ANTHROPOCENE MUSEUM 2.0 | Shimoni Caves of the Enslaved

Exhibited online in the summer of 2021 at The World Around Summit, and in residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This instalment comprised of community engagements with the local Shimoni and Twaka people in Kwale County, Kenya, where we produced a short film, Journal publications in the Architectural Review, April 2021 Issue, titled The Underground, and later in 2023 an exhibition about the site at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark.

In 2020 we travelled 500 kilometres down from Nairobi to the coastal town of Shimoni in Kwale county which sits on the Indian ocean in Kenya. It is a site that holds the little known Shimoni caves of the enslaved and the even less known Three Giant Sisters Caves of refuge. In our research we highlight that the world knows quite a lot about the West African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, but very little about what took place on the East African side. Trade from the East African coast is predominantly understood to have been between the Portuguese, the Arabs and the local Indigenous people, but it has also been linked to the British, who continued to exploit enslaved labour after George III signed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. 

We spoke with the local custodians of the caves in Shimoni and Twaka, who narrated the dark history that was meted out here. The caves were used as holding chambers for ensalved people, while a number of them escaped into the vast coral cave networks to find refuge in the Three Giant Sisters caves several kilometres away. Today this connecting corridor is silted up, leaving lost archaeological evidence of the past. 

The community today imagines a future where they can excavate into the silted networks to uncover evidence of the past and mobilise the disillusioned youth who find it troubling to come to terms with this history. The three-dimensional scans of the cave remain in drawing form and archive awaiting further plans for curation and archaeological exploration to uncover more complex histories within stratigraphy. 

Shimoni slave cave (first 10 Images) & the Three Giant Sisters Cave (last six images)