Dhow Itineraries: The Making of a Shadow Economy in the Western Indian Ocean

A shadow looms large over the western Indian Ocean. This shadow has a haunting presence, lurking in the waters that lap the shores of East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, appearing in moments of intense tension in the international order, and at other times disappearing, biding its time as the soothing rhythms of the monsoon winds lull trade and life along the littoral into routine. However, every now and then, the figure of the shadow, violence, becomes visible in most spectacular forms. Events in East Africa such as the attacks at Garissa University College on April 2, 2015, and Westgate Mall in Nairobi on September 21, 2013, the bombing of an Israeliowned hotel in Mombasa in 2002, and al-Qaeda's attacks on American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, have brought into sharp relief the region's long entanglements with the so-called global war on terror. On other shores across the Indian Ocean, the siege of Mumbai, India, by armed gunmen on November 26, 2008, implicated mobility in the Indian Ocean in large-scale violence, as reports indicated that the maritime movement of weapons and people were crucial in planning these attacks.¹

Amid these events, governments and media have assumed that arms and militants can move easily across the Indian Ocean, especially on wooden sailing vessels, or dhows that have historically traversed the region. Dhow networks have also been implicated in funding the long, protracted conflict in Somalia. Reports by the United Nations Security Council's Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea indicate that dhows were used in the charcoal trade from Somalia, this trade being controlled by al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based militant insurgent group with links to al-Qaeda.² Since then, the UN and international authorities have assumed that dhow circuits converge with financing for terrorism.

While dhows have become sites of suspicion for government and international authorities, scholarly literature on the Indian Ocean largely assumes that the dhow trade declined with the discovery of oil in the Persian Gulf in the 1950s.³ Yet, today, dhows continue to be used for long-distance trade across the Indian Ocean. Vessels such as the vahan (as shown in fig. 1), a modern, mechanized rendition of the kotia, a type of dhow, continue to be built in Kutch in western India. Mechanized dhows from Kutch, the United ArabEmirates (UAE), Iran, and Pakistan still ply old Indian Ocean routes, going where container ships cannot or will not go. For instance, Kutchi dhows continued to visit ports across the Persian Gulf even during the Gulf Wars.⁴ Since 1991, dhows have found an economic niche in Somalia, where they have been a crucial mode of shipping ever since the collapse of the central government. These dhows became targets for pirates operating off the coast of Somalia between 2005 and 2011, where they were hijacked to be used as "motherships" for larger and more profitable targets such as oil tankers and container ships.⁵ What remains understudied is how these dhow circuits have been caught up in the global war on terror, especially in the context of recent developments in Somalia.

Figure 1.

A Kutchi vahan at Mombasa's Old Port, 2011. Photograph by the author.

In October 2011, the Kenya Defense Force (KDF) and later, the forces of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) began a military invasion into Somalia looking to suppress al-Shabaab, the group allegedly responsible for the increasing insecurity within Kenya's borders. One of the prime targets in this "Operation Linda Nchi" (literally, "Operation Protect the Nation"), was the port city of Kismayu, long considered to be an al-Shabaab stronghold, and the main source of revenue for the group. A 2011 report by the United Nations Security Council's Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea states that revenues from Kismayu and secondary ports such as Merka and Baraawe generated between $35 million and $50 million for al-Shabaab, of which at least $15 million was based on charcoal and sugar...