On reading Abdulrazak Gurnah’s writings one is struck by the thriving and “cosmopolitan” nature of East African coastal towns, at least up until the 1960s. Cosmopolitanism in general, and on the Indian Ocean rim in particular, is a hot topic in current academic discourse. It is my purpose here to not only survey current thinking in regard to cosmopolitanism in Indian Ocean studies but to examine how Gurnah illustrates and contests depictions by Indian Ocean scholars of apparently idyllic premodern East African societies. His writings lend themselves to more nuanced and problematic readings of these societies as cosmopolitan.