In the second half of the 19th century the first Digo Muslims had almost nowhere at home to learn their faith. There were no Qur'an schools in Digo villages, and converts went to Mombasa to pray. Ali bin Muhammad Mwaganyuma of Pungu helped to change that. He went away to study, came home, preached in the market while people jeered at him, and kept teaching. His neighbours came to call him simply Mwalimu Ali, "Ali the teacher".
His story comes chiefly from the historian David Sperling, who interviewed Mwalimu Ali's grandsons in the 1980s and traced the family in colonial records.
A Family of Early Converts
Pungu lay near the ferry to Mombasa and was home to Ngare's market, the largest Digo market south of the town, which Baluchi traders frequented.
Ali's grandfather, Ali Ganyuma Mwanrudzu, was the mwanatsi of Kaya Similani. A kaya was a Digo fortified settlement governed by a council of elders (ngambi), and the mwanatsi ("son of the land") was its senior elder, chosen through the mother's line. He had inherited the post from his maternal uncle. Traders had to ask his permission to do business at Pungu. Through them, and through clan relatives already Muslim at Mtongwe, he became a Muslim, perhaps as early as the 1850s, and took the name Ali. He died in about 1865. He was one of the few converts of his time to raise his children as Muslims, telling them, as his great-great-grandson remembered: "If you don't pray, you don't eat." But there was no school for them, and his eldest son, Muhammad Mwaganyuma, is said to have learned something on his own.
Study at Mtanganyiko
During the Mwakisenge famine of 1884–85, Muhammad sent his son Ali to stay with an uncle, Mwinyihamisi Mwandungo, a Digo trader who had settled at Mtanganyiko in the 1870s. Mtanganyiko, north of Mombasa, was then the main centre of Islam among the northern Mijikenda. There Ali studied at the Qur'an school under Omari Ngoma and also under Muhammad bin Ali Mazrui. He also learned falaki, a kind of astrology that claimed to influence events as well as read them.
Jeered in the Market
Back home, Ali went with his father to Ngare's market and preached Islam there. In Sperling's words, "popular reaction was hostile ('he was jeered and shouted down') but this does not seem to have deterred him." He went on preaching, began to teach the children of Digo converts, and became known as Mwalimu Ali. People also came to him for treatment, and he went about treating them.
In the 1890s his father and Hamisi Mwapodzo built the first mosques of Pungu, the Pungu Tuliani Mosque and the Chingbwede Mosque. Mwalimu Ali became the first Imam of the Pungu Mosque. His pupil Saidi bin Hamisi Mwapodzo later built the first mosque at Matuga. Sperling notes that Saidi, unlike "his teacher Mwalimu Ali", did not condemn Digo customs but joined in Digo dances to win acceptance.
Mwalimu Ali was also a man of business. A 1913 list of traders at Pungu includes an "Ali bin Mohamed selling calico and American cloths", probably him, and his grandson said he traded in rubber. In 1914–15 he and his father were among the Digo leaders who applied for land titles.
The Inheritance Case
His most far-reaching act came in the 1920s. Muhammad Mwaganyuma is said to have died in about 1922. Under Digo custom, property passed through the mother's line, and his brother, also named Ali Ganyuma, claimed the estate. Mwalimu Ali refused. As his grandson told it, he said to his uncle: "You have your sons, and Mwaganyuma had his son, who is me. You can't take my father's property."
The elders' council and the court at Kwale decided for the uncle by Digo custom. Mwalimu Ali, helped by his son Shaykh Mwinyi, who had studied some Islamic law, took the case to the Supreme Court of Kenya, which found for him. The uncle then appealed to the Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa, sitting at Kampala. In March 1928 it dismissed the appeal in Ali Ganyuma v. Ali Mohamed, ruling that "Mohammedan Law applies and the estate descends patrilineally."
The ruling divided the Digo. That same year the Local Native Council, the elders' body for the district, asked the government to let Digo custom apply unless a man had left a will. In 1929 the District Commissioner reported that people wanted "to evolve a system of patrilineal inheritance, rather than that the old custom should be done away with by the 'stroke of a pen'". Sperling judges that Mwalimu Ali "persisted in his legal appeal out of religious conviction".
How the Record Survives
No date of birth or death has been found for Mwalimu Ali. Most of what is known comes from his grandsons, Uthman and Ngumi bin Shaykh Mwinyi, from scattered colonial lists and from the law report of his case. His son Shaykh Mwinyi later taught at Msambweni and died at Lungalunga in 1947.
Legacy
Mwalimu Ali was one of the first Digo to study away from home and return to teach his own people. He put up with ridicule to do it, led Pungu's first congregation and taught converts' children. Through his long lawsuit he settled, for the colonial courts, how a Digo Muslim's property should pass, a question the community argued over for years afterwards.