-ni, “at the cave”), and embark on boat trips to Wasini Island and the nearby Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park (see Figure 1). Whittaker's song played a significant role in this development, by bringing Shimoni and its caves to wider attention, and focusing on one of a number of narratives about the caves' past usage. The lyrics of ‘Shimoni’ did not simply embellish a local tale, but (re)created it in the image of metanarratives about the history of slavery on the East African coast. As we will argue in this paper, these metarratives now dominate reconstructions of the past in Shimoni, and are reinforced by the activities and institutions that constitute and promote the caves as an important site of cultural heritage.