Bajuni Erotic

The Bajuni are a Swahili-speaking Muslim people of the far northern Swahili coast, and their homeland is less a territory than an archipelago: a low chain of coral islands and sandspits running from Kismayo in southern Somalia down to the Kenyan border, along with the facing mainland villages and the creeks behind them. Chula, Koyama, Ngumi are names that appear on most maps as specks, if at all. Life there is organized around the sea and the monsoon calendar: fishing from small sailing craft, shark and reef fish dried and traded inland, mangrove poles cut in the creeks and shipped north to roof houses in Arabia, coconut and sesame on the sandier ground. Boatbuilding is a Bajuni skill with a long reputation here. The mtepe, a sewn boat stitched together with coir rather than nailed, was built and sailed on this stretch of coast into the early twentieth century, among the last of its kind in the Indian Ocean. Islam is Sunni of the Shafi'i school, and it is not a separate compartment of life: the mosque, the Quran school, the naming of children, the timing of a marriage, the etiquette of a funeral all run through institutions that have organized Swahili coastal towns for a thousand years.

Their language, Kibajuni, also called Kitikuu, is a northern dialect of Swahili in the Sabaki branch of Bantu, close kin to the speech of Lamu and Pate and far enough from standard Swahili that outsiders regularly mishear it as something else. That detail has had consequences. When Britain handed Jubaland to Italy in 1925, the new border cut the Bajuni world in two, and the split has shaped everything since. In Somalia the Bajuni are a minority without the clan backing that structures Somali politics, so when the state collapsed in 1991 they were among the most exposed: islands raided, boats and land seized, thousands pushed to Mombasa, to Kenyan camps, and eventually to Britain, the United States and the Gulf. Many of those asylum cases turned on linguistics. Officials used language testing to decide who was really Bajuni, often measuring claimants against standard Swahili or Somali rather than their own dialect, so people were disbelieved for speaking their mother tongue correctly. Villages that once filled the islands are thin now or gone. The people are not: they are on the Kenyan coast, in Kismayo, and abroad, and Kibajuni is still spoken, though fluent speakers grow fewer.