On January 11, 2023, the road was a crime scene. That day, an IED exploded beneath the first car in a convoy of Kenyan engineers and construction workers, killing all four passengers. Only the road witnessed the militants digging the hole to place the device, and the blackened, mangled body of the Toyota Hilux — just innards, no chassis, all four wheels still upright, attached to their axes.
Before the road was witness, before it was a crime scene, it was a wound in the landscape — a raw gash filled in and covered with gravel from quarries along the River Tana, which flows through the arid expanse of northeastern Kenya toward Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline. Before it was a wound, it was negative space, left behind by piles of upturned topsoil, called “overburden,” that were trucked to somewhere else. Before it was negative space, it was a path of uprooted trees and shrubs. Before that, it was a constellation of concrete beacons that looked like gravestones. And before it was a constellation of beacons, before it was any of these other things, the road was a straight line on a map — solid, obvious, and true.
Most other roads in this part of Kenya, a region characterized by infrastructural neglect, don’t have names. They go by numbers, like D568, C81, or A3. But from the moment this one was drawn, it had a name: the Lamu–Garissa Road. That is because this road isn’t just going to Garissa — other roads already do — this road is going into the future.
The Lamu–Garissa Road forms the initial part of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor, which is, in the words of LAPSSET authorities, the “first single gigantic, integrated, transformative, and game-changer infrastructure project.” The place-names in the acronym are a code for the promise of wealth: the project will link the oil fields of South Sudan and of Turkana in northern Kenya through a network of highways, railways, and pipelines to Lamu Port. Other roads and railways fan out into Ethiopia. Through this network, development shall emanate: farms, homes, resort cities, universities, refineries, factories. Lamu, an island off the north coast of Kenya near the border with Somalia, shall be restored to its historical glory as a central node of international trade along East Africa’s Swahili coastline.
The Lamu–Garissa Road begins in Mokowe, on Lamu’s mainland, close to Lamu Port. For fifteen miles, it is tarmacked, glossy, smooth, done. Its designers have big dreams for it: its one-hundred-and-fifty-five-mile body will stretch northward, bending a bit east at the halfway point to run parallel to the River Tana, stopping through the string of towns along that winding desert lifeline. The engineers plan a road with a speed of seventy-five miles per hour and a capacity of thousands of vehicles a day. Nothing out there has ever moved that fast.
But the road isn’t even close to done yet. Not long after departing Mokowe, the tarmac turns to gravel. Farther on, the road ends: black IED scars have stopped it in its tracks. The LAPSSET Corridor is a flagship project of Kenya’s Vision 2030, a plan for “[transforming] the country into a middle-income, industrialized, and sustainable nation by 2030.” The most significant of its many programs are large-scale infrastructure projects; LAPSSET was meant to be the capstone. South Sudan’s independence in 2011 and the discovery of oil by the British firm Tullow Oil in Turkana provided a seductive base of extractive wealth (and thus lucrative justification) for such a corridor. According to the LAPSSET blueprints, at some points, highway, railway, and pipeline will all run in parallel within one 1,650-foot-wide artery along which liquid, cargo, and humans — that is to say, capital — will flow freely. All lines in this project point toward a single vanishing point: modernity.
Modernity reached other parts of Kenya long ago but struggled to make it up this far north. LAPSSET promises to change that, forming the connective tissue that allows capital to flow into northern Kenya’s impoverished, left-behind regions. “By 2030, it will become impossible to refer to any region of our country as ‘remote,’” the plan declares. “The Vision aims to move all Kenyans to the future as one nation.” LAPSSET will stitch the nation together — gone will be the era when the only way to get to Lamu from Nairobi within a day was by air — and also heal it, connecting “problem” regions of the north, long plagued by insecurity, with the prosperous central regions through inclusion in the modern economy. A road can make a promise.
Many people in Lamu took LAPSSET’s promise seriously, reorienting their entire lives around it. Mohammed Skanda did. The bright-eyed paralegal, who was born and raised on Lamu Island, recalls, “When I joined university in 2016, my father told me loud and clear, ‘You need to find a suitable course so you can get employed in that port.’” Many of Skanda’s friends studied marine sciences; Skanda, who was “not good at sciences,” opted instead for a degree in administration. Around 2010, an influx of LAPSSET-related scholarships for local students even caused a spike in Lamu County’s average school exam scores, he says.
In May of 2021, the first shipping containers bearing the seven-pointed star of Maersk entered Lamu Port on the MV Cap Carmel to thunderous applause from a large crowd that had congregated. The port itself, which is being completed by the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) — the same state-owned enterprise that is building the Lamu–Garissa Road — will cost an estimated $3 billion of the $23 billion total budget for LAPSSET. Currently, three berths are complete. Once all thirty-two are done, Lamu Port will be the largest deep-sea port in East Africa.
But since its inaugural day, barely more than a dozen ships have stopped in the port, most carrying livestock to Oman. Otherwise, the only signs of life at the “largest port in East Africa” are soldiers of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) languishing on hot, empty lots while their civilian clothes hang to dry on fences, flapping in the wind. Skanda never got to work at the port: “The disappointment comes when you get your degree, your education, but there’s no opportunity to work on because the port is not ready.”
LAPSSET’s motto of “a seamless, connected Africa” with smooth, speedy vectors is, on the ground, suspended indefinitely à venir — on its way but never arriving. There are a few reasons why, some of which are themselves consequences of draining momentum: Uganda’s withdrawal as a project partner; an unsteady relationship with Tullow Oil and other oil-field developers; Parliament-imposed budget cuts; and general concerns about ineffective resource allocation and monitoring. But everyone knows the biggest reason: insecurity.
Less than seventy miles from Lamu Port lies the porous Kenya-Somalia border, a blade-straight line that cuts through the greater Boni Forest. Across this border, aided by the forest’s dense canopy cover, al-Shabaab, it is believed, enters Kenya. Al-Shabaab — “the Youth” — emerged in 2007 as a rapid reaction corps for the Islamic Courts Union that brought law and order to war-torn Mogadishu. Later, the group developed into a political Islamist organization and gained control of significant territory in southern Somalia. Kenya has been a key military partner in subsequent attempts by Ethiopia, the United States, and the African Union to eliminate al-Shabaab — and this has made Kenya a target for al-Shabaab outside Somali borders. In 2013, al-Shabaab militants laid siege to the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, killing at least sixty-seven people. In 2014, they executed at least forty-eight in Mpeketoni, almost all of them non-Muslim men. In 2015, they slaughtered one hundred and forty-eight students at Garissa University. In 2019, they killed twenty-two people at the DusitD2, an upscale hotel in Nairobi. And in 2020, they overran the Manda Bay Airfield, a US military base mere kilometers from Lamu Port, killing one US soldier and three contractors.
The vast majority of al-Shabaab attacks on Kenyan soil came after the KDF invaded Somalia in October of 2011. In February of 2012, the KDF joined AMISOM, the African Union’s regional peacekeeping mission in Somalia, and later that year, it led an offensive in the southern Somali port city of Kismayo, which had been occupied and administered by al-Shabaab since 2008.
Solving insecurity was one of LAPSSET’s key purported benefits. In Kenya, roads have been imagined as arteries of security since colonial times; they’ve been used as tools of counterinsurgency, allowing police forces to penetrate into otherwise inaccessible regions. Similarly, the environmental impact assessment for the Lamu–Garissa Road lists “improved security” as one of the “positive impacts” the road will ostensibly bring to each subcounty it crosses. And yet the embarrassing arrested development of this “gigantic, integrated, transformative and game-changer infrastructure project” — an embarrassment heightened with every perennial assurance by government and LAPSSET officials that insecurity is actually no longer a problem — throws the entire project into doubt. Meanwhile, the LAPSSET infrastructure itself and the workers building it have increasingly become victims.
In March of 2022, as documented in a video shot on a GoPro-like mounted camera, al-Shabaab militants, brandishing black flags, stormed a CCCC camp. In the footage, they force CCCC workers to recite the Quran. Those who cannot have a red label saying “Kaafir” (nonbeliever) digitally affixed above their heads, as if in a video game, and they are executed on the spot. At least four workers were killed. According to Kalume Kazungu, a reporter for Kenya’s Daily Nation, the country’s largest newspaper, two Chinese foremen were abducted and later released, one with his hands chopped off. Four months later, another newspaper article sought to explain “why al-Shabaab are no longer a threat to LAPSSET Corridor.” But on December 28, 2022, al-Shabaab militants ambushed travelers on another road about fifty miles from the port, killing two. Two days later, an IED detonated on a different nearby road, and a few weeks after that was the IED attack that charred the Toyota Hilux. One week later, on January 17, al-Shabaab gunmen attacked another construction convoy, killing one and injuring five.
Media reports of these attacks take on a strange tone: none of them mention the names of the Kenyan workers who died on the job, but some do describe the vehicles that were destroyed. Coupled with proclamations of the project’s continuing importance to the government, it feels as if the Lamu–Garissa Road is more than a witness and a crime scene. The road feels like a victim, one that must be protected at all costs.
On paper, the proposed path of the Lamu–Garissa Road is solid and obvious. Its planners considered three potential routes, or alignments. One follows an existing dirt road from Lamu north to Garissa, on the west side of the River Tana. Another follows an existing road that takes the east side. A third runs too close to the river for a highway of high speeds: the River Tana Delta shoots out laghas, capillary rivulets that fade dry and return with the rains, and the alignment must be suitable for culverts and bridges that can sustain a highway.
The final alignment is straight and sure. Perhaps too sure. Though large parts of the road remain untarmacked and closed off to the public, nowhere near complete, it has already committed crimes.
After giving up on the port and its supposed jobs, Mohammed Skanda turned his attention to actually existing issues spawned by LAPSSET. As the Lamu County coordinator for Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI), he advocates for human rights for local people of all faiths. But since LAPSSET was announced, much of MUHURI’s legal work has focused on land. Speculators and investors flocked for a share of lucrative economies of anticipation; some were dealt inside information about the corridor’s path and bought land that would yield a fat future. Meanwhile, Skanda says, many locals are still awaiting compensation. In 2018, the High Court of Malindi ruled that Lamu fishermen were entitled to compensation after the port cut off access to fisheries; six years and a new president later, they are still waiting. “This project is not a blessing anymore,” Skanda says. “It is a curse to many who live around the corridor.”
When the Lamu–Garissa Road headed toward Bargoni, Skanda says, it was to pass through burial plots containing the remains of Awer people, who are indigenous to the greater Boni Forest area. Skanda says that an Awer woman named Amina approached MUHURI because that solid, obvious line crossed the plot where her mother was buried. Other Awer people came forward with similar complaints, but Skanda says that MUHURI’s attempts to negotiate with the contractors on their behalf fell on deaf ears. They “slashed” through the burial grounds, he says.
As a lawyer, Skanda has faith in the “constitutional way of addressing the grievances of the people” — that is, litigation. But court cases have dragged on for years, and environmental and human-rights activists in Lamu are regularly harassed and silenced, including by the government. The anti-terror measures ostensibly in place to surveil, arrest, and disappear al-Shabaab suspects are used on them too.
In 2015, the Kenyan government declared MUHURI and Haki Africa, another human-rights organization, “terrorist groups” with ties to al-Shabaab and ordered their assets frozen. (A court ruled against the government, and the assets were released.) Later that year, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights released a report documenting human-rights abuses committed by Kenyan security agencies during “anti-terror operations” in communities along Kenya’s coast and in the northeast region: twenty-five extrajudicial executions, eighty-one enforced disappearances, and many cases of torture in detention, including “beatings, waterboarding, electric shocks, genital mutilation, exposure to extreme cold or heat, hanging on trees, mock executions, and exposure to stinging by ants in the wild, denial of sleep and food.”
MUHURI runs a legal-aid clinic, and as part of a program called the Joint Initiative for Strategic Religious Action (JISRA), whose motto is “faith communities for peace,” Skanda often attends dialogues with local youth on countering violent extremism. He says that a couple of recent sessions in Hindi and Mokowe left him feeling more hopeless than ever. He recalled their conversation:
“What is the best way to work with security?” he asked a group of about sixty attendees; they merely laughed.
“Is there a best way?” one of them asked him, then pushed: “Mohammed, is there a best way you can advise?”
Skanda cited some joint programs put forth by the government.
“We did that already,” one said. “How long? We’ve been reporting these things. What is the result of this reporting? Taking our people away? We tried to give information. But do you want me castrated? Do you want me tortured? Do you want my business burned?”
Remembering this exchange, Skanda sighs, because they’re not wrong. What scares him is that they have nothing to lose. “Now they’ve given up on everything. . . . They will just use what little [patience] they have left, and when that’s done, I don’t know what they will do.”
What Skanda is implying, though he stops short of saying it, is that al-Shabaab cannot pull off its attacks on Kenyan soil without local collaboration.
The colony of Kenya itself grew around a line: the Uganda Railway. It was a railroad searching for its own raison d’être. The British built it to preempt the Germans, but it became clear — especially to unhappy British taxpayers who dubbed it the “Lunatic Express” — that it would never pay for itself. To justify this railway, which was supposed to connect the Port of Mombasa with Uganda, the lush “Pearl of Africa,” the British colonial administration manufactured the wet dream of a “white man’s country” in the temperate highlands of East Africa, luring European settlers. Next came the 1908 Land Ordinance Act, through which the Europeans gave themselves the juridical right to annex land and force Africans onto “native reserves.” Even today, the country’s economic and political centers are concentrated along this southern railroad belt.
As the Uganda Railway sunk empire into African soil one spike at a time — alienating Africans from ancestral lands and thrusting them onto commercial farms and into the wage economy; delineating ethnicities and inventing race; reshaping identities through the Gospel and English — it both created something new and irrevocably shut the door on the past. The railroad forced everything to line up toward one future.
But the railroad was not only a symbol of empire; it was its material instantiation — and, as such, both a weapon for colonial domination and an arena for resistance against it. Early resistance fighters of the Nandi ethnic group dug out railroad spikes and sharpened them into spearheads, sabotaging the “permanent way” and turning it against its creators. Infrastructure, especially in its incomplete, vulnerable state, was a natural point of attack for those who rejected a single, imperial future.
Mau Mau militants, composed mostly of landless Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu peoples, waged an uneven war, fighting a world power with homemade weapons from bases in the forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. Their land-back movement enjoyed broad-based grassroots support, which made it difficult for the British to separate loyal Africans from insurgents. Under the imposition of a state of emergency and martial law, the government put almost the entire Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu populations into concentration camps — screening pipelines and gulags where Mau Mau suspects were tortured, maimed, raped, and killed — and into open-air detention camps, a program called “villagization,” whereby Africans were contained with barbed wire and deep trenches and surveilled by loyalist Home Guards from watchtowers.
In the years leading up to independence, a series of handshakes ensured that Kenya’s independence was not decolonization. Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta — who famously asked Kenyans to “forgive and forget” the sins of the colonizer yet held that “Mau Mau was a disease that must be eradicated and never remembered again” — set Kenya on a path of continuity. Kenya studied its colonizers well.
On December 12, 1963, Kenya celebrated its independence from Great Britain. Only two weeks later, the new Kenyan government declared a state of emergency in the north. It had inherited an ungovernable periphery. Under colonialism, the Northern Frontier District, as it was known, was a buffer zone half the area of Kenya that had little value to the British beyond serving as a shield from Ethiopia’s expansionist ambitions and the north’s ebb and flow of interclan warfare, conflict over water and pasture, and livestock raids by bandits called shiftas. (Shifta means “rebel” or “bandit” in the Amharic language.) On a land of moving people, the British blithely drew lines from Nairobi, separating Somalis and other pastoralists — sowing seeds of discontent.
For months prior to the state-of-emergency declaration, Somali militants had attacked police posts, though these strikes resembled shifta raids more than military offensives. (Stores were looted, government buildings vandalized, and store owners and police shot.) These militants included armed supporters of the Northern Province Peoples Progressive Party, a multiethnic secessionist movement supported by the new Somali Republic, but President Jomo Kenyatta reduced them to “hooligans or armed groups of youth called ‘shifta,’ those people who go raiding here and there,” reaching for the pejorative cattle-rustling idiom. He declared war on the shiftas.
Barely a few years after the British’s villagization program, the independent (but British-backed) government of Kenya set up its own uncannily similar copy in the northeast desert. Paul Ngei, then minister of housing, said, “One of the failures of modern scientific methods is that they have not been able to design an instrument which would tell that a particular Somali was a shifta and the other was a loyal citizen.” This counterinsurgency tactic aimed, on the one hand, to separate insurgents from civilians and, on the other, to make loyal, modern Kenyans of “natives” through the provision of government services in village camps.
However, the Boni Forest remained illegible to empire, becoming both hideout and highway for the shiftas as they moved their war south to what is now Lamu County. On April 5, 1964, a shifta attack at Pandanguo (part of the LAPSSET Corridor today) prompted a local politician to write to provincial authorities that the Awer, whose language was mutually intelligible with Somali, were guiding shiftas through the forest. With every subsequent attack, new waves of refugees fled to the fenced-in, fortified town of Witu for safety. All except the Awer. “These people have so far shown no need to leave their homes,” read a Kenya Weekly News report. “The Waboni [Awer], a subject tribe of the Somali, have an understanding with the shifta,” the author wrote, adding that the Awer were “either sympathetic or terrorised” and “tacitly, if not actively, support the bandits.” With such accounts supplemented by reports of shiftas seen with the Awer, officials suspected collaboration.
The Awer are fluent in the Boni Forest, which contains some of the most biodiverse riverine and coastal vegetation in the world. For centuries, the Awer followed honeyguide birds to beehives deep in the glades, harvested fruit from the tielle (a palmlike cycad), drank cashew-fruit tea, and traversed on giraffe-leather shoes. They invited Bajuni imams from the mainland to teach and traded with Giriama apothecaries to get the dark, gummy poison that they used to coat hunting-arrow shafts reinforced with giraffe-sinew thread. The Awer were master hunters — the name Boni comes from bon, the Somali word for “hunter,” though they call themselves Awer — and only they know the forest like the backs of their hands.
Although the Awer are often mythicized as “Stone Age” hunter-gatherer people, their present way of life has been shaped by the priorities of the postindependence nation-state — development, conservation, and security. In 1966, the government decided to sedentarize the hunter-gatherers, teach them to farm and herd, and pull them into the cash economy. In his September 1966 monthly report, the Lamu District commissioner wrote that “by working together in the spirit of harambee” — that last word meaning “pulling together,” a nationalist motto popularized by Kenyatta — the Awer “could not only improve their standard of living, but could also contribute much to the economic development of the nation.”
Mohamed Kitete grew up hearing these origin stories of Awer oppression. He recalls his elders telling him that, after independence, many of the Awer were removed from the forest primarily so the government could more easily identify enemies there — and prevent and punish Awer collaboration with shiftas. “Some of our grandfathers were beaten, some of them were locked in cells, and some in prison,” Kitete says. Kitete, who now lives on Lamu Island, currently runs the Lamu Minority People and Development Organisation, which advocates for Awer land rights.
Since independence, the Awer have increasingly found themselves locked out of their own land. In 1976, the Boni and Dodori National Reserves were expropriated by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). In the 2021 claim of historical land injustice that Kitete coauthored on behalf of the Awer, he writes that, since the shifta war, the Awer were “forcefully moved” to a line of villages along a road, a slice of sedentary life in between the gazetted KWS reserves.
It was after Kenya’s independence that the Awer experienced empire, caught in the middle of a frontier battle between state and secessionists — and, because of their suspected complicity, made into modern citizens against their will. Moored along a road, a form of settlement recognizable to the nation-state, the Awer could now participate in a national project. They had “graduated” from hunter-gatherers into productive farmers, members of the modern economy. The postcolonial government of Kenya had absorbed a key lesson of empire: controlling mobility.
In September of 2015, the Kenyan government launched a military operation initially called Operation Linda Boni (Protect the Boni) to flush al-Shabaab militants out of the Boni Forest once and for all. Almost thirty-nine thousand hectares of land were gazetted by the government as a “no-go” security area. When al-Shabaab first became active in the region, Kitete says that after being attacked, the KDF would find the Awer and punish them, accusing the Awer of feeding al-Shabaab militants, sheltering them, and hiding information about them.
Operation Linda Boni was meant to last two months. It became the Boni Enclave Campaign, then Operation Fagia Msitu (Sweep the Forest), then Operation Amani Boni (Peace in Boni), but it still has not ended.
The road made a pact. In one issue of the glossy LAPSSET Quarterly Newsletter, produced by the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority, beaming government officials sign an agreement to begin construction on the Lamu–Garissa Road, with former president Uhuru Kenyatta gazing down from a framed portrait on the glass-block wall behind them. The article asserts that “the LAPSSET Project is no longer a pipe dream but a reality.” In a previous issue, above photos of Kenyatta himself at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Lamu–Witu–Garsen Highway, a thoroughfare similar to the Lamu–Garissa Road that reaches west rather than north from the port, the authority boasts: “The project will boost the security situation in Lamu.” With security, Lamu will transform, ostensibly to look much like other “places” in the magazine — seamless renderings drawn with the clinical precision of CAD models of copy-pasted palm trees, anonymous white high-rises, gratuitous Smart cars, beds of marigolds, and smiling white people holding balloons or riding bicycles.
In this magical realism, roads are the invisible interspace where nothing is or happens, merely channels across the gap between what is and what will be. The Lamu–Garissa Road conquers the distance between today’s Lamu and a future Lamu, the Dubai-esque tropical metropolis, a nondescript node in a frictionless world that envisions global, universal mobility and modernity.
The Awer want a part of the prosperity on display. Mohamed Kitete says that LAPSSET “is a good project for the Kenyan people.” But at the heart of infrastructure is a paradox, and the Lamu–Garissa Road is no exception. In the future of LAPSSET, every sign of local and indigenous lifestyles has been replaced with smooth, foreign objects. Where in this future do the Awer fit?
Meanwhile, attacks on the road continue. KDF soldiers are the sole frail stitches protecting this soft-boned shoot as it attempts to stretch through the Boni Forest toward Garissa. Why is it that once the road ventures into the very al-Shabaab territory it was meant to secure, it falters, unable to penetrate, let alone pacify?
From Kitete’s point of view, al-Shabaab violence in Lamu correlates with LAPSSET construction. “When [al-Shabaab] was attacking us, we were asking ourselves, ‘Why? Do they want the land? Or do they want to stop this megaproject?’” Kitete thinks out loud. “Because the moment LAPSSET was started — LAPSSET in general, not just this road — is the moment [al-Shabaab] started serious attacks.” This begs the question: What if the road not only failed to bring security but also actually brought insecurity?
The bloodiest al-Shabaab attack in Lamu took place in June of 2014, in Mpeketoni and other villages on the mainland. Exhibiting knowledge of local geography, al-Shabaab militants tactically isolated Mpeketoni’s police station and selectively entered buildings in the middle of the night. Survivors told a journalist that the Somali- and Kiswahili-speaking gunmen asked men to cite verses of the Quran and, if they couldn’t, executed them. From Mpeketoni, the attackers moved on to Pandanguo, Kibaoni, Hindi, and Honge — predominantly Kikuyu Christian settlements.
Reporting on the Mpeketoni massacre, BBC News wrote that “all those killed are believed to be locals” — true insofar as all the victims were Kenyan. But, by local standards, all those killed were not “locals.” While al-Shabaab capitalized on this increasingly incendiary rift between wageni (“guests,” or “migrant” communities) and wenyeji (“hosts,” or “indigenous” communities), they did not introduce it. LAPSSET did.
In February, at a national prayer event attended by President William Samoei Ruto on Lamu’s mainland, Monicah Muthoni Marubu, the women’s representative for Lamu County and a former LAPSSET official, used her time onstage to address Ruto directly. She spoke of the Mpeketoni massacre: “Your Excellency, since 2014, I assure you, these people sitting here” — she pointed to the crowd of almost all wageni — “every night when they sleep, they are jolted awake by even the sound of a mouse . . . because of what happened here.” Many in the crowd nodded along.
“But they are not scared of some al-Shabaab,” Marubu continued, entreating Ruto. “Your Excellency, I’ll put it to you: there is no al-Shabaab here!” The crowd applauded wildly.
Al-Shabaab itself had claimed the killings as revenge for Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia, but Marubu alleged that people were being killed on local ranches licensed to groups of indigenous Muslim Bajunis, which is to say wenyeji: “They want to kill them, to scare them, so that they leave.” Her message was clear: Al-Shabaab is a myth. The real killers are among us.
She asked Ruto to revoke these ranch licenses. “Your Excellency, these people” — she referred again to those seated in front of her — “have lived on this land for more than thirty years. Where will they go?”
Applause reached an apogee, with standing ovations. Ruto dutifully jotted down notes.
“When Muthoni Marubu says that ‘this is not al-Shabaab,’ she’s speaking on a preexisting narrative,” says Dr. Ngala Chome, a Ghent University research fellow who studies the politics of land and identity in Lamu in anticipation of LAPSSET. “She’s not inventing anything.” To understand how LAPSSET and al-Shabaab are entangled, he argues, we must first understand how LAPSSET took dormant identity politics set into motion by colonization — and lit them on fire.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Lamu’s mainland was dominated by slave-run plantations owned by Arabs attached to the sultanate of Zanzibar. After abolition in 1907, the land fell into wilderness, reclaimed by wildlife. According to Chome, in 1922, the Swahili community requested to register a twenty-three-thousand-acre tract of land on the mainland as community trust land — land that is now in the LAPSSET Corridor — but the colonial administration rejected it. Thus, most land in Lamu remained public, and locals remained without title deeds.
After independence, the government had agricultural ambitions for this sparsely inhabited area: licensing group ranches on public land. But Chome says that since registration required organizing a cooperative, showing that ranch activities were taking place, and gaining access to the central government’s land registry, it was only Europeans and Arabs who could do this. Chome says these elites would collect a group of small-scale farmers, mostly Awer, and use their names to register twenty-thousand- to thirty-thousand-acre tracts of land as ranches (though actual ranching, which involves livestock, did not happen).
In 1971, the government established a parastatal cotton plantation on Lamu’s rewilded mainland near Lake Kenyatta, but managers found it impossible to stop workers — mostly recruited from elsewhere on the coast — from deserting, for fear of wild animals. The government tried something else instead: subdividing the one-thousand–acre plantation into ten-point-three-acre household plots and selling them cheaply to landless Kenyans in other parts of the country. The government believed that private, small-scale land ownership could kill two birds with one stone: turn public wilderness into habitable and productive land while also appeasing a large constituency of Kenyans left landless by settler colonialism.
Most beneficiaries were landless Kikuyus who labored on white-owned farms in the Rift Valley. The Kikuyu settlers cleared bush, killed baboons, felled trees, and cultivated the land for subsistence and, later, commercial agriculture. The town of Mpeketoni materialized out of this Lake Kenyatta settlement scheme and, with the help of West German–funded infrastructure in 1986, became a prosperous economic center in what was “bush” not long before. By then, the indigenous Bajuni (of the islands) had become a minority.
The government saw success, and settlement begat settlement, which attracted even more settlers. For public projects, the government is obliged to compensate people residing on public land, with or without a title, and other migrants from the railroad belt and down the coast moved to Lamu, settling in plots adjacent to existing settlement schemes, anticipating that when the schemes inevitably expanded, they would become their first beneficiaries. And so the outnumbered Bajuni saw their lands encroached. But from the 1980s to the 2000s, Christian wageni on the mainland and Muslim wenyeji on the islands coexisted peacefully.
LAPSSET — or, rather, just the promise of it — changed everything. In an area that had been historically excluded from national wealth and under tenuous land ownership, LAPSSET promised prosperity. This prosperity raised the stakes. It surfaced questions, Chome says, “like, for the very first time ever, the question of Kikuyu settlement in a coastal county” — questions about not just who owned land in Lamu but who belonged.
Local political campaigns reoriented around this fault line between native and outsider. These tensions came to a head with the Mpeketoni massacre, in which only wageni were murdered. Al-Shabaab did not make inroads into Lamu because of LAPSSET, but the rift that LAPSSET opened between wenyeji and wageni provided a foothold for the insurgency.
On June 25, al-Shabaab militants attacked two wageni villages on the mainland. They killed five people, including an elderly man and a student who was visiting home during his school break.
A tarmacked road cuts through layers of geological history in a straight line, but a dirt road is persuadable, negotiating with the landscape, curving around hills, coasting along river valleys. It is difficult to excavate tarmac, but it is easy to plant an IED in dirt. When the road is young, anyone can dig a hole in it and bury someone else’s future. The Lamu–Mombasa Road, for example, was once riddled with IEDs, but after it was tarmacked, explosions waned. Like a crustacean, vulnerable in molting before settling into an impenetrably hard shell, the road wrests invincibility through permanence. The tarmacked track becomes a bone in the skeleton of empire, both connected and connecting.
The road that “sedentarized” the Awer — once a bustling thoroughfare for trucks carrying fish to Kiunga or miraa to Somalia, Kitete remembers — became their death trap. Al-Shabaab had been careful not to antagonize Kenyan Muslims and has not directly targeted the Awer. But on June 17, 2017, a security vehicle filled with Awer students returning to school after celebrating Eid with their families exploded. An IED detonated underneath the vehicle, killing four students and four police officers. Two of Kitete’s sisters were in that car, he said, among those killed. The road is both front line and foot soldier. Kitete’s family fled from Mararani to Kiunga, at the end of that lethal road, where his parents remain to this day. Kitete says that ten of his relatives have lost their lives to al-Shabaab. Whether killed by indiscriminate gunmen or IEDs, all died on roads.
From 2015 to 2019, Awer villages were virtually deserted. The threat of al-Shabaab attacks cut villagers off from the public provisions of the very modern nation-state they had “settled down” to join. The national polio vaccine campaign skipped over Awer children. A motorcycle taxi ride to Lamu, the only point from which one could get anywhere else, cost between twenty and thirty dollars, a fortune for people functionally excluded from the economy. Getting government documents like IDs was a life-threatening venture. At one point, Kitete said, there wasn’t a single government school teacher in any of these Awer villages. As recently as last year, Awer students were airlifted by military chopper to a school on Pate Island to sit for their national primary education assessment exams. Other than one pharmacy in Mangai — which Kitete says al-Shabaab burned in 2016 but still operates under a charred roof, stocking over-the-counter drugs like paracetamol — there are no medical facilities.
At the same time that the KDF has been torturing and punishing the Awer for their suspected complicity, Chome says, as well as engaging in illegal logging within the Boni Forest, al-Shabaab has tried “winning hearts and minds” by building mosques and digging wells. According to Chome, government officials dispatched to Lamu have said that when they try to speak with the Awer, “they find a wall. They can’t get any information. . . . The government is finding it hard to get information from a community they have been terrorizing.”
As the young people who spoke with Mohammed Skanda suggest, their rights still don’t really matter. As they are caught in the crossfire between security forces and al-Shabaab (“the enemy”), it is often unclear which one of the belligerent parties poses a more severe threat. “Security” — an ironic metonym for the state security apparatus that, in fact, does not seem concerned about the safety of Muslims it profiles — “can reach me even faster than the enemy and can mistreat me more than the enemy itself,” Skanda says. “Better to use the enemy to express their grievances because the results can be seen in seconds.” Skanda is very explicit about his condemnation of any al-Shabaab activity in the region. However, he also admits that there might be collaboration between al-Shabaab and locals. “Al-Shabaab is there looking for a loophole to get in,” Skanda explains. “Security is really tight, and he has no one to collaborate with, but the only person he can interact with is that one being oppressed. . . . This is what is happening. It’s a matter of calling a spade a spade.”
At the time of the Mpeketoni massacre, there was no evidence of Lamu residents being part of al-Shabaab, says Chome. But this has changed. He mentions a “graduation ceremony” for al-Shabaab suicide bombers that took place in Lower Juba, Somalia, in January, and he’s noticed that since June, when a leadership shift occurred within al-Shabaab, new recruits have included “people whose origins can be traced to Lamu, which you had not seen before.”
To essentialize the struggle against al-Shabaab in Lamu as a military problem misses an important point: the frontier is not just a battlefield but an active arena of imperialism. The Awer wait for a future that may not include them, while Bajunis attempt to stop the tide of capital by playing the land-title game. Wageni in Lamu, haunted by a blotter of nearby attacks, live in the full knowledge that they are insurgents’ explicit targets. The government, whether because of the political significance of LAPSSET or the financial (and human) sunk costs, seems willing to die by this corridor, and yet the more LAPSSET fails to materialize, the more Kenyan recruits slip to “the enemy.”
Right now, it does not appear that the Lamu–Garissa Road can transport anyone into the future. Rather, like its parallel line to the south, the old colonial Uganda Railway, it appears more like a rope, one that has entangled groups together, creating new identities and enmities and enmeshing all into one wretched knot. The more one pulls at any coil — land, religion, infrastructure, development, ethnicity, terrorism — the more the knot tightens. It is here, on contested land, that a road headed to the future can’t seem to go anywhere at all — for reasons that seem to have everything to do with the past.