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Effectively, Lamu old Town is one huge Museum, but within the town, three buildings are officially designated as museums:

1. the early 19th century fort
2. the German Post Office, established on 22nd November 1988
(the first on the East African coast), which operated for only three
years
3. the Swahili House

Lamu Museums are located in the Lamu Archipelago on the N. Coast, one of the most beatiful & serene locations on the African continent and a World Heritage Site

The isolated island, with streets so narrow such that donkeys provide almost the only mode of transport makes the town quite unique.

Historical Background:

The construction of Lamu Fort commenced in 1813, shortly after Lamu’s victory over Pate and Mombasa in the battle of Shela. This major building task was reputedly undertaken with the cooperation of Seyyid Said, the Sultan of Oman who was then cultivating a promising new alliance with Lamu.

Upon its completion in about 1821 the fort marked the Southern corner of the traditional stone town and served as a garrison for Baluchi soldiers sent by the Sultan of Oman. Its protective presence encouraged new development around it. Thus confident Merchants erected the 19th century shopfront and buildings. By 1900 the Fort had become the image of the community, a role which it still plays to date.

It served as a prison from 1910 to 1984 to both the British colonial regime and the Kenya government, before it was handed over to the National Museums of Kenya in 1984. Efforts to turn the Fort into a museum were started with technical and financial assistance from Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). With its inception as a museum with environmental conservation as its general theme; Lamu Fort is basically a community center for the people of Lamu old town.

The courtyard is available for weddings, meetings and theatre productions. At the ground floor there is a permanent exhibition which is divided into three major sections
(i) Marine
(ii) Freshwater
(iii) Terrestrial.
Each is further subdivided into its different ecosystem.

Lamu Museum
The many exhibits on display represent the material culture of the various coastal peoples in the context in which the items are used. Upstairs there are administrative offices; laboratories, a workshop and a restaurant named Mazingira (swahili word for Environment) at the rooftop.

Lamu fort thus, has already acquired a strong identity as a World heritage centre.

Lamu Fort is a massive two storey stone structure located in Lamu Old town, Lamu District. It lies about 70 meters inland at the main jetty within Grid Reference 114 498 on the Lamu 1:50,000, Kenya Survey Map sheet No. 180/1.

LAMU-GERMAN POST OFFICE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
German nationals Clement Denhardt and G. A. Fisher first made contact with the Lamu hinterland in the late 1870s. They soon struck a friendship with Ahmed Abdullah Simba, the Sultan of Witu, who at the time was having problems with the rulers of Lamu and Zanzibar and so welcomed a new ally. Shortly afterwards, Witu became a German protectorate.

This building was the first German Post Office ever established along the East African coast. The Post office was established on November 22nd 1888 by the Germans, led by Clement Denhardt. The communications and trade contacts for the German Protectorate in Witu could at the time be served through Lamu, a well-established town with links to the outside world.

The Post office operated for more than two years before its closure on March 3rd 1891 after the withdrawal of the German settlement in Witu.

German Post Office Museum is located in Lamu old town, Lamu district in Coast Province.
LAMU FORT HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The construction of Lamu Fort commenced in 1813, shortly after Lamu’s victory over Pate and Mombasa in the battle of Shela. This major building task was reputedly undertaken with the cooperation of Seyyid Said, the Sultan of Oman who was then cultivating a promising new alliance with Lamu.

Upon its completion in about 1821 the fort marked the southern corner of the traditional stone town and served as a garrison for Baluchi soldiers sent by the Sultan of Oman. Its protective presence encouraged new development around it, for example it was at this time that some Lamu merchants erected the 19th century shopfront and buildings. By 1900 the Fort had become a central to the community, a role which it still plays today.

It served as a prison from 1910 to 1984 to both the British colonial regime and the Kenya government, before it was handed over to the National Museums of Kenya in 1984. Efforts to turn the Fort into a museum were started with technical and financial assistance from Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). With its inception as a museum with environmental conservation as its general theme; Lamu Fort is basically a community center for the people of Lamu old town.

The courtyard is available for weddings, meetings and theatre productions. At the ground floor there is a large exhibition space, which most recently hosted the first Environmental Museum in Africa. Upstairs there are administrative offices, laboratories, a workshop and a rooftop with impressive views over the town. There is also an excellent conference facility that is available for hire.

Lamu Fort is a massive two storey stone structure located in Lamu Old town, Lamu District. It lies about 70 meters inland at the main jetty within Grid Reference 114 498 on the Lamu 1:50,000, Kenya Survey Map sheet No. 180/1.

This museum gives visitors a glimpse of the traditional setup of a Swahili home

SWAHILI HOUSE MUSEUM
Swahili House
Architecture
Houses are usually oblong and built around a small open courtyard. The houses in the few remaining very traditional (and in the recent past poorer) towns such pate, are single- story building, but in a wealthier and crowded town, such as Lamu, most are two-storied and many have three stories, the structurally safe limit.
A story is typically added when the occupying family expands by the marriages of its daughters, residence for the first marriages women being uxorilocal. In some grander houses the ground floor was occupied by slaves and used as warehouses, and the family members lived above. Drainage is an important consideration: houses have flat roofs and house drains send the often heavy rainfall into the streets drains, which empty into the sea. The traditional Swahili stone-built houses are complex structures, and here is the only barest outline, to show the house as part of a wide symbolic schema that lies at the base of Swahili notion of purity, ancestry, and status.
The axis of a typical house runs north and south. The entrance to the courtyard is properly at the north end and the owners private rooms are at the south end. The vagaries of the street layouts mean that a staircase from the front door may twist and change directions so as to end up in the right place. The northern end is referred to as upande wa kibla ( the side of the kibla) , the northern and sacred end of a mosque. Houses and mosque should have the same orientations.

Open Courtyard
The traditional house is a very private place, its outside walls having only holes for ventilation. Light comes from the open courtyard. The entrance is through a large seat-lined porch (daka) raised a foot or two above the street, with a double wooden door traditionally elaborately carved and decorated with geometric or floral and leaf patterns and Quranic inscriptions. The double door opens directly onto an inner porch ( tekani) on the ground floor; in two-story houses one half of the door opens onto the inner porch and the other half onto a flight of stairs leading up one side of the courtyard to the upper floor. The porches are the limits of entrance to casual visitors. The inner porch gives onto the main inner courtyard (kawanda) , a word used for any open working place.
In larger houses, at least there is a well in the courtyard, and a bathroom and toilet in a small room off one of the corners. The main rooms are set to the south of the courtyard: in lamu rain almost never comes from the north. In single- story houses there is a typically a guest room (sabule) directly off the courtyard on the northern side of the inner porch, so that it is far from the main living quarters into which a guest cannot look. In larger houses the sabule is typically at the top of a staircase separate from the main family staircase, and has its own bathroom. In the absence of guests ( who are usually visiting kin or trading partners) , the head of the family may often sleep in the sabule, particularly when his wife has close female kin staying with her; they sleep in the main bedroom, the ndani. There is also typically a staircase leading up the north wall to the roof. Formerly slaves would sleep under the staircases, the space known as sarambi.

Guest room
On the southern side of the courtyard, facing north and Mecca, lie the living rooms of the owning family, opening directly off the courtyard. There are no separate livings, eating, or sleeping rooms (beds are merely placed in curtained alcoves (ngao) when needed). The rooms are arranged in a series of galleries (misana, single msana) set transversely between the east and west walls. Each inner gallery, farther back from the courtyard, has its floor set a step higher than the preceding level. Doorways are set in the intervening walls mark them from the courtyard and each other, so that to a visitor each set higher and is darker than the nearer one. There are formal ways of being invited farther into the interior of the house. The first of these galleries is a daytime area mainly for sitting and conversing; this is the msana wa tini, the “lower gallery”.
Behind, except in smaller houses, is a second area, msana wa yuu, the “upper gallery”. Both galleries have high painted poles at the ends for the curtains of the sleeping alcoves. Beyond the upper gallery is the most private area, the ndani, “inside” (occasionally called the msana wa kati, “central gallery”), where the wife and husband sleep. This is par excellence the wife’s room. In grander houses these galleries are extremely high and cool, and often have small window-niches at the ends, in which are placed pieces of porcelain for show.

Behind the ndani are the choo, the bathroom-cum-toilet of the ndani, and a smaller space or room, the nyumba ya kati (center of the house), sometimes called chumba cha kati (central room). The bathroom is usually on the left side facing from the courtyard, the nyumba ya kati on the right: the left is polluting, the right not. Each may have its own doorway from the ndani. The latter room has (or has had) two main functions.

Kitchen
It is properly the place for childbirth, the preparation of corpses, and the seclusion of widows; and it was a place for storing the more precious trade good and valuables. It is furnished merely with a bed of the kind called ulili; it may have an exit, a hole blocked with loose removable stones, for passage of the corpse for burial, and a small side door opening to the bathroom so that water can be brought into it easily. This room is found only on the main family floor. The room above is traditionally flat and on it may be a small pent house kitchen (jiko), with its own narrow internal staircase; or the kitchen may be placed in a corner of the courtyard below.
A father should give his daughter at her first marriage her own separate living accommodation linked to his own: either a story may be added, each story occupied by a separate elementary family or he may build or buy an adjoining house. When this is across a street, a bridge (wikio) is built to link the two houses: women can pass from one to the other without being seen from the street below. The working definition of a separate accommodation for each family is that it has its own bathroom-cum-toilet. water comes from wells and cisterns. The toilets are dry pits, vertical ducts set inside the walls; so long as they are kept dry, they are thick and lime-washed, and the ceilings are very high: these houses are cool and relatively dry even though the coastal climate is often very hot and humid.

Bedroom
These houses are not merely “machines for living in”: they are as much symbolic as technical structures. They represent the performance, stability, credit-worthiness, and purity of owning lineage. These qualities are expressed both in the solidarity and layout of parts of a house, and in its external and internal decoration. The outside walls are plain and undecorated, although properly lime-washed, except for the curved outer doors. These imposing gates cut off the outside public world from the private family world within and symbolize the disdain of patrician owners for all others of different rank and ancestry. The internal decoration may be extremely elaborate. There is a marked increase in privacy from the outer porch at one end to the main wife’s room, the ndani, at the other with the nyumba ya kati even more secluded behind that. This is associated not merely with the seclusion of women but essentially with the ndani as the ritual center of the house.
The first two galleries are separated by internal walls, each having two door ways; the wall of the ndani has only one central doorway, so that its interior cannot be seen from the first gallery or the courtyard. Walls have rows of wooden pegs for hanging rugs tapestries. Walls pillars and parts of the walls, as well as door jambs and lintels, are curved and decorated in plaster. The back walls of the msana wa yuu and particularly of the ndani are set with rows niches, vidaka or zidaka(diminutive forms of daka, the outer porch of the house), sent into the plaster. These inches are arched and so shaped that their roof are sloped higher at the back, so that the observer cannot see the join between the roof and back; the backs are also slightly angled relative to one another, so that there is only a single central place from which the entire wall panel can be viewed in proper perspectives. The niches are for displaying porcelain, manuscripts and wedding materials, copies of the Quran and other treasures. Beneath the rows of niches, in the center, is typically a blank rectangle where is placed a bed on which a bride is presented on her wedding. The observer stand in the upper gallery, from which they can best see her seated and surrounded by the beauty of the niches and their contents. In the past rooms occupied by slaves were not plastered but those occupied by free persons had to be, even if they lacked niches: plaster is associated with purity.

A late 19th-century waterfront manison housing temorary exhibits about the history of the town.

The building was bought from the Bohra community for 2,000 English Pounds after a longer period of occupation by the Medical Department who had used the building to serve as the Malindi Native Civil Hospital. The exact date of construction is not known but when Thomas Alfree was buying the property from the Bohra community, as discussed in his undated autobiography, even the oldest Bohra who was then more than ninety years old could not remember when it was built. We can, nonetheless suggest a date of construction perhaps the last quarter of the 19th century, a time bracket that saw these type of building style fashionable especially in the old towns of Lamu and Mombasa.
Thomas Alfree bought the house from a grant to the Marine Division of the Fisheries Department for purposes of establishing a Kenya Marine Fisheries Station in Malindi. Unfortunately, Alfree in his autobiography is silent on the date he signed the lease agreement of 99 years but definitely must have been during the first half of British Colonial period in Kenya.
After occupation by Fisheries department, the building became the office for Kenya Wildlife Services before it was handed over to the National Museums of Kenya in 1999. On 10th May 2004 the building opened its doors to the general public as Malindi Museum.

Description of the Building
The building is a charming old double – storey structure with a roof terrace covered with roof tiles and is situated along the seafront, on an excellent site, some few meters from Malindi jetty and Fish Market. It is a veranda building, a building type of the 19th century with features identical to the Malindi District Commissioner?s Building. It is rectangular measuring Ca. 12.9 x 18.7 metres and 12 meters to the highest point of the roof. The perimeter walls are ca. 65 cm thick made of plaster over lumps of coral set in lime mortar.

The building has four entrances. Two of them are on the east façade reached through a colonnade of 5 rounded pillars on square pedestal. One entrance is fitted with a Gujerati 9and the other with a Swahili carved door. The third entrance is on the northern façade at the N/W quadrant reached through a flight of a masonry stairway. It has a small trap door of the Indian type serving both the ground and the first floor of the building. The fourth entrance, exclusively for the first floor, is on the southern façade and is reached through an exterior wooden staircase, which evidently is a secondary addition to the building. The door to this entrance is simple and opens onto a balcony supported by the rounded columns covered with a roof resting on dressed wooden supports.

From the balcony, a door leads into the first floor unit through a corridor with two rooms on both side organized in such a way that they are directly opposite one another with beautifully carved Bajuni doors.
At the back of the corridor is another door opening onto the back of the first floor level where a landing to the terrace, circulation space and toilet facilities are organised. From the landing there are two staircases; one leading up to the original terrace (now the library); the second staircase leads down to the ground floor or out of the building through a side entrance organized at the N/W quadrant of the north façade, discussed as the third entrance above.

Onversely, the original plan might have divided the building into two separate units all entered through the front facade. The ground floor unit was perhaps exclusively through the Indian door which opened onto three parallel long rooms one behind the other (probably used as a shop and store); while the first floor unit was through the Swahili door opening onto a corridor of two room deep leading to a masonry staircase and up to the first floor of the building and the terrace (the residential area). If this was the situation, then the idea that the exterior wooden staircase and the two doors along the south façade being secondary addition to the building is valid.

The museum currently houses temporary exhibitions. The museum also doubles as an information centre where visitors are able to find more information on attractions and happenings in Malindi. It is all about Malindi under one roof.

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