This book is about the city of Lamu, and about an urban society living in it ; Prof. Romero calls

1Re-introducing the “ People Without History “: African HistoriographiesE.S. Atieno OdhiamboRice UniversityIntroduction It has become fashionable to think of continents, communities, identities, belonging, tradition, heritage andhome as imagined, invented or created entities. The idea of Africa has been tantalizing to the West sinceHomer imagined the flight of the Greek gods from mount Olympus to Africa, there to feast with theblemishless Ethiopians. In the fifteenth century a Papal Bull imagined Africa as a terra nullius and proceeded to divide it between Christian Spain and Portugal. The English poet Jonathan Swift imagined a yon Afriquewhere geographers were wont to fill the blank spaces with elephants for want of towns. The partition of Africa at the Berlin West Africa Conference in 1884 – 1885 carved out Africa to European powers ostensibly becausethe continent had an ignoble history of slave trade and slavery which could only be stamped out throughEuropean colonization. Thus the former citizens and subjects of African kingdoms and of stateless communitieswere dubbed as the peoples without history. Instead it was asserted that there was only the history of Europeansin Africa. European authorship from Hegel down to H. R. Trevor- Roper asserted that Africa constituted a blankdarkness, and “ darkness was no suitable subject for history” [Trevor – Roper 1966:9] The colonial period was atime of distortion through power: “power was used to force ...