Trust in Allah and tether your camel
Islamic Hadith

The ability to communicate facilitated cooperation. Language re-enforced cooperation and gave early humans the evolutionary advantage allowing them to dominate their competitors. It engendered trust among individuals, enabling them to develop the institutions, monetary systems, and technologies resulting in our mastery over the natural world. Now human evolution has reached the tipping point where trust is no longer intrinsic to societal processes. Crypto-currencies and blockchains, for example, are marketed as repositories of monetary value and methods offering trust-free transactions.

Digital technologies are reordering society, eroding trust in our institutions, and short-circuiting faith in traditional sources of information. They challenge the authority of formal education, making it possible to revise the historical record and subvert commonly accepted facts. Software and invisible algorithms can now restore the bodies to dead bones, recreate artifacts from the past, and conjure up alternate realities.

For those who came of age during the decades preceding these changes, the changes appear to undermine how we engage with our friends, society, and the wider world around us. If for those coming of age during the spread of the Internet and mobile phones it was not a major problem, now it is.

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The art of persuasion has been turned into the new science of attention capture. Community is no longer a function of physical proximity as individuals gravitate into mimetic tribes fronting a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations. Society’s culture wars thrive in these conditions, fuelling political polarization and lowering the threshold for conspiracy theories and extreme ideologies. Politicians exploit information tunnels and echo chambers. Bytes travelling at high speeds maximize short bursts of communication and ephemeral images lacking context. Eyes on screen degrade our ability to make nuanced observations and compete with complex ideas in our minds.

Critics like Yuval Hariri claim humans are caught in an evolutionary arms race pitting our declining cognitive capacity and shrinking brains against the rising robotic master race. Many other observers share his concerns about the power of data-driven technology concentrated in a few powerful entities. The disruptive power of artificial intelligence demonstrated by basic language models like Chat GTP has already prompted scientists and programmers to call for a pause in their development.  What begins with a decline in trust will end with the loss of human agency.

The rise of artificial general intelligence offers a great leap in efficiency and scientific advancement unimaginable until recently. This is just the beginning. In a recent interview the veteran technology tracker Kevin Kelly pronounced that the “long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire.”

Into the global info jungle

Two decades ago, the prophets of digital progress told us that the new technologies would bring us together, freeing us from physical constraints while liberating our creative talents. The world was shrinking, encouraging us to believe Marshall McLuhan’s global village was at hand. It was, but the village turned out to be not the friendly place we assumed it would be. It is actually a sprawling city with all manner of good and bad neighbourhoods, high tech and legacy infrastructure, parks and dangerous dark spaces. An increasingly compressed and still diverse population inhabits this mega-village, and the great majority display essentially the same peasant mentality as the generations past who brought us to this juncture.

Where technology was formerly regarded as neutral among those living on its cutting edge, now it is regarded as an indispensable public good. It needs to be embraced if the peasants are to remain competitive and enjoy the benefits of the global mega-village. The digital ecology is actually a jungle with many unseen dangers. Scams abound. Hustlers scan the media looking for dubious partisan stories for transplanting into the mainstream. The capacity to deceive is outpacing the implementation of corrective measures.

The technology industry and its commercial partners are, of course, keenly aware of the problem. Digital disruptions arising across sectors from health and education to commerce and banking led researchers to develop the technology acceptance model (TAM). Meta analyses and multiple studies identify perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as the two main variables influencing adoption. Trust ranks lower, a complementary factor that varies across sectors and applications.

Where technology was formerly regarded as neutral among those living on its cutting edge, now it is regarded as an indispensable public good.

I would add place. Technology adoption is a longstanding concern in this region of the mega-village. For decades Africa’s low level of technological progress figured prominently in Western developmental narratives. My professor of soil science, a veteran of many years of research in Zambia and Malawi, drove this point home by showing us a slide with some 40 kinds of short-handle hoes. The short handle hoe never made sense to me, but to this mzee’s credit, he avoided generalizing offering any judgements on what he framed as the diversity of agricultural practice.

It is true African technology adoption has lagged due to a constellation of factors including cost, maintenance and support systems, cultural appropriateness, and the inconsistency of expected behaviours of the humans in government and leadership positions. In some cases, like the adoption of industrial monocultural farming, this has been a blessing for the environment. The coming of the digital age buried any notions about Africans being somehow averse to technology change.

After a slow start (for those who remember the 071 numbers), Kenya surpassed the expectations of investors at the time of the roll-out of the first mobile networks in 1999. The projected 300,000 mobile phone lines turned out to be 900,000 in use after one year. This doubled after a year, and now Kenya mobile line penetration is calculated to be 119 per cent. The launch of Mpesa mobile money in 2005 accelerated growth and employment in the new economic sectors, contributing to Kenya’s number one world ranking for financial inclusion. Within several years mobile money comprised half of the country’s GDP.

The mobile phone also spawned a new generation of con artists. I suspect very few people did not fall at least once into the traps they set. Safaricom upped its customer service and users got smarter. We still get those dodgy messages, but online loan and gambling apps are a far greater problem.

The issue of trust has come to the forefront as the digital ecology penetrates every corner of the global mega-village. Many sincere and normally intelligent people are concerned about these trends as us villagers cope and adjust to life in the new jungle. Five years ago an article in a leading journal of science declared that trust is the internet’s next frontier. It cited the unreliability of online information, the manipulation of social media, and the loss of privacy and protection for digital data. A study based on a sample of 42 countries confirmed that the decline is global.

The problem transcends the digital sphere. Like an infectious disease, the loss of confidence in information is just a symptom. It is contaminating everything. During a recent Ramadhan podcast, for example, a participant asked the scholars: “When the angel of death comes to take our souls how will we know it is not fake?”

Not too long ago we would have asked, “Who is this miro?” But it was a North American.

Comparative contexts

Trust is defined as the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on expectations of the latter’s behaviour. Online trust, in contrast, is developed through use: the individual’s interactions with online information systems. The more we use it, the more we trust it. The decline in the former is linked to the spread of surveillance technology. CCTV cameras, facial recognition software, and unregulated tapping of phone data and tracing in turn lower the baseline for trust in human behaviour. Threats real and perceived, terrorism and the coronavirus pandemic, have accelerated governments’ capacity to monitor citizens. The impression conveyed by all of this is that our online interactions are inversely related to our trust in fellow humans.

“When the angel of death comes to take our souls how will we know it is not fake?”

Kenya is no exception. According to World Value Survey data, Kenya ranks low in interpersonal trust and trust in institutions. Because the baseline referred to above was already low, it provides an interesting comparison to the Western world, where the invasion of privacy and implications for human rights has provoked a backlash.

For a person like myself, arriving from a high-trust environment, the trust deficit in Kenya was obvious. When I was growing up, the only time we locked up our house was when we went on overnight trips or vacations. I saw locks on telephones and refrigerators for the first time in Kenya. My friends kept their chequebooks under lock and key, citing the mischief of teenage sons. I wondered at the uniquely designed signatures, unreadable as a name but equally hard to forge.

Transactional relations tended to be problematic, even with friends and colleagues: loans were forgotten, contracts not honoured, and sworn promises did not hold water. People I highly valued disappeared over minor issues. I also found that these problems were often more due to situational than ethical issues. Differential terms and conditions applied. One had to be alert, savvy, and over time norms of reciprocity usually compensated. You might suffer some short-term losses, but participating in this system generated useful repositories of social capital. There were other upsides.

Attitudes towards information proved to be the more perplexing dilemma. Instead of flowing freely, information was controlled by some invisible cultural algorithm. Reputable sources and even scientific truths were not accepted at face value. Books and magazines once borrowed never returned. When taking an interest in a new book in my possession, the first thing people would do was peruse the acknowledgements and credits. Newspapers were both shared and hoarded. Most wananchi displayed a healthy thirst for knowledge, many of the educated stopped reading books after graduating from secondary school. Inattention to detail could be deadly, details intentionally withheld even more toxic.

When asked, strangers would always respond generously, with large margins of error. Simple questions received perpendicular responses. Sometimes the answer would be buried in a puzzle of peripheral facts; sometimes it was a cat-and-mouse game. Replies reiterated the question as statement.

For example: I go to my friend’s shop, don’t see him, and ask: “Koome yuko wapi?”

“Koome hayuko hapa.” Koome is not here.

Again, there was an underlying template at work. I lost count of the number of times I asked for directions and the bystander took me by the hand or jumped in the car to guide me to my destination. Some of the informational non sequiturs were intentional, many stemmed from different orientations and methods for accessing information. I became highly invested in human sources and networks: baraza discussions, neighbourhood grapevines, conversations in matatus and with taxi drivers. Radios attracted small crowds who redistributed the info.

Instead of flowing freely, information was controlled by some invisible cultural algorithm.

My breakthrough moment came when I realized information was a commodity, something to be stored, husbanded, and re-allocated parsimoniously as needed. In the post-colonial environment, it was not the near-unlimited public good I had mistakenly assumed it to be.

The coming of the internet qualified both of these qualities. In his 2013 book, Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier, exposed how the free flow of information has enabled a small number of strategically placed players to hoover up and use our data without acknowledging ownership. A decade later nothing has changed. A handful of American and Chinese tech giants own the servers.

AGI and Africa’s upside 

The new digital ecology was a black swan. We could not predict the problems it wrought although they appeared obvious enough after the fact. This is not the case for the coming of Artificial General Intelligence. Weak or narrow AI is designed to do specific tasks; AGI is trained to replicate human learning and problem solving.

Countless works of science fiction have explored future AGI scenarios, I Robot; 2001: A Space Odessey; Neuromancer; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Non-fiction titles have joined them more recently: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach; Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies; The Economic Singularity; Deep Learning. Before that, movies based on books like Blade Runner, The Matrix, Ex Machina, and Westworld introduced AI scenarios to wider audiences.

In 2018 Stephen J. Hawking warned that AI will either be the best thing that’s ever happened to us, or it will be the worst thing. He and others like Yuval Harari observe that unlike the rapid progress realised since the adoption of deep learning based on neural networks, humans are constrained by the slow pace of biological evolution. This was given substance in an analysis appearing in the Journal Computers and Society, which concluded that over the longer-term evolution will favour AI over humans.

The free flow of information has enabled a small number of strategically placed players to hoover up and use our data without acknowledging ownership.

This brings us to the concept of the singularity, the irreversible point when super-intelligent machines transcend human intelligence. The term, first used by the Hungarian-American mathematician, John von Neumann in 1958, went mainstream with the publication of a book by Ray Kurzweil that predicted we could reach the singularity by 2045. There is nothing in the roll-out of AGI language models since last year to significantly challenge these hypotheses.

I grew up anti-robot. My favourite comic book was Magnus, Robot Fighter, and nothing has changed my instincts. My distrust of Safaricom is based on experience; my iPhone’s brain is already too independent. My Chinese phone is an Android phone and TikTok is non grata. Having said that, I think the impact of AI will be positive for Africa. It should follow the pathway of digital technologies, which have been a communications life saver, leap-frogging many of the problems I mentioned. There are, of course, risks and considerations. If digital tech has opened up some of the minds crippled by Kenya’s rigid education system, AI may replace them.

The continent has been catching up, mobile telephony is removing bottlenecks, improving life in rural areas, and mitigating the isolation of Africa’s remote and wide-open spaces. Africa has been on the sidelines of digital technology and AI development. The usual biases are showing up in the developed world’s algorithms and the parade of misinformation.

This may be only a temporary problem. Being on the periphery of technological change has its benefits. There is time to get it right and our guys are somehow good at doing things differently.

I trust in Africa’s upside in this increasingly mechanical era. There is something about the embedded assymetries, the mish-mash colours, imprecise angles and architecture, and the resilience that comes with that deep trust in human nature. As my brothers in Lamu are fond of saying, Kitu kimetengezwa na binadamu hakishindi akili ya watu. Information is a human invention.

Being on the periphery of technological change has its benefits.

At the onset of the industrial revolution the poet William Blake preached the gospel of human imagination to resist the march of the new infernal machines and satanic mills. Maybe this optimism comes from watching Chappie and District Nine, or listening to too much jazz.

Let us tether the camels, trust in Allah, and put faith in the record of human adaptation. The informational gaps and disconnects, the cock-ups and rip-offs, the scams, the political economy of lies and tricksters, and all those preventable problems feeding the This is Africa meme—they have all contributed to our adaptive fitness.

Africa is the land of non-linear evolution. If this continent, as many of us believe, is the future, that is good news for the human race—at least until the sexbots pass the Turing test.

Much has been documented about reburial cases in Kenya, especially situations resulting from heated contestation among family members, concerned community and the government. Most of these cases have been determined through court processes and have raised questions of heritage, memorialization and how to handle the dead.

The debate about reburying the dead has resurged with renewed vigour, with politicians and pundits discussing relocating the remains of Kenya’s founding president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. This issue was tabled in the eighth parliament in 2001 through a motion by former Rangwe MP Shem Ochuodho, who wanted the government to create a fund to support Kenya’s heroes. However, Ochuodho’s proposal was shot down in parliament and did not see the light of day.

The discussions were revived in June 2003 when Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi announced the planned construction of Heroes Corner in Nairobi and the intention to exhume the remains of former Mau Mau fighters and the Kapenguria six for reburial there. The idea of exhuming and reburying them was intended to construct a narrative of resistance against colonialism, following a script that would largely portray veterans as national heroes during the reburial ceremony.

The debate about exhuming and reburying past heroes was once again revived, focusing on former president Jomo Kenyatta.

However, the idea of Heroes Corner did not take off following the failure to find Dedan Kimathi’s body and the decision by the government to erect his statue on Kimathi Street in Nairobi in 2007. It also emerged that the families of nationalists and freedom fighters opposed the idea of exhuming their dead kin, claiming that the government was not in a position to dictate where their loved ones should be buried or reburied.

Prior to the promulgation of the new constitution, a task force chaired by Prof. Vincent Simiyu was set up to fast-track the idea of memorializing past and present national heroes and heroines. Following the committee’s recommendations, the late President Mwai Kibaki announced on 20th October 2010, during the first ever Mashujaa Day celebrations, the government’s plan to establish a National Heroes Monument at Heroes Corner in Uhuru Gardens to honour past and present heroes and heroines.

The debate about exhuming and reburying past heroes was once again revived, focusing on former president Jomo Kenyatta. It centred on whether to rebury Jomo’s remains at the family’s rural home in Gatundu, or at the Heroes Corner in Nairobi, or whether to let them remain in the heart of Kenya’s capital city. This debate raises the serious question of whether the remains of Kenya’s first president have any significant role in Kenya’s politics today.

Born in 1893, Jomo Kenyatta served as Kenya’s first prime minister, becoming the first president when the country became a republic on 12th December 1964. As president, Jomo was associated with abolishing racial segregation in schools, hotels, churches and social clubs. His supporters believe he was central in spearheading the Pan-African movement, an ideology that sought to create and entrench African identity.

On the other hand, critics challenge Jomo Kenyatta’s role in the struggle for independence and his depiction as a Pan-Africanist and as a unifying leader. He is blamed for undermining the 1962 constitution, which had aimed to create a decentralized political system, in favour of a centrist state. This gradually led to a weakened opposition, unequal resource distribution, clientelism, neopatrimonialism and “land capture” by the elite.

After ruling for about 15 years, Mzee Kenyatta rested on 22nd August 1978. Although his family wanted to bury Mzee’s remains at their ancestral home in Ichaweri, the government objected because Jomo Kenyatta was a national figure and the country’s founding father. He was buried in a marble mausoleum at Parliament Square.

The mausoleum is adjacent to Parliament Buildings on a piece of land that is approximately 4.48 acres along Parliament Road within Nairobi’s Central Business District. Its walls and floor are solid granite. There are 22 evenly-spaced flags — 11 on each side — along the paved pathway to the red-carpeted entrance to the main structure, and decorated statues of lions.

While Jomo Kenyatta’s mausoleum is not open to the public, access may be granted upon formal request, or one may catch a glimpse of the sepulchre during the commemoration of Mzee’s death that takes place on 22nd August every year.

It is, however, ironic that the existence of the Jomo Kenyatta mausoleum defeats the purpose for which it is referred to as a national heritage. If its existence is to remind Kenyans and the world of the significant centrality of Jomo Kenyatta’s presence in the making of the Kenyan Nation, then why deny Kenyans the opportunity to engage with its past? It is no wonder then that in some quarters there have been demands that Jomo Kenyatta’s remains be moved to a private site or to a more accessible space such as Heroes Corner.

Critics challenge Jomo Kenyatta’s role in the struggle for independence and his depiction as a Pan-Africanist and as a unifying leader.

The calls led to an unsuccessful attempt to open the mausoleum to the public through the Kenyatta Mausoleum Bill 2016 tabled by Hon. Muthomi Njuki. The bill had recommended that the mausoleum be made a national repository of Jomo Kenyatta’s artefacts, a place of research and knowledge dissemination, a tourist site for locals and outsiders, and a spot for preserving and conserving Jomo Kenyatta’s and Kenya’s heritage.

That the mausoleum is treated as a private space is bemusing considering that Jomo Kenyatta was a public figure and Kenya’s founding president who led the country for nearly fifteen years. Moreover, the mausoleum is managed and maintained by parliament and guarded by the Kenya Defense Forces using taxpayers’ money. In other countries such as Egypt, Ghana and Malawi, the mausoleums are not only part of the national heritage but are also open public spaces that tourists and locals can visit freely.

There are those for whom the question of relocating Jomo Kenyatta’s remains to Ichaweri appears to be a non-issue; they point to former presidents Moi and Kibaki who were buried in their homes at Kabarak and in Othaya, respectively. In both cases, however, their two families objected to the government’s plan to bury Moi and Kibaki at Uhuru Gardens. The families further claimed that both had expressed the wish to rest within the family home. It should also be noted that both Moi and Kibaki died in retirement, unlike Jomo who passed away in office.

The suggestion to rebury Jomo Kenyatta at Ichaweri, therefore, is not meant to bring dignity to the deceased or closure to his family. Rather, it is connected with current politics that aims to rewrite national histories from below.

On the other hand, while the proposal to rebury Jomo Kenyatta at Heroes Corner in Uhuru Gardens is a noble idea, it is dubious and comes at an inappropriate time. His interment at Uhuru Gardens should have occurred when he died in 1978. Moreover, moving the mausoleum from parliament to the new Uhuru Gardens would be a waste of public resources and would affirm Jomo Kenyatta’s influence on Kenya’s politics from the grave.

Reburial, in most cases, is undertaken to end the narrative of the dead, to set the deceased’s body and soul at peace and offer closure to the living. However, given that the dead body and the exhumation and reburial process are political, this not only unsettles the writing of history but raises questions regarding the temporality aspects and sequences of these actions, that is, what the remains of the dead do in relation to reburial and their impact on those involved in the exhumation process.

The significance of the dead body — especially of a national hero — to the survival of a political regime cannot be wished away. It possesses the capacity to upset and destabilize social order or even evoke a variety of understandings across the social-political spectrum. A case in point is the Malawi government’s decision to rebury the country’s founding president Kamuzu Banda in a mausoleum. The action was part of President Bingu wa Mutharika’s strategy to win hearts and secure the support of Banda’s ethnic group, the Chewa of central Malawi.

The suggestion to rebury Jomo Kenyatta at Ichaweri, therefore, is not meant to bring dignity to the deceased or closure to his family.

It has also been argued that the burial of former Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe at his rural home in Zyimba — instead of at Heroes Acre in the capital Harare — denied President Mnangagwa the opportunity to legitimize his leadership and benefit from the prestige of the dead.

However, unlike Heroes Acre in Harare, Heroes Corner at Uhuru Gardens is not a cemetery but a symbolic area that features the names of Kenya’s heroes and heroines for the remembrance and preservation of the nation’s history. Photos of past and present national heroes and literature on Kenya’s history are part of the materials being considered for inclusion at Heroes Corner. Any consideration of relocating the corpses of deceased heroes and heroines to Uhuru Garden will open up a whole can of worms with the families of the deceased, and in terms of culture and the law.

What is emerging through this debate on the reburial/relocation of the mausoleum is how this narrative is linked to attempts to recast the past, connecting the history of the reburied with the temporality of convalescing and reconstructing the nation. Jomo Kenyatta’s case raises questions about his life as president and the role of reburial and memorial practices in producing a historical narrative around the corpse of the founding president, pointing to how reburial can be a politically contested issue.

The contestation clearly indicates that Kenya’s founding president, Jomo Kenyatta, is an irreplaceable figure in the sense that his remains convey a complicated legacy of the struggle for independence that cannot be erased from history.

Gedi was a thriving city-state, then one day everyone just packed and left.

From the look of things, the people of Gedi woke up one day and left. All 2500 of them. The problem is, we don’t know who they were, and why they left a perfect city behind.

It probably started in the city center, a core of mega-structures separated from the rest of the city by its own wall. Within this inner wall, the Sultan and his nobles packed up all their things and led the way out. They emptied their safes, had their servants and slaves pack everything, and started the journey through the Arabuko Sokoke forest. The middle class living just beyond that inner wall did the same. Then the peasants followed, tugging their meagre possessions, leaving their mud-walled homes in the background.

We don’t even know if they made it to wherever they were going. But we know they were enterprising, organized, rich, and Muslim. That’s pretty much it.

At a time that saw many wars among and for other city states, Gedi was isolated in the middle of a thick coastal forest. Built over 45 acres cut into the forest, it had an outer perimeter wall marketing the edges of the city, and an inner wall protecting an urban core with bigger houses, and an imposing mosque. This inner wall seems to have been built purely to separate the wealthy and powerful from everyone else. While the core was built entirely from coral stones, the homes of the poor outside were mud-thatched houses. So while the coral walls mostly survived, the peasants’ homes all but disappeared.

But there was a masterplan. All the houses are single-storey and built with coral and limestone. At least those ones in the rich areas. Each had a medieval safe in their structure, only accessible through a trapdoor. Even more interesting were the indoor bathrooms with drains, overhead basins for flush toilets.

The urban plan was detailed, with all the streets laid out in a grid pattern complete with a drainage system throughout the core of the city.

From the look of things, business was done in the courtyards. This economy was sustained by trade, fishing, metalworking and pottery production. The currency was cowrie shells, and the wares were pretty much anything they could get their hands on. Archeological finds include a pair of Spanish scissors, an Indian iron lamp, Chinese pottery, and Venetian beds. Hell, there’s even an iron box!

Then twice, once in the 1500s and in the 1700s, the people of this great city simply abandoned it. The second time, no one ever came back.

Save a few more details, that’s about all we know so far about the ancient civilization that built Gedi. Everything else is a theory or an exposition.

The problem starts with the fact that there is no Gedi in available records or even local folklore. No one even knows what the people of Gedi called it, because the few written records available on site are inscriptions on tombs. One simply has the date AH 802 (AD 1399), which means that by then it was big enough to host someone important enough to need such a tomb. Gedi is missing in Portuguese records yet they ruled just 15kms away for a century. It’s not in Swahili records, or Arab ones. The Giriama who have lived near it for centuries left it untouched, believing it was haunted. So, until the 1920s, it stayed that way, subservient only to nature herself.

At least one theory suggests that the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama did mention Gedi as Quelimani, but that place is a seaport further down, in Mozambique, near the Rio dos Bons Sinais (River of Good Signs). For it to be Gedi, there would have had to be a river nearby that dried up.

There is another theory that whoever occupied the city’s position in the 13th century built atop a much older civilization. This would (sort of) explain the choice of location, if only it was supported by evidence and perhaps clear indications why it was a good spot (beyond near an ancient coral reef). Another theory suggests Gedi was in fact once a port city, perhaps early in its life. It would be like the Sumerian city of Ur in Iraq, meaning it got further and further away from the ocean as water levels receded.

That would mean Gedi should in fact be 5,000 years and not 700 years as we’ve always thought. But even if it isn’t that old, the people of Gedi still had access via Mida Creek, which is nearby.  The broadwater inlet would have served as a seaport for the people of Gedi, Kirepwe Island and Temple Point.

But if we can’t figure out who built it and why, perhaps we can fare better with why they eventually left after four centuries? Nope. Not at all.

There are very few reasons why a civilization would abandon a city. It could have been a plague, an invasion, receding water levels or a drying up of key resources. But Gedi, unlike many other abandoned Swahili city states, has no proof of any of these. In fact, it seems as if its people just up and left for some reason known only to them.

So this is where theories go from bland to absolute crazy.

The first archeologist on site in the 1920s, James Kirkman, theorized that they abandoned it because of a looming invasion. Gedi was first sacked by an army from Mombasa in 1530, which was at war with Malindi. At the end of that century, a Turkish privateer called Ali Bey landed and disrupted things even further. Then in 1589, a marauding army called the Zimba was making its way up from southern Africa. The Simba launched a battle for Mombasa which ended in a genocide of the Swahili population. The Portuguese destroyed them near Malindi, around the same time Gedi died down (the first time).

A new town wall was built, and the town structures and streets repaired. It was never the same again.

But that wouldn’t explain why it was abandoned two centuries later. The exit in the 17th century was most likely because Portuguese exit from Malindi meant there was no more protection from the Oromo of Somalia. Gedi is the Oromo word for “precious”: one theory has it that it could be because it was in such a lush place, and the other is that it was the name of the Oromo king who made it there.

The problem though, is that there’s no proof of a war or skirmish of any kind. The walls and coral houses seem intact but for the wear and tear of abandonment. It also doesn’t explain why the Giriama, also fleeing Oromo invasions in Somalia, landed here. Perhaps these two stories are interconnected, because the Oromo invasions continued much further south.

A leading theory is that the people of Gedi fled because of receding water levels in their wells. All the wells in the ruins seem to have been deepened over time. Lack of drinkable water would be enough of a motivation to abandon a city, especially one with in-house toilets. Another less plausible theory is that it was the Black Plague in some form. But epidemics are merciless assassins, and the people would have been too frightened to have time to bury their dead. Perhaps there are mass graves lying somewhere within the forest around it. At least one excavation found a mass grave with infant remains, but that’s just about it.

Even with any of these, we don’t know who built it. Were they Swahili, Arabs, Phoenicians or a medieval civilization we haven’t even found evidence of yet?

Whoever it was that built Gedi, they woke up one day and disappeared without a trace.