On any given day in Old Town, tourists gather around and inside Fort Jesus World Heritage Site, phone cameras lifted toward coral-stone walls that have withstood centuries of imperial contestation. Guides narrate Portuguese arrival, Omani rule, British administration and sometimes about the locals. The architecture of the Fort is presented as a monumental, globally-legible archive.
Just beyond this, another archive moves through the streets.
Women who cross the Likoni Ferry every day with baskets of cassava, mangoes, oranges and white aubergines set up their temporary shops along walls and buildings in the narrow alleys, and outside mosques. They converse amongst themselves in their Mijikenda dialects and only speak Swahili to clients.
Tuk-tuks weave continuously through the city’s arteries, ferrying residents and visitors alike to sites such as Fort Jesus and Mackinnon Market, their drivers negotiating fares and exchanging banter in fluid Swahili and sheng, an evolving urban slang. These vehicles are not peripheral to Mombasa’s historic landscape but are among its most visible circulatory systems.
Alongside them, fourteen-seater matatus adorned with elaborate graphics and customized aesthetics compete for passengers traveling between Mombasa Island and its expanding peripheries. Together, these mobility networks constitute an informal yet highly organized infrastructure that sustains daily urban life.
The city speaks, trades, negotiates and circulates in registers that rarely appear in heritage policy documents.
One of these landscapes is formally protected. The other is regulated, improvised and occasionally disciplined.
This tension reveals the limits of how heritage is currently imagined and governed in Mombasa. In principle, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) marked a conceptual shift in global heritage thinking. Adopted in 2011, the framework encourages cities to move beyond monument-centered preservation toward an integrated approach that recognizes social practices, economic processes, cultural diversity and living communities as constitutive elements of the historic urban fabric. Heritage, in this formulation, is not frozen in time; it is layered, relational and evolving.
This article argues that heritage governance in Mombasa remains site-biased despite the integrative ambitions of the Historic Urban Landscape framework. While policy recognizes monuments and façades as heritage assets, it insufficiently accounts for the informal mobility systems, gendered trade networks and evolving linguistic cultures that have long sustained urban life. If Mombasa is to meaningfully operationalize HUL, it must expand its understanding of heritage beyond built form and into the lived infrastructures that animate the city.
Yet the translation of this framework into metropolitan governance often narrows its scope. In Mombasa, conservation efforts remain strongly oriented toward elements of built form—façades, architectural typologies and tourism circuits. This emphasis is understandable. Old Town’s coral architecture and Fort Jesus World Heritage Site carry undeniable historical significance and global recognition. They attract visitors, international funding and cultural prestige. But when policy privileges stone over social systems, it risks producing an aestheticized city preserved for viewing rather than understood as lived.
The question, then, is not whether Mombasa should conserve its architectural heritage. It is whether heritage governance can expand its field of vision to include the informal transport systems, linguistic practices and gendered economic infrastructures that have long sustained urban life.
Consider the role of tuk-tuks in the city’s historic core. Often dismissed as congesting or disruptive, these three-wheeled vehicles are, in practice, critical connectors between conservation zones, residential neighborhoods, markets and transport terminals. They are part of the everyday mobility infrastructure that makes heritage accessible and have grown to become critical tools in the tourism value chain. Majority of tourists have at one time or another during their tour of Mombasa, used a tuktuk. Without them, many tourists would not reach Old Town’s interior streets; many residents would find movement across short but dense distances where matatus cannot go more difficult.
Recognizing this interdependence, the Mombasa County Government has in recent years supported initiatives to train tuk-tuk drivers as informal tour guides. The logic is pragmatic: drivers are already embedded in the city’s circulatory system. With basic historical training, tour-guiding skills and customer engagement techniques, they can extend the heritage economy beyond formal tour operators. In doing so, the county implicitly acknowledges something important; that the historic urban landscape is not sustained by monuments alone but by the people who move others through it.
This initiative offers a glimpse of what a more expansive HUL approach could look like. It recognizes that mobility workers are not external to heritage but are indeed its mediators with the authority to narrate the city’s past. Historically, heritage interpretation in Mombasa has privileged formal tour operators and monument-centered storytelling that foregrounds imperial transitions while marginalizing the social histories of traders and everyday residents.
Training tuk-tuk drivers as guides quietly disrupts this hierarchy. It redistributes interpretive power to actors embedded in the city’s daily circulation. In this sense, the initiative gestures toward a decolonization of heritage, not through the removal of monuments, but through the diversification of who speaks for them.
The tuk-tuk has become a tool for accessing monuments and heritage sites rather than being understood as part of the city’s contemporary historic layer, or a marker of how Mombasa’s urban transport has evolved in response to informal employment, rapid urbanization and shifting socio-economic dynamics. Wea re seeing an increasing number of women who are transforming their livelihoods by working as tuk-tuk drivers.
The same selective vision shapes how informal trade is treated within and around places in the city. Street vendors, many of them women, are not recent encroachments upon historic space. Coastal trade has defined Mombasa’s urban economy for centuries. The circulation of fresh produce and foodstuffs through narrow streets is not a deviation from history but a continuation of it. It is customary for residents of Old Town to purchase goods from these women who either sell along walls, gates, mosques or weave through the narrow alleys, baskets on their heads singing and marketing their wares.
These women are not temporary actors in a static historic setting. Their routes across the Likoni Ferry reflect longstanding patterns of coastal mobility linking mainland agricultural production to island-based commerce. Their presence stabilizes residential life in Old Town while simultaneously supporting the tourism economy that depends on every day street-level activity. To treat them as peripheral to heritage is to misunderstand the historical continuity of trade that has defined Mombasa for centuries.
These vendors should be treated as economic actors embedded in the historic urban landscape.
When informal traders are displaced in the name of putting up new high-rise buildings that, for the sake of maintaining security evict the traders from the vicinity, what exactly is being preserved? The façade may remain intact or more aesthetic, but the living commercial culture that animated it for generations is thinned or removed. The city becomes curated rather than inhabited.
Equally overlooked is the city’s evolving linguistic heritage. The coded sheng language exchanged among tuk-tuk operators, matatu drivers and their conductors on the other side, and the city’s youth on the other reflect Mombasa’s layered histories of trade, migration, and generational negotiation. Language here is not random improvisation. It encodes urban belonging, and adapts to tourism, port economies and digital culture. Sheng, while having a solid Kiswahili foundation borrows words from English, Arabic, Indian dialects and local Kenyan languages like Gikuyu.
Language in this context functions as infrastructure. It leaves no imprint on conservation maps. It is not bounded by heritage zones. Yet it is one of the most immediate ways residents reproduce and reinterpret the city daily. If the Historic Urban Landscape framework calls for recognition of intangible heritage and social practices, urban linguistic hybridity should not fall outside its purview. To dismiss it as informal slang is to overlook a living archive of coastal urban transformation.
Mombasa’s future will involve development pressures that will include real estate expansion and infrastructure modernization. The challenge is not to halt change but to govern it in ways that do not erase the systems that already make the city function. A genuinely integrated HUL approach would not treat tuk-tuks, informal trade or hybrid language as peripheral to heritage. It would recognize them as contemporary layers in a long historical continuum.
If Mombasa is to move from rhetorical alignment with the Historic Urban Landscape framework to substantive implementation, governance mechanisms must also evolve. One practical step would be the establishment of participatory heritage boards that enable the county government to codesign development approvals and conservation guidelines to ensure that preservation does not translate into displacement.
To rethink heritage in Mombasa, therefore, is to acknowledge that the historic urban landscape is not only sedimented in coral-stone walls but circulated through tuk-tuk routes, matatu grafitti, spoken in hybrid tongues and sustained by everyday economic practices that bind the city together. The policy question is no longer simply how to preserve monuments, but how to govern a living landscape without hollowing out the social infrastructures that give it meaning. Without participatory mechanisms that integrate informal actors into heritage decision-making, conservation risks producing a visually intact but socially diminished city. The challenge and opportunity for Mombasa is to ensure that preservation protects not only what is seen, but what is lived.