A Chinese From Kenya

Under the category of "Isn't this cool?" a clever Kenyan girl has finagled herself a scholarship to study in China. The girl claims she is the descendent of Chinese sailors shipwrecked in Kenya six hundred years ago from the fleet of Zheng Ho. These sailors converted to Islam and intermarried with the locals. I'd imagine her claim is true; after six hundred years, probably everyone in the area is a descendent of those sailors. The story represents a neat little intersection of two histories little known in the West. One of these is the tale of the great sailing fleets of Zheng Ho, who roved the Indian Ocean on voyages of trade and diplomacy, finally brought to western eyes by the great Joseph Needham. The second history is that of the Arab city states the dotted the coast of eastern Africa from the Horn of Africa down to what is now Mozambique. These states did quite a bit of trade with China and India:

When the Portuguese arrived in East Africa at the end of the 15th century they found the Swahili to be an urbanised culture, with trading links stretching from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to China. Mosques and tombs were decorated with Chinese porcelain, the rich wore robes of Indian cotton and Chinese silk, and the city of Kilwa even minted its own coins.

I used to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, and have seen the beautiful Chinese porcelains in the small museum in the old city-state of Gedi south of Lamu, where the girl in the story is from (kudos to Simon World for spotting this story).

[China][Kenya]