Kiswahili

Mlalo

Continued

Mlalo Kaya, c. 1914

The settlement at Mlalo dates at least to the 1700s. This is Dobbertin’s excellent shot of the kaya at Mlalo. Along the East African coast and its hinterlands, including the Eastern Arc Mountains, kayas mark the residential sites of founding lineages. Kayas, like this one at Mlalo, housed the founders’ original rain shrines and burial sites. The shrines and cemetery still exist at the chief’s compound. The chief’s compound, out of sight here, is just below and behind the trees at the apex of the image’s triangle. The current ceremonial chief, Maliki Kinyashi, has preserved the clan’s rainmaking shrinesand meets regularly with his advisory court.

The houses are packed together, as in the Bumbuli images, and most are round, signifying a resident’s status as a non-Christian and non-Muslim. By the 1910s, Mlalo’s Muslims had built a mosque in town adjacent to the lone tree in the image. The river in the foreground is the Umba, which farmers used as a vital source of irrigation water, especially during dry seasons. During the upheavals of the late nineteenth century, Mlaloans built a sturdy protective stockade around the town that offered security to townspeople and refugees from the area. By the 1910s, the stockade is gone. A cluster of tiny house-like structures lie scattered around the out skirts of the kaya. On a visit in 2016, Chief Kinyashi’s sister and wife explained to several of us that as children they ground a special banana flour and placed in the houses for visiting ancestor spirits. These miniature abodes are visible at other hamlets in Dobbertin’s photographs.

Mlalo Kaya, Repeat Image, 2016

The round houses have almost disappeared throughout the Kaya, except in the chief’s compound. The town’s current administrative offices, the market, and small businesses now occupy a flat stretch of land directly on the river’s floodplain. There have been periodic catastrophic floods along the Umbaat Mlalo killing people and damaging property. A lush banana plantation now covers the slope where the small ceremonial houses stood in the 1910s.

In addition to the burial sites for the chief and his ancestors, Mlalo town’s cemetery is visible here just below the lower boundary. It covers another area where the spirit abodes sat in the 1910s. The cemetery has been planted up with castor bean trees and dracaena plants, some growing overgrowing over 20 feet tall.