Mazrui family hangs on to power, to control land ownership at Coast

By  Amos Kareithi

Takaungu, Kenya: When the seven elders converged in the small office, patiently waiting for the verdict, they were confident that history would be on their side. They keenly listened as the white man read through the lengthy document and finally appended his signature. This, as it turned out, sealed the fate of the thousands of locals whose forefathers had broken their backs as they slaved in the expansive grain fields with whips cracking their bare backs, sweat freely pouring from their furrowed faces.

Fifteen years earlier, the Sultan of Zanzibar had abolished slavery and provided for compensation to the slave masters for the loss of labour. Under this arrangement, childless concubines were freed while mistresses who had children were only granted freedom if they proved cruelty. The decree abolishing slavery was issued in April 1897, but on this day as the seven elders congregated at Takaungu near Malindi, they were not discussing slavery or compensation, but were trying to safeguard their future.

Finally, when W E F de Lacy, the acting registrar of title finally appended his signature on the document he had been reading through, the seven, Rashid Bin Salim, Mohamed Bin Sud, Mohamed Bin Juma, Rizik Bin Muhamed, Khalfam Bin Abdullah and Abdulla Bin Rashid all collectively breathed a sigh of relief.

They had secured the future of their descendants on March 21, 1912: Takaungu, a land their ancestors had exploited using armies of slaves was now forever theirs. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since the Mazrui family first arrived in Takaungu in 1837. At the time, the family was fleeing from Mombasa to escape the tyranny of the sultan of Zanzibar, who was from the Omani Arabs.

The Omani Arabs and the Mazrui had a long history of feuds that had led to numerous bloody battles that ultimately led to the invitation of Europeans to boost their side whenever they felt overwhelmed. The battles are best captured by the happenings of 1822 when Pemba helped the Omanis drive out the Mazrui Governor Rizike, while in Mombasa, Mbaruk, of the Mazrui family appealed to the British for protection against the Omani navy. This was at a time the British had just made a treaty with Said to abolish the slave trade.

The book Mideast & Africa 1700-1950 details how to avoid antagonising the sultan of Zanzibar, the British had on December 1823 banned the Mazrui family from flying a British flag in Mombasa.

However, when Captain William F Owen visited Mombasa and the Mazrui had improvised a homemade British flag without consulting his Government, he promised the Mazrui protection against the Omanis whom he believed to be worse slavers. Owen committed the Mazrui to promise to abolish the slave trade in Mombasa. It was not until 1837 that the leaders of the Mazrui family were routed out of Mombasa as their leaders died in prison in Mombasa while the rest fled to Takaungu.

 

Agreement with Government

It was here, Paul E Lovejoy writes in his book, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa that the Mazrui family established a thriving agricultural enterprise. Although they had pledged to stop slave trade in Mombasa, at their new base in Takaungu, slaves were the main means of labour where villages with between 300-400 slaves under an overseer laboured in the Mazrui farms.

According to Lovejoy, “Takaungu thrived in the 1860s and at the height of slave trade, each slave village had between 300 to 400 slaves. They were involved in cultivation of maize and millet.” Around this time, Takaungu was exporting 5,400 tonnes of grains per year and one of the richest men in the area was Suleiman bin Abdallah Al Mauli, who owned 261 slaves who worked on 2,500 hectares planted with grains and coconuts. Historians believe that in the 1860s the total population of slaves working without pay around Malindi stood at approximately 6,000. By 1912, the Sultan of Zanzibar had long leased out his territory at the Coast to the British for 70 years and slave trade was no longer in vogue. The Mazrui were trying to chart their own destiny.

It is against this background that the seven elders, acting as the representatives of The Mazrui Arbitration Board successfully extracted an agreement with the Government to secure the land that had once been exploited by their slave-owning forefathers 51 years earlier.

The 1912 agreement reads in part: “This application is as the result of negotiations that have been carried out between the Government and the Mazrui people for some years. This community had large unspecified rights to land without known boundaries in this sub-district of Takaungu.” According to the agreement, the titles the Mazrui held to the land were not lawful and they could not sell the land. This was one of the main reasons they approached the Government so that they could be given an indefensible title to some specified parcels. The family was as per the 1912 agreement given titles to all pieces of land in Takaungu, Mtundia, Rocca and Watamu.

It was mandated to subdivide the land with the assistance of the Survey Department. This land was described to be running from the Coast through Msabaa to the south to the point between Mombasa and Malindi District as approved by Sir Arthur Handinge near Kuruwiru.

 

Certificate of ownership

On the eastern side the land was to run parallel to the Indian Ocean and extend eastwards up to the Wanyika reserve. The application stressed that the agreement between the governor and Sheikh Rashid Bin Salim was to be carried out in its entirety. It is on the basis of this agreement that the British administration issued a certificate of ownership to the Mazrui as per the agreement.

The neatly hand written certificate reads, “ I Adrian John Maclean, recorder of titles do hereby certify that Rashid Bin Khamis or the Liwali, his attorney together with the other dully gazetted members of Mazrui Arbitration Boundaries are the proprietors of all that piece of land and the mineral rights situated in the province of Seyidie in Takaungu District.” According to the title certificate, the land in question was approximately 9,100 acres. Out of this land, 2,716 acres was delineated and placed under Wakf of the Mazrui kin and successors forever. A pathway of 30 feet was to be created following the track of present (1912) Mombasa and Malindi Road.

The Wakf, which was later legislated into an Act of Parliament provided for the creation of commissioners who were to act as trustees of the communally held land. The commissioners were to be made up of the Provincial Commissioner Coast Province or his representative; the Chief Khadhi who was an ex officio member and six other members, who were to all be Muslims. Exactly 100 years later, the indelible signature penned by Maclean, the recorder of titles, has refused to be rubbed off by three postcolonial Government regimes and is now haunting descendants of slaves and the former masters. In 1989, the Government had trashed the Mazrui pact by repealing the law that bestowed the land to Sheikh Rashid Bin Salim’s descendants and converted the disputed asset into trust land. This land was later given to indigenous people who were squatters in 1989. These were families who had lived in the area but had no right to what they regarded as ancestral land as it had been registered in the Mazrui’s family name.

 

Decision overturned

However, this decision to scrap the Mazrui Trust land Act was overturned this year after 23 years by Justice Francis Tuiyot who ruled that, “All other lands vested in the said board of trustees for the Mazrui, by the Mazrui Lands Trust Act (Cap) 289) of the Laws of Kenya (now repealed) were also vested in the Mazrui, as lawful proprietors thereof, and to the exclusion of all other persons.”

This in effect means that an estimated, 10,000 families will be rendered homeless once the descendants of Mazrui dynasty decide to kick them out to reclaim the 9,100 acres they inherited from their forefathers, with the assistance of the British Government. It is a case of history repeating itself as the helpless cries of the squatters relive the memories of the slaves who once laboured in Takaungu without any right to the land they toiled on. On the other hand, the undying resilience of the Mazrui family who continue resisting repressive Government control is replayed.

It is as if the echoes from the past are still reverberating in Takaungu, reliving the pre-colonial days when the Mazrui family fought powerful forces like of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the Portuguese and Britain in order to command proceedings at the Coast. Then, just like now, the indigenous people of the Coast were bystanders who like pawns in the chessboard of destiny passively witnessed history being written and their fate sealed by powerful forces they could not control. 

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