The poet Paolo Conte, to feed his beloved's 'Arabian dream', offered the afternoon moon and a 'limon ice cream', the Lamu archipelago does much more. Every year at this time, it organises the Lamu Cultural and Traditional Festival, a classic event that showcases the best of the Arab culture of the archipelago north of the Kenyan coast and its ramifications in art, entertainment and competition.
Today sees the start of the 21st edition of the event that highlights Swahili customs and traditions that have become true cultural 'trademarks' of Kenya's 'Arab Venice', a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This year, in addition to the celebrated games with the famous donkey race (the true 'masters' of the island, where they roam freely and have always served as a means of transport, where vehicles are not allowed except for health or institutional emergencies), gastronomy will be the main focus this year, in the context of the media explosion of food as a tourist attraction, 'food contests' and fairs related to typical products. The festival of gastronomic products will involve not only fryers and small shops, but also private homes engaged in churning out traditional Arab-African products such as samosas, chapatis, mahamri, mandaazi, mshakiki, coconut rice cakes and various sweets.

While the restaurants will be able to offer the hundreds of tourists, both local and foreign, who have booked this long weekend, special dishes that are an expression of the island: mango and tamarind fish with coconut rice, shrimp-filled chapatis, sea pilau rice, spicy octopus, and so on.
There will be no lack of moments related to the Swahili language (the contest of poets who honour the coastal idiom that was later chosen as the official language of Kenya) and the millenary customs of the city-archipelago (dances and rituals handed down from father to son).

The international economic crisis and flight prices will not allow the numbers of the early years of the millennium to be reached, but bookings in hotels and room accommodation (in Lamu B&B and Guest House are still the most popular formula) prove that taboos on the islands a few dozen kilometres from Somalia have been overcome. Today Lamu is a safe town and the political and ecological diatribes do not affect its name, which is that of one of the safest places in Africa.

The programme includes the dhow race, in which the boats will be divided between the old and the faster boats, dances in the Town Hall square and the Museum courtyard, the traditional Swahili poetry and rhyme competition on Saturday, traditional dress parades, dancing and acting, and much more in every corner of Lamu Town, but also in Shela and the island of Manda.

The festival's grand finale on Sunday with the traditional donkey race on the waterfront.
A spectacle that involves every year in the same way, a triumph of smiles, colours and emotions that rightly highlights one of the most characteristic and particular corners of the Kenyan coast.