SAND

“Sand is sort of an ocean breather. It makes our ocean look healthy. According to our local indigenous knowledge, sand plays a big role in our ocean.”

Salim is in his mid-50s. He knows the North coast of Kenya and the life with and on the Indian Ocean very well. His family history and the sea-oriented way of life of the Bajuni introduced him to the art of fishing and the rules of the sea at an early age. Today, he is a resident of Malindi, a seaside town, where the Sabaki River joins the ocean, 120 km north-east of Mombasa. When I spoke with him this spring, our conversation centered on the sea and the effects of interfering with it.

Our paths crossed when I reached out to the local fishing community. I had wanted to know more about sand and the town’s coastal zone. Salim is the spokesperson and secretary of the Malindi Beach Management Unit (BMU). He is known for his strong engagement and charisma. Throughout his involvement with the organization, he has met many important figures, for instance Italian businessman and former Formula One boss Flavio Briatore.

We were sitting on a bench overlooking the only designated landing site for local fishers in Malindi. „Nobody can interfere here with us. We did some demonstrations, we fought for it. This area is for the fishers to prepare their boats, their gears, to do their activities.” He recalled past times, in which the water used to reach up to the bench where we were sitting – a difference of 15 meters from where the shoreline is now. Doris Kamuye, the curator in charge of the Malindi National Museums of Kenya (NMK), told me a similar story of the coastline sometimes stretching far into the city. In the last 50 years, she said, the sea in Malindi has receded by more than 500 meters at some points. Increased human activities and sand harvesting upstream River Sabaki are still causing eroding riverbanks and siltation. On walks along the shore, I could literally see the mud, sludge and red silted river water that eventually gets discharged into the ocean. Littoral sand had been washed ashore through wave and wind action and has deposited along the Malindi seafront, resulting in the loss of beach frontage and the question of ownership of the newly gained land.

What might seem as a contradictory trend given globally rising sea levels as an effect of climate change is actually a good example of the complexity and dynamics of shifting shorelines and coastal zones. A dynamic that is often neglected by policies regarding the maintenance and protection of the coastal zone. During fieldwork, I found out that the increasingly unpredictable interplay of sand, sea, and winds is blamed on the construction of a seawall within the riparian zone of the Malindi Marine National Park. The seawall was meant to protect Briatore’s luxury resort. The problem was not sedimentation or erosion per se, as Salim explained, but the permanent infrastructural interference that forces sand to move in unnatural ways, leading to unwanted disturbance.

“They built the wall there to protect the resort, but the impacts went to the other side. It has created erosion on the other side to the Marine Park. You know, the ocean, when the waves come, it needs to ease. Going up and come back. Normally. But if you interfere, it will punish. And that’s also when sand relocates from its area, from its nature, transferred to another place where it is not its nature. Maybe it will move there, it will go cover the fishing grounds, cover the coral garden. So, there is an environmental impact and there is a social impact. A socio-economical. I talked to a lot of people. We did some demonstration during the construction”.

Salim’s voice sounded emotional and vehement at the same time. Whether he was talking about fishing, tourism, infrastructure projects or river sand harvesting, he liked to think of these human activities as interferences with a system that had non-linear implications. This resonates with me: considering the shoreline and the beach as anything but a static entity in the marine environment. Depending on the Monsoon winds, you can observe the deposition of sediments or their erosion along the Kenyan Coast. Many actors, human and non-human, constitute these ecosystems, even in cities, where human planning aims to stabilize shaky matter and soothe the flows of the ocean, the sand, the waves.

I return to Salim’s earlier notion of the sand as the ocean breather. What did he mean by it?

“You know when I say ocean breather, you know sometimes you can see, when the sea is calm, you can sit and see how it plays with the sand. The way it breaks, the sound, the sand, mixed with the waves, that’s why I say it’s an ocean breather. Sand and sea work together to breathe. And I’ve noticed that on those magical islands. I’ve anchored my boat down there. I’ve seen how the ocean behave, how it plays with the sand. It removes the sand, to make this place breathe. It’s also sort of an ocean cleanser. It is cleaning. Whenever it moves, it cleans the coral, the ground. So, it’s playing a major role in making the ocean to look healthier. And I don’t even have a diploma.”