The Bajuni archipelago is the Somalia almost nobody imagines: a chain of low islands of white sand, coastal forest and coral reef stretched out off the lower Juba between Kismayo and the Kenyan border. Koyama, Chovaye, Chula, Chandra, Ngumi and Darakasi are the natural continuation of the Lamu archipelago, on the other side of a border drawn by the British and the Italians in the 1920s that split a single cultural world in two.
That world has a name: the Bajuni, a Bantu people of the Swahili coast, fishermen and sailors, who speak Kibajuni (a dialect of Swahili) and who for centuries lived from the sea, from farming on the islands and from Indian Ocean trade. Today most of them live elsewhere: there are estimated to be some 91,500 Bajuni in Kenya and around 20,500 in Somalia, the result of the exodus the community itself calls “The Troubles”, which followed the collapse of the Somali state in 1991.
This guide does not suggest going. Somalia is at the highest alert level of every foreign ministry, piracy is among the risks explicitly cited by the US Department of State, the British FCDO warns of a significant risk of piracy in the Indian Ocean, and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressly advises against any maritime activity in Somali waters. What follows is the information (geographical, historical and human) needed to understand one of the most beautiful and least documented places in the Horn of Africa.
The Bajuni islands are the northern end of the Swahili world, the same coastal civilisation that produced Lamu, Pate, Zanzibar and Kilwa. Their inhabitants, the Bajuni, are a Bantu coastal people with Somali, Arab, Persian and Southeast Asian influences, who speak Kibajuni, a dialect of Swahili, and who traditionally lived from fishing, seafaring, farming and blacksmithing, along a strip of settlements and islands that ran from Kismayo to the Lamu archipelago. In the Middle Ages the islands were linked to the trade networks of the Indian Ocean and for centuries were used by the Ajuran Sultanate. In 1913 the British official C. Wightwick Haywood visited them and recorded that only Chovaye and Chula were inhabited, and documented ruins pointing to earlier settlements. The mainland coast of Jubaland was ceded by the United Kingdom to Italy in 1924, and the islands passed into Italian hands two years later, which left them on the Somali side of the border. The fall of the Somali state in 1991 and the period the Bajuni call “The Troubles” triggered a mass exodus to Kenya and later to Europe and North America.
Read the full history ↓Green, farming Somalia: the Juba valley, the Swahili islands of the Bajuni, the Rahanweyn of Baidoa and their Maay language, and the corner of the country where conflict and famine hit hardest.
Read the history of The deep south: Jubbaland and Bay (very unsafe areas) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Bajuni archipelago is the northern tip of a civilisation. The Swahili coast — that strip of cities, ports and islands running from northern Mozambique to southern Somalia — produced a world of its own for a thousand years: coral-stone cities, long-distance trade along the monsoon route, a Bantu language with Arabic and Persian loanwords, Islam as its cultural framework and an extraordinarily sophisticated maritime economy. Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Malindi, Pate, Lamu and, north of them all, Mogadishu and the Bajuni Islands.
The islands — Koyama, Chovaye, Chandra, Ngumi, Chula and Darakasi, plus smaller islets — are low, sandy and small: the largest, Koyama, is barely more than 6 km², and the smallest of the main ones is under 2 km². In Somali they are known as Jasiiradaha Jubbada Hoose, “the islands of the lower Juba”, and administratively they belong to the Jubbada Hoose region. Geologically and ecologically they are a continuation of the Lamu archipelago, from which they are now separated by an international border drawn in the 20th century.
Their historical inhabitants, the Bajuni, are a Bantu people with a complex ancestry: Bantu peoples of the Swahili coast, Somalis from the interior, and Arab, Persian, Malay and Indonesian contributions. They speak Kibajuni, a dialect of Swahili that is the main marker of their ethnic identity; many Bajuni consider themselves distinct from the wider Swahili population, and some traditions claim an origin linked to Shungwaya with ancestral Yemeni connections.
Bajuni territory was never limited to the islands. It took in a long string of coastal settlements and islands between Kismayo to the north and the Lamu archipelago to the south: a continuous strip of fishing and trading communities that shared a language, kinship, routes and a maritime calendar.
Bajuni life historically revolved around three activities: fishing, seafaring and farming on the islands, supplemented by metalwork. Bajuni men were fishermen, traders and boat captains, and they mended nets and built boats; nautical knowledge was the community's collective capital.
That knowledge was organised by the monsoon, the same wind system that shaped all trade across the Indian Ocean. Between November and March, the northeast monsoon — the kaskazi — pushed vessels south; between April and September, the southwest monsoon — the kusi — brought them back. Crossings, deep-sea fishing, trading voyages and even boat-building seasons were all planned around that calendar.
The islands also produced food. When the British official C. Wightwick Haywood visited the archipelago in 1913, he recorded agricultural production on the islands as well as fishing, and noted a telling detail: of the whole chain, only Chovaye and Chula were inhabited at the time. He also recorded architectural ruins suggesting earlier settlements more extensive than those he found on his visit.
That last observation points to one of the biggest gaps in East African archaeology. The islands were part of the Indian Ocean trade networks and were used for centuries by the Ajuran Sultanate, the Somali power that between the 13th and 17th centuries controlled the Shabelle and Juba valleys and much of the coast. Yet the archipelago has never been the subject of a modern systematic excavation: whatever may have been there remains essentially undocumented.
Bajuni history was marked by episodes of displacement long before the 20th century. The community records two major earlier upheavals: the Orma invasions of the 16th century, coming from the interior, and the Somali raids of the 1960s. In both cases the pattern was similar: pressure from the mainland on a coastal community whose strength lay at sea and whose vulnerability lay on land.
In between, the archipelago went through the same changes of master as the rest of the western Indian Ocean. The Portuguese arrival from 1498 onwards broke the commercial balance of the Swahili coast and subjected the coastal cities to a new regime of tolls and punishments. In the 18th and 19th centuries, dominance passed to Oman and then to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which nominally administered the coastal ports and collected customs duties through local governors; between 1836 and 1861, parts of Jubaland had been claimed by the Sultanate of Muscat.
Under all these arrangements, the islands kept a high degree of practical autonomy. They were small, scattered and hard to control; their economy was based on subsistence and coastal trade, not plantations; and their people had maritime mobility as a resource. That ability to move by sea is the key to understanding both their historical survival and their later dispersal.
The event that most shapes the archipelago's situation today did not happen on the islands but at European negotiating tables. From 1895, the coast and interior of the Juba were absorbed into British East Africa. For three decades Kismayo and the islands were British territory, oriented as much towards Mombasa and Zanzibar as towards the Somali north.
After the First World War, Italy demanded territorial compensation for having joined the Allies in 1915. The United Kingdom ended up ceding the northern part of Jubaland: mainland Jubaland passed to Italy in 1924 and the islands two years later, in 1926. Thus was born the short-lived colony of Oltre Giuba — “beyond the Juba” — governed by Corrado Zoli from 16 July 1924 to 31 December 1926 and incorporated into Italian Somaliland on 30 June 1926. Britain kept the southern half, the Northern Frontier District, now part of Kenya.
That line split a single world in two. The Bajuni Islands ended up on the Somali side; the Lamu archipelago, their natural continuation, on the Kenyan side. Communities that shared a language — Kibajuni — kinship, fishing routes and a monsoon calendar were separated by an international border that had nothing to do with their human geography.
The consequences were felt throughout the 20th century and are still felt today. Current Bajuni population figures show it starkly: around 91,500 people in Kenya against some 20,500 in Somalia. The community was also left in a structurally fragile position within Somalia: a Bantu, Swahili-speaking minority in a state organised around Somali lineages, without strong clan representation in the political system that took shape after independence.
The Siad Barre regime (1969-1991) hit the Bajuni economy hard. Under its model of scientific socialism and collectivisation, fishermen had their gear and boats confiscated and were forced to join government cooperatives. For a community whose capital was precisely the boat, the net and nautical know-how, the measure was devastating.
From 1974, the forced removal of inhabitants from the islands to the mainland also began, as part of the regime's resettlement policies. That process, little documented internationally, emptied much of the archipelago long before the civil war and broke the continuity of settlement on islands that had been inhabited for centuries.
The available ethnography on the Bajuni is scarce and old. The reference study is still Vinigi Grottanelli's “Pescatori dell'Oceano Indiano”, published in 1955, which remains untranslated and hard to get hold of. The most complete modern linguistic work is that of linguist Derek Nurse, who documented Kibajuni and Bajuni society partly through the diaspora, precisely because access to the islands had become impossible.
That combination — early displacement, economic confiscation, a lack of academic documentation — explains why the archipelago is today one of the least-known places in East Africa, despite lying just a few dozen kilometres from one of the most studied cultural destinations on the continent.
In January 1991 the Siad Barre regime fell and the Somali state collapsed. For the Bajuni, that moment opened the period they themselves call “The Troubles”: violence, looting and simultaneous abandonment by both the Somali and Kenyan governments, in a community with no militia of its own and no clan protection on the new map of armed power.
Thousands of Bajuni did the one thing they knew how to do: they sailed. They headed south to take refuge with relatives in Malindi and Mombasa, on the other side of the border that had split their world seventy years earlier. In 1991 the United Nations advised them to move to refugee camps in south-eastern Kenya; the Kwa Jomvu camp, near Mombasa, operated until 1998. From there, a significant number emigrated to Europe and North America.
The result is a community living mostly in diaspora, with around 91,500 people in Kenya and some 20,500 in Somalia, and with a significant share living far from its original linguistic and cultural setting. Chula, home to the village of Ndowa, is today the only island in the archipelago with a significant population.
The surroundings don't help either. The islands lie off one of the most insecure areas of Somalia, between Kismayo and Ras Kamboni, where clashes broke out in December 2024 between Jubaland forces and Somali federal units. The US State Department explicitly lists piracy among the risks in its Level 4 advisory; the British FCDO warns of a significant risk of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, with attacks possible more than 1,000 nautical miles from the coast; Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressly advises against any maritime activity in Somali waters.
What remains is an archipelago of white sand, coastal forest and reef, with unexcavated ruins and a language spoken ever further from where it was born. It is probably the least documented island group in the western Indian Ocean. Telling its story, even if you can't go, is the only way to keep it from being lost altogether.
