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Women's Wedding Celebrations in Mombasa, Kenya

Through their wedding celebrations, women from all strata of Mombasa society have participated in the evolution of a variegated Swahili culture. An historical analysis of wedding ceremonies illuminates two important questions: first, the pattern of interaction between people of slave and free ancestry after the abolition of slavery in 1907, and second, the role women have played in integrating into Swahili culture elements drawn from both slave and free peoples. An awareness of the interplay of ethnicity and social stratification is crucial to understanding Swahili society. Historians have traced successive migrations of people from different parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean, bringing disparate ways of life. But despite the well-known formulation that Swahili culture grew from the mingling of African and Persian or Arab peoples, little attempt has been made to analyze specifically the contributions of African slaves to the mixture. The failure to distinguish different strata in the African component of Swahili culture obscures the class dynamic in coastal society. Scholars do not ignore social stratification, but few describe adequately the interaction between various strata. Still fewer writers analyze cultural artifacts as the expression of different, and often competing, strata. For example, James De Vere Allen, in his excellent guide to the Lamu museum, argues persuasively that “Swahili culture … is an African culture,” not an Arab import, as early British writers assumed. But having exposed the colonialist assumptions behind the earlier idea and having established the indigenous roots of Swahili culture, Allen (n.d.: 1-2) does not attempt to describe the impact of the lower strata on the material culture of the elite, whose articles dominate the museum. Allen is handicapped by the fact that poor people tend to create fewer and less substantial artifacts. In order to analyze the contributions of slaves and other people from the lower strata of society, one must turn to customs, particularly dances, which did not depend upon wealth or power for their creation.