Oman

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: ‘When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.’ I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf states in the intervening six decades.

An hour after the propeller plane lifts away from Wilson, Nairobi’s regional airport, it is arching over the blues and greens of the Lamu archipelago; a pattern of islands that extend 130 kms to the Somali border. Views of Lamu, which is also the name of the island and the stone town, have the dreamlike quality of an acid trip; the candy-pink minaret of the main mosque rising over coralline houses in the oldest, continuously inhabited, settlement on Kenya’s Swahili coast. And beyond the hazy shoreline, confetti-scatterings of white are the dhows that powered the fortunes of this former hub and deep-sea port. These criss-crossed the Indian Ocean on seasonal monsoon trade winds swapping ivory and slaves from the African hinterland for silks and spices from India, Yemen and Oman.

Muscat looks different than just about every other Gulf capital. There are neither skyscrapers nor demonstrations of obvious opulence. But at first glance, Oman doesn’t seem so different than some older parts of Dubai or Abu Dhabi. There’s money; there’s men in traditional, flowing garments and women in burqas; there’s beautiful buildings funded by oil profits.  Yet Oman is a peculiar place straddling past and present. There are echoes of empire, a people yearning for Oman to reclaim its status as a major geopolitical player, and a government facing the difficult task of preparing for a post-oil future. Omani became independent in 1951 after 60 years of soft British colonisation.