Heirlooms that connect Indian Ocean cultures centuries apart
Antique collection at the Trade Routes furniture shop in Nairobi, Kenya. The pieces, imported from India, are similar to those brought by Indian Coolies. PHOTO | FRANCO ZAIDI
As Old Nairobi moves up the hill to a reconfigured conurbation of businesses and residences still called Westlands, trade follows the flag. A low-lying shopping mall in Loresho with middle-class aspirations has emerged containing a new emporium of Indian Ocean artifacts. Housed underground, Trade Routes -- part gallery of arcane Indo-Swahili-Somali architecture and art and part museum shop -- contains a wacky collection of curiosities brought together by Kenyans of Hindu and Sikh Panjabi origin.
Here, outside colonialism’s narrow confines, trans-global recovery -- with its wondrous cascade of architecture and history -- revisits Eastern Africa’s Later Golden Age (15th-19th centuries) including its commercial expansion into the southern Silk Road cities of South Asia; the porous boundaries of the known past reinvigorating an era of Arab, African-Swahili, Somali and Indian style that was as aesthetically pleasing as it was philosophically profound.
