The Islamisation of the Digo made them the only Mijikenda people with a Muslim majority. It did not start with a conquering army or a royal decree. It started with individuals who met Islam through trade, kinship, famine and illness, and then chose to rebuild their lives around it. Abdallah Mwapodzo of Diani is one of the clearest examples we have. He came to Islam in a time of crisis. He still kept faith with his village, and that village was where he planted the new religion.
Almost everything known about him comes from the historian David Sperling. Between 1967 and 1987 Sperling recorded the memories of Diani elders, and he checked them against Kenya National Archives files. The account below follows his work closely.
The Mwanatsi of Kaya Diani
Mwapodzo was born at Ukunda around 1840 with the name Chivoyero Mwapodzo. His father was Mwakulenje Podzo.
His future was set by his mother's line. Kaya Diani had been founded in the late 17th or early 18th century by Mwalela Bawa of the Akinalela clan, who had come from Kaya Dzombo. The leadership of the kaya then passed down through Mwalela Bawa's matrilineal descendants. Across the Digo kayas, the mwanatsi ("son of the land") led the kaya's ceremonies. He sat at the head of the ngambi, the council of elders, and was almost always chosen by matrilineal descent from the founding clan.
So Chivoyero did not rise to office by election. He came from Ukunda to inherit it from his maternal uncle, Mwatsavua. Diani tradition dates this to the reign of Sayyid Majid of Zanzibar, which means sometime between 1856 and 1870. He became the seventh mwanatsi of Kaya Diani. The six before him had not been Muslims.
Conversion in a Time of Famine
His father often visited relatives in Mombasa, and these trips gave the young man his first contact with town life and with Muslims. The turning point came with the Mwakisenge famine of 1884–85. Father and son went to stay with Digo relatives at Takaungu, north of Mombasa, who were already Muslims. There both of them caught smallpox. Mwakulenje Podzo died. His son, in the words of a Diani elder interviewed in 1967, "was cured and became Abdallah." When he came home after the famine he was a Muslim, and he "was speaking Swahili", which at that time marked a man who dealt regularly with the towns.
Others in Diani may have converted before him. But those earlier converts either moved away to Mombasa or barely practised the faith. Mwapodzo was the first who lived as a Muslim in the village and drew others after him. That is why Diani remembers him as its first Muslim.
A Convert Who Stayed
Sperling's central finding about the southern Mijikenda is that, from the 1850s on, Digo converts usually stayed in their home villages while centring their religious life as Muslims on the town. Earlier converts had moved to the Swahili towns and left their communities behind. Mwapodzo shows the new pattern almost perfectly.
He kept trading in Mombasa and is said to have visited Zanzibar. Yet he remained mwanatsi and kept leading the ceremonies of Kaya Diani. Elders remembered his prayers for rain as especially effective. People brought him goats, chickens and other animals to sacrifice at the kaya prayers. For him, being Muslim and being the ritual head of the kaya were not two lives to choose between.
He also opened Diani to the wider Muslim world. In the mid-1880s and 1890s Muslim traders began to settle at Diani. They sold fish, dates, beads and cloth, bought coconuts and tobacco, and supplied grain in the famine years. When they went inland to buy tobacco, Mwapodzo gave them an escort. Several of them settled at Diani Mwaroni, where he lived. One of them, Mbega, a freed slave, was his friend. Mwapodzo was also a friend of Shaykh Mbaruk bin Rashid, the Mazrui leader at Gasi.
The Mwaroni Mosque
For years Diani had no mosque. Its few Muslims went to Gasi or Tiwi for Friday prayers, or prayed inside small enclosures of palm fronds. For the 'Id festivals, men "like Abdallah Mwapodzo" walked to Mombasa. They spent the night on the way at Pungu with Muhammad Mwaganyuma, an early convert there.
Around 1907, as the number of Muslims grew, Mwapodzo built the first mosque at Diani, the Mwaroni Mosque, near his home. It was made of mud and poles under a palm-thatch roof. Its first Imam was Shehe Baimba, a Gunya (Bajuni) trader who had come selling beads and mirrors and offered to teach. Later Mwapodzo's nephew, Hamisi Mwaramunda, won the post in competition with other candidates. Diani remembered the mosque as being "of the Akinalela", the founding clan of the kaya.
After the First World War more mosques followed: the Mwamambi Mosque in 1920 and the Mvumoni Mosque in 1922. Around 1927 the people of Diani cleared the bush around the ancient Kongo Mosque, and in 1932 Shaykh Mwinyikombo opened it with a great maulid. By 1920 at least five of the seventeen members of Diani's ngambi were Muslims.
The Colonial Headman
The British appointed Mwapodzo Headman of Diani, and he held the post until his death. By 1916 a colonial report already called him "very old" and noted that he had been excused from attending Council meetings. He died in 1923. On 10 July 1923 the District Commissioner, H. E. Lambert, recorded in his tour diary that Abdallah Mwarandu had been chosen Headman in his place.
His working life thus ran from kaya leadership before colonial rule into British indirect rule. Sperling found that Digo conversions reached "a kind of crescendo by the end of the 1920s", in the years just after his death.
Other Early Digo Islamic Pioneers
Mwapodzo was part of a wider generation. Sperling's research also records:
Hamisi Mwapodzo of Pungu. He is a different man with a similar name. He became Muslim around 1870 and, with Muhammad Mwaganyuma, built the first Pungu mosques in the 1890s.
Muhammad Mwaganyuma of Pungu, son of Ali Ganyuma, who was already a Muslim by 1855. Muhammad's son Mwalimu Ali studied at Mtanganyiko and became the first Imam of the Pungu Mosque and a teacher of converts' children.
Mwinyihaji wa Bwika, senior elder of Tiwi, died 1913. Elders in other villages remembered him as the man who began inheritance according to Islamic law among the Digo.
Omari Mwakikweza, son of Mwanaphyori Chikpweza, an early convert from Diani who moved to Mombasa. Omari came to be regarded as head of the Digo Muslims there.
Sulayman Abdallah Mwakuaza, Imam of the Mkunguni Mosque at Tiwi. As far as is known, he was the first Digo, and the first Mijikenda, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was seen landing at Jidda but never returned home.
Legacy
Abdallah Mwapodzo left no monument and no named institution that we know of. He did leave a pattern. A Digo could become a Muslim, keep his place at the head of the kaya, pray for rain at the kaya and lead his village to Friday prayers. Islam eventually became the majority religion of the Digo south of Mombasa. The Mwaroni Mosque he built, Diani's first, is where that change began in his village.
Do not confuse him with Hamisi Mwapodzo of Pungu. The spellings of the family names here follow Sperling, and Diani elders may write them differently.