Turathi, from Arabic تراث is the Kiswahili word for ‘heritage’ and the verb kuhifadhi meaning ‘to keep, preserve, protect’ also stems from the Arabic حِفَظَ. Besides the already visible inheritance seeds embedded in the language through cross-cultural fertilization, heritage as forms, places and practices on the Swahili coast, is embedded in a plethora of tangible as well as non-tangible local epistemologies, cultural spaces and archives, objects, verbal and visual arts. To name but a few: the old town and its port, handwritten manuscripts in the dialectal variety of Kiamu language, photos, tapes and tape recorders, writing Swahili in Arabic script, learning stories by heart, giving voice to written poems. In this presentation, I will show heritage - and unacknowledged forms of it, that live on despite the few practitioners who care to value them. These less-studied forms of heritage are to be found at the intersection between Swahili-language literature and practices on one side, and significant geographies and places on the other hand. Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state, and the special home library of poet and imam Ustadh Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir (1952), will be the co-entry points from where – based on ethnographic and literary analysis conducted in the Kenyan archipelago – I will present the diverse ways in which heritage came into being, has been forgotten or is still in the shadow on Lamu island. Setting the theoretical investigation of this paper in ethics of care (Held 2008) while expanding it to ‘epistemologies of cares’ on a broader spectrum, this presentation draws from ethnographic and literary research conducted in the frame of UMADA, a cultural preservation project for documentary heritage funded by MEAP (UCLA Library) and the NWO VENI talent program grant on endangered forms of Portable Islam in the 20th-century Indian Ocean.