SNORKELLING AND TERRORISM ON THE KENYA-SOMALIA BORDER

The sandy north coast of Kenya has become a playground for rich tourists. But for The Economist's Africa correspondent, this paradise is interesting for its proximity to purgatory--the resurgence of jihadist fighters in Somalia ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

This is a diary of a week in paradise. Not heavenly paradise, or Eden, but a third usage of the term: tropical paradise. Today, I am in Lamu on the north coast of Kenya. This narrow, blistering archipelago has been on the posh end of the hippy trail since the 1970s. For centuries before that, a mongrel mix arrived on the trade winds: Omanis, Yemenis, Persians, Indians, Malays, Comorians, Somalis, Africans from the length of the Swahili coast, Portuguese, Germans, and British. Some added to the rich Sufi traditions of Lamu’s mosques; all played a part in fashioning an urban culture alternately pious and decadent, which even now has no need for cars and is only incidentally electrified.

For tourists, Lamu is what happens when “Arabian Nights” meets “The Blue Lagoon”, with Africa looming planetary and red just across the tidal channel. For the rich, it is a playground at the donkey-shit-littered end of a circuit that starts with Gstaad. Some of the same hippies who were here in the 1970s have since come into money and returned to build palatial villas along the Shela beach, on the ocean side of Lamu Island.

Lamu tolerates a seamy undertow of sex and drugs, with rock-hard beach boys doing some of the delivering, as long as it stays behind closed doors. And during the Christmas season, when the weather is hot and clear, a few of the wealthiest families in Europe congregate at Shela to swim, snorkel, fish, and, especially, to party. Lights of the social scene, such as Prince Ernst of Hanover, bring with them a peculiarly modern court of nobles, financiers and supermodels.

My plan is different. I am interested in the proximity of purgatory to paradise. I want to head north to the Somali border and find out what the villagers—hunter-gatherer Boni people—and Kenyan border patrols in the remote Kiunga district think about the resurgence of jihadist fighters in the mangrove swamps just across the border. Might they invade Kenya? What then?

These were the same fighters, the Shabab (Youth), who formed the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which in 2006 briefly ruled much of south and central Somalia, before being cut apart by United States and Ethiopian air strikes. Somalia is too dangerous now for me to do any useful reporting. Yet it is the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and, I believe, one of its most pressing strategic concerns. If Somalia is allowed to fail, there will be no intervention for other failing states in Africa.

First, though, I have to get up there. A speedboat is the only way, leaving in the morning between the tides. That gives me an evening in Lamu. I meet a friend, Andrew, who has turned his back on a career in London publishing to restore and sell houses in Lamu town. After a couple of drinks we push past absent donkeys and wind through the narrow alleys to his splendid home for dinner. The best town houses have four floors, with a courtyard below and a roof garden to catch the ocean breeze.

In Andrew’s study, so suspended, are piles of books, journals, and maps. We find Ras Chiamboni, the village on the Somali side of the border where jihadist fighters have been trained, on a colonial-era nautical chart. This was a time when Chiamboni was Italian. It might have been for that reason, or in reference to the phallic spit of land extending out from the village, that the British knew it as Dick’s Head.

Later, when Andrew walks me back to my hotel, the town has become labyrinthine. An open sewer trickles alongside, choked here and there with dung and fetid strips of plastic. We pass men bedding down in the doorways of their homes, the better to watch the stars above and the passers-by. Other perfectly restored homes await their owners’ return from Zurich or Antwerp. With such contrasts between the intimately local and the showily global, Lamu would be a fine place for a modern nativity.

Picture credit: Robin Hutton, Giustino (both via Flickr)

(This is an instalment of a week-long correspondent's diary about the Kenya-Somalia border, published on Economist.com.)