The Landscapes of Slavery in Kenya

Cultural landscapes impacted by slavery and its effects in eighteenth-century Kenya included coastal trading entrepôts, interior caravan trade routes, coastal plantation complexes, European mission stations, freed slave settlements, and runaway slave settlements. Landscapes represent the values, symbols, and meanings that societies have imbued upon them. A cultural landscape is not only a physical place, but also encompasses the memories associated with that space. Studies of such landscapes enable understanding of the histories of peoples, places, and events. This article works to understand how the people who lived in landscapes of slavery in Kenya perceived and interacted with those terrains. Former slaves and their descendants used tangible and intangible elements of landscapes to construct places of memory; these memories not only connect them to the landscapes they presently occupy but also to an imaginary, ancestral homeland that they have never seen.