Ngalowas

Ngalowas are the small, traditional, often single-handed fishing boats of the east coast. They're still used all along the coast, and are the most elegant of boats, bringing together technologies which came from many different parts of the world.

The hull is carved from the trunk of a mango tree using an adze. In this picture of a new hull, the marks of the adze are clearly visible.

If nothing else is added, this most simple of boat designs can be used close inshore, propelled either by a paddle or a mangrove pole, but it is inherently unstable. It's called an mtumbwi.

To provide stability and to make an ngalowa, two mangrove poles are lashed athwartships, to the ends of which....

....are lashed shorter mangrove poles using knots which enable their to angle to be altered, and these are then set in to wooden outriggers. The preferred rope used here is modern nylon.

The ngalowa is powered by either a lateen sail or a paddle. It seems most likely that the lateen sail came to this coast either with the Portuguese or with the Arabs of the Persian Gulf.

Ngalowas are fast and easy to work single-handed - but the one awkward manouevre is the tack. To do this, the boom which supports the sail has to be lifted in front of and over the raked mast - easier done if there is more than one person in the ngalowa.

It has always intrigued me as to how outrigger technology reached East Africa since it seems to have originated in the southwestern Pacific. Perhaps it came with the Malagasy people of Madagascar whose ancestors sailed across the Indian Ocean from the Borneo area around 1,200 years ago.

Every village along the coast had its little fleet of ngalowas anchored off shore, ready to go out with the land breeze in the evening, through the protecting reef and far out into the ocean, to return on the morning's sea breeze with its catch.

We used to buy fish from these villages. Sometimes the fishermen brought in great turtles, precariously balanced across the hull. We would also hire an ngalowa and ask its owner to take us out to the reef on a low spring tide so we could go goggling or search for shells - this picture was taken at Nyali beach in the mid-1950s.