Article: Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda.

Justin Willis originally conceived this project as a study of relations between Mijikenda peoples in Kenya's coastal hinterlands on the one hand, and the Swahili and other residents of the town of Mombasa on the other. Instead it became a 'study of changing concepts of ethnicity', as he discovered that neither of these groups was 'discrete or homogeneous' before the 1930s. The book offers a careful historical analysis, from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, of redefinitions over time of what it meant to be 'Swahili', and of the recent invention of 'Mijikenda' identity. Willis's analysis is informed by contemporary understandings of ethnicity and other forms of identity as ...

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