where it all began

From Mombasa on Kenya's southern coast to Lamu in the north, Selina Denman charts the story of this part of East Africa-as well as her own

- Selina Denman

In the now faded photo: my mum, demure in an off-white, gold-trimmed sari, hands half-hidden in a swirl of henna; my dad, suit wrinkled, sporting Jackie O sunglasses borrowed from my auntie to block out the Mombasa sun. It's August 4, 1973, their wedding day. I stand in the same spot 50 years later, under the whitewashed arches of Tamarind, then and now "the best seafood restaurant on the whole coast of Kenya," Mohamed, my taxi driver, tells me categorically. The views from here have not changed much in the last half century. Across the glinting blue of the creek, on Mombasa Island, colonial mansions hide behind a tangle of trees, and the boxy flat-roofed buildings of Old Town, discolored by the salt-laden Indian Ocean air, press up intimately against each other. Wood fishing boats bob in quiet inlets where my parents once spent weekends learning to water-ski.

It was an improbable romance. My father had moved from rural England to Mombasa to seek his fortune; my mother was part of the town's close-knit, conservative Indian Bohra community. They fell in love and somehow convinced my grandparents to allow them to marry. In Swahili, I am nusu-nusu. Half-half. Half-English, half-Kenyan, half-brown, half-white, half-Muslim, half-foreign, half-local. But the story of the Swahili coast has always been one of movement and exchange, of people, stories, and traditions swept along by the tireless trade winds-the steady northeasterly kaskazi; the antithetical, southwesterly kusi; and the transitional matalai.