With every step, the sandy ground under my feet crunches with the sound of discarded plastic. Flimsy shopping bags hang from the branches of skinny trees like colorful bunting, and empty champagne bottles litter the earth. A few meters away, donkeys forage for scraps while a man in a tartan-patterned kikoi empties out a basket of trash onto an ever-growing heap.
I’m at the dune-hemmed back of Lamu’s Shela village, a ritzy island enclave just off Kenya’s northeastern coast, and this informal dump site couldn't feel farther away from the Shela I fell in love with on my first visit almost a decade ago. Like its coterie of famous regulars—supermodels, royals, and members of the modern-day Happy Valley set—I fell hard for Shela’s breezy Swahili villas; the froth of pink bougainvillea behind their weather-beaten walls; and the late-night parties on Manda beach, a short dhow-hop across the Lamu channel.
Over the last few years though, this hedonist hideaway shed some of its wild ways. While the palm-pinned terrace of the Peponi Hotel—a Swahili-tinged Chateau Marmont of sorts and the epicenter of Lamu’s social scene—still fills up with martini-sipping glitterati every night, a new crop of long-time residents and fresh arrivals are eking out a more conscious future for the island they’ve grown so fond of.
Among them is Amha Selassie, a dreadlocked British-Ethiopian agriculture consultant who brought me to this dump site to show me Earth Love, the natural wellness center and regenerative farm he set up during the pandemic. “Lamu might look like a desert, but it can grow magical gardens,” he tells me as we meander between the trash. “People here are sleeping on their resources, I want to show them how important the land can be. Cleaning up is part of getting the magic back.”
After a thorough cleanup, he turned part of the dump site into his permaculture farm, where—in the shade of ancient neem trees—more than 100 plant species grow into an edible jungle of bananas, moringa, eggplants, and passion fruit (saplings and seeds are shared with communities across the island, who Selassie helps set up their own regenerative farms). At the back of the lot, black soldier flies feed on kitchen scraps and grow into wriggling protein for the chickens that fertilize the soil with their droppings. A few steps away, lemongrass and Spanish lime seedlings sprout from cut-open jerrycans. “There’s no such thing as waste,” Selassie says. “Just resources in the wrong place.”
The pandemic spelled a shift for Shela, which, thanks to its lack of strict lockdowns, attracted socialites and cash-flush remote workers from across the globe. “Seemingly half of Notting Hill moved here during those days,” says fashion designer and longtime Lamu resident Anna Trzebinski. “For many, Shela was an eye-opener, a beautiful barometer of how simple life used to be.” I’ve joined Trzebinski on one of her pillow-covered Mozambican dhows—“floating sofas,” she calls them—on an early-morning swim in the mangrove-lined channel that writhes through Manda island. We sip bullet-strong Arabic coffee spiked with ginger and black pepper and snack on sweet dates to cut through the spicy kick. “Those of us who have known and loved Lamu for a long time feel a big sense of responsibility,” she says. “We don’t want people to think this is the next Mykonos or Ibiza.”
Jannah, the hotel she opened late last year (which follows her home-turned-boutique hotel in Nairobi’s leafy Karen suburb, Hemingway’s Eden), reflects that. Spread across two plaster-clad buildings in the labyrinthine heart of Shela, it's a distillation of Trzebinski’s love and respect for the village. From the plush indoor-outdoor penthouse to the airy suites with fully equipped kitchens, Trzebinski furnished each space with made-in-Lamu furniture and ornate zidaka wall carvings. Kenyan art adorns the walls, and while every room is equipped with solar-powered air-conditioning, a gas-guzzling backup generator was intentionally left out. A few doors down, Jannah’s third installment is set to take over a former merchant’s home and will house an outpost of chef Arial Moscardi’s Cultiva (a hot-ticket and devoutly locavore farm and restaurant in Nairobi) when it opens sometime next year.
Days at Jannah move with the rhythm of the village, as the muezzin’s call to prayer filters through the mahogany-framed windows at dawn, and the night’s silence returns just after sunset. There’s no alcohol on the menu, and guests are reminded to dress modestly in respect of Shela’s Islamic ways. While Jannah is now one of Shela’s smartest stays, Trzebinski stresses that it’s still a far cry from bedding down at the Four Seasons. “Hospitality shouldn’t be about ‘me-me-me,’” she says. “It should be transformative, immersive, and connected. Jannah is for people who don’t look for hyper-sanitized travel. It’s slightly out of one’s comfort zone, but that’s when you start growing.”
A similar ethos resonates across the works of other Shela transplants. Zambia-born Jemima Bornman Carr, who grew up along the village’s donkey-trodden alleys since the age of four, recently opened Ikeno, a slow-fashion menswear boutique selling breezy shirts and suits made from upcycled dhow sails and ikat fabric from India—a nod to the ancient trade routes between South Asia and the Swahili coast. During the pandemic, she teamed up with Kenyan jewelry designer Nyambura Wahu (who runs Shela's long-loved African Corner concept store) on a fashion-show fundraiser for Ubunifu, Wahu’s art-focused education project that has now grown into a community-based creative center for disadvantaged youth in Lamu’s Mararani Village.
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I spend the remainder of my time in Lamu aboard NaiSabah (booked via The Ultimate Travel Company), another such sensitive newcomer. Launched at the end of 2023 by Kenya-born conservationist Jeremy Bastard, this three-stateroom Omani dhow takes its guests on multi-night trips around the Lamu archipelago, far beyond the glitz of Shela. Depending on the season, journeys could reach as far as Zanzibar or the pristine coastlines of Kiwayu island near the Somali border. Whichever direction it sails, itineraries include stops at indigenous villages and local non-profits, an extension of the charitable work—wildlife conservation and nomadic education projects—Bastard does on his home turf in northern Kenya. “NaiSabah is a way to go beyond Lamu’s surface,” he tells me over frosty Tusker lagers one afternoon. “It’s about reconnecting with the communities and the environment, letting the wind and tides dictate the flow of each day.”
My route brings me to the gritty coastal outskirts of Lamu Town, East Africa’s oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement, where I meet local dhow builder Ali Skanda. At his boatyard, he draws on the carpentry skills his dhow-building ancestors have passed down for generations to put the spotlight on Lamu’s plastic waste problem. “We saw a cow with 35 kilograms of plastic in his stomach,” he says. “We’ve created a mess in our time, [and] the next generation needs to turn it around—they’re the leaders of tomorrow.” To inspire action, he built The Flipiflopi ndogo, a 30-foot fully functional dhow made sail-to-hull from waste plastic and discarded flip flops. These days, he shares his age-old carpentry skills with a new generation of craftspeople, who create Swahili-style kiti cha enzi chairs, low-slung jauri loungers, and other furniture from recycled plastic collected across the archipelago.
Sailing onward along the Lamu Channel, we glide past mangrove forests and tidal creeks at a honeyed pace. We drop anchor near Lamu Island’s southern tip, from where the following days fill up with the simple joys that brought me to this region in the first place. There are snorkeling trips and fishing expeditions; the catch of which NaiSabah’s chef, Junior, prepares for dinner. We stop for G&T sundowners at a footprint-free beach; drink coconuts straight from the tree; and eschew our aircon-cooled cabins for bedrolls on deck, where gentle swells rock us to sleep under a sky full of stars.
Here, surrounded by wild nature and with the breeze carrying the muezzin’s last lingering syllables from a nearby village, it’s easy to see why Lamu's community strives to fight the inevitable tides of change. “That’s what Lamu does to people,” I recall Trzebinski saying. “You get sucked in and become deeply passionate about it.”