Paper short abstract:

The ethnography of the social afterlife of Swahili tombs is about struggles for the custodianship of the past within the present, and the effects this has in reconfiguring the relationships between genealogy, power, and ecumenical Islam.

Paper long abstract:

The cemeteries and mosques that make up the Swahili 'ruins' found on the East African coast are regularly visited by Sufi pilgrims and non-Muslim tourists alike.

While highly emotive arguments between Islamic partisans, Sufis and Salafists, expose the tensions evoked by patrician tomb visitation, the legislative and technocratic impulse to preserve such tombs as cultural heritage sites also reveals the tenor of debate amongst archaeologists in turning such ritual sites into monuments of state and, thereby, asserting their own versions of genealogy vis-à-vis theoretical work on 'Swahili origins.'

The ritual intercessions that take place at the tombs of Swahili ancestors, some with 'saintly' genealogical claims to the Prophet, are integral to Swahili prayer and identity along this coast. Here the dead dwell in the tombs and baobab trees associated with such cemeteries and are expected to mediate in the wellbeing or misfortunes of their living 'descendants.' But here 'dwelling' is related to Swahili understandings of descent and social hierarchies, as the spirits of the elite are entombed, and the spirits of commoners (former slaves?) are embodied in trees. Here, the anthropological question of how these spirits are experienced by the living is broached. What is the form or context in which spirits mediate Swahili hierarchies?

The ethnography of the social afterlife of Swahili tombs is about struggles for the custodianship of the past within the present, and the effects this has in reconfiguring the relationships between genealogy, power, and ecumenical Islam.