Travel: Chai in Kenya

Mackinnon Road Mosque

More than 50 languages around the world – from Hindi to Arabic to Swahili – share a common word for chai, or tea. Here in Kenya, which grows tea in abundance in the lush Kericho highlands, chai is served milky and sweet. Unlike the common U.S. version – actually an Indian spiced chai masala – it is simply black tea, a remnant of Kenya’s colonial past.

Tea first sailed with the merchants of the British East India Company to England in the 1700s, and then onward to its colonies. It flowed to Kenya through India, along with a stream of enterprising laborers who came to earn their fortune on the colonial frontier.

We’re in Kenya for both business and pleasure, visiting family and shooting a dozen Kenyan mosques for a calendar celebrating their unique cultural heritage.

Over 30,000 Indian laborers – mostly Punjabi Muslims – crossed the Indian Ocean to Kenya in the early 1900s to build the British a railway deep into the African interior. Though Islam had been introduced on the coast long before by Arab and Indian traders, who had been plying the monsoon winds for millennia, this wave of migrants helped give rise to mosques across Kenya.

We shared our first cup of chai with Musa Ahmed, third generation caretaker of Seyyid Baghali’s tomb at Mackinnon Road Mosque, where the railway sets off from the sea. Baghali, a Punjabi foreman in the railroad’s early days, was renowned for feats of strength and his tomb beside the tracks became a destination for travellers. Today, a beautiful mosque and shady compound offer a welcome respite from the dusty road to the coast.

Two hours further on, the Badala mosque rises above the port of Mombasa. The Badalas, seafarers by trade, were some of the first Sunnis on the scene in East Africa; it was a Badala pilot in 1498 that showed the Vasco da Gama the sea-route from Malindi to India.

As we wound our way through the maze-like streets of Mombasa’s Old Town at sunrise, we were welcomed at Badala with tea, of course, and hot chapattis, rolled and fried in the street. We sipped steaming tea on stone steps in the early morning stillness, before the narrow lanes come alive with their age-old dust and bustle and clatter.

Before my cup was finished, my Swahili-speaking husband had already befriended the mosques’ old men who, pleased their building was chosen, shouted for neighbours and doled out advice. In the end, we took one of my favorite photos from the rooftop of a gracious neighbour, as the sun set the mosque aglow and turned the clouds to shards of gold.

Badalla Mosque, Mombasa