Marriage and Community in Contemporary Mombasa

Despite the general changes and the group's diminished economic and political situation during the twentieth century, the Swahili family and sense of community continue as major forces in the lives of group members. My informants and the literature (e.g., Stroebel 1979:80–94, Prins 1967:76–83) agree in indicating that for at least several decades, kinship, like community, is neither as broad in scope nor as powerful in directing activity as it was in the recent past. Still, ties based on both affect much of what most group members do most of the time. The Swahili are an urban people, and they live in an unquestionably rapidly changing environment, but they are not deracinated, their nuclear families are not isolated, and their senses of identity are still, for almost all group members, firmly rooted in being Swahili.

In later chapters, marriage and the nuclear family receive a good deal of attention, but from the perspective of community structure, it is useful to bear in mind that almost all marriages within this community are with fellow community members. Men sometimes marry Mombasa women from other ethnic groups, but when they do this—and this is true now as it has been for at least the greater part of this century—the marriage is kept secret, especially from the man's "main" wife.^[9] This wife is almost invariably not only a Mombasa Swahili but, nearly as frequently, also a member of the same section as her husband and, in more than a quarter of the cases for which I have data, either a patrilateral or a matrilateral cousin.

In recent years, according to some informants, ties beyond the nuclear family have weakened, but if this is so, it is so only relative to what must have been quite powerful bonds. Households often contain kin in addition to nuclear family members, and if the sharing of houses by married brothers and their wives and families is rare, as it is, this is not a new development; a separate house for each nuclear family, especially after a number of children have been born, is generally thought desirable and was so viewed as far back as informants can remember.

It is difficult to assess whether the Swahili are virilocal or uxorilocal since crowding and the lack of availability of house sites makes it difficult for couples to live where they and their kin wish. Some informants say it is better for a newly married couple to live near the groom's family, and others (fewer) say it is better to live near the wife's family. Since an accurate census is quite impossible to carry out,^[10] I can only say that if I have an impression as to where married couples live, it is that there is some tendency to locate near the wife's family. My census data (see table 1, chap. 4), as spotty and thin as they unavoidably are, indicate that couples always live in their section's neighborhood if they are from the same one (as they almost always are) and if, as the overwhelming majority still do, they live in Old Town rather than in non-Swahili parts of the city or in a distant town or nation.

Women from the group occasionally now, and in the past as well, marry men from other Swahili communities along the coast, and a few marry Arabs, either from the Persian Gulf or from the community of unassimilated Arabs in Mombasa. Even less often, they marry whites who have converted to Islam; I know of three cases, two to Europeans and one to an American. These two rare sorts of exceptions aside, however, the group's women never marry outside their own community for their first marriage.

Parents are concerned that their children may marry outsiders and, even more frightening, Christians, but this has not happened in any of the forty-six marriages since 1975 which I have data on. If there are marriages outside the community, it is in the pattern of men taking "secret" wives (all of them, so far as I can tell, Muslims) that has been part of the marriage practices followed for as many generations as informants' accounts go back.