Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on the way the heritage of slavery is traceable in the structure and architecture of Lindi town, in its sacred topography of mosques and the stories told about different quarters.

Paper long abstract:

As I have argued elsewhere, settlements between ex-slaves and ex-masters in the aftermath of slavery differed greatly between towns on the Swahili coast. Spatial distinctions and the options or lack of them fore spatial mobility were always important to them, as is known, for instance in the case of Lamu, where the 'sacred geography' continues to reflect distinctions between high-status (Sharifian) and ex-slave believers. By comparison, on the southern Swahili coast social distinctions derived from the era of slavery were less tenacious. This paper demonstrates that they are nevertheless traceable in the layout of one of these towns, Lindi, and that tracing them opens a revealing perspective on the aftermath of slavery here. Concretely, the formerly 'respectable' quarter, home to many former masters, has declined, superseded in the colonial period by the area associated most closely with the Indian merchants who dominated colonial cash-crop trading. Its ambiguous reputation as a site of both witchcraft and Sufi mysticism reflects the changing status of its population. Low-status immigrants to town, meanwhile, congregated in other new quarters. The successive building of mosques associated with partly ex-slave congregations, first in the new commercial quarter, later in the outskirts, forms a material substratum of the immigrants' negotiations for citizenship. Decades later, villagisation transferred to town the inhabitants of an ex-slave settlement on a former plantation, reiterating their marginality in a process meant to pursue modernization and social equality. These spatially-expressed social distinctions coexist uneasily with the communalist rhetoric, and at times practice, of town life.