Copyright by Emily Beth Brownell 2012

The Dissertation Committee for Emily Beth Brownell Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Growing: An Environmental History of Urban Expansion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Committee:

Toyin Falola, Supervisor

Erika Bsumek

Ruramisai Charumbira

Catherine Boone

Gregory Maddox Growing: An Environmental History of Urban Growth in Dar es Growing: An Environmental History of Urban Expansion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Tanzania

by

Emily Beth Brownell, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin Dedication

For my grandmothers, Marilyn Folkman Greathouse and Eva Mae Cole Brownell.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Toyin Falola for not only guiding me through graduate school and my dissertation but for what I know will be a lifetime long mentorship and friendship. Him and his wife Bisi Falola treated me as part of their family when I arrived in Austin and I will always be grateful for that. Erika Bsumek quickly became, despite her scholarly distance from African subjects, an irreplaceable mentor, guiding me through my own thoughts and reflections of how my project fit into the field of environmental history. I am also eternally grateful for all of her “local knowledge” about the pitfalls and joys of academia that she so graciously passed on to me as I came up against obstacles and frustrations. After meeting Gregory Maddox, he quickly became a crucial source of reflection and feedback for me working both in the fields of environmental history and Tanzanian history. Ruramisai Charumbira and Catherine Boone, as committee members gave me invaluable feedback and critique. In Tanzania, my research was facilitated by a generous group of people including Wolfgang Scholz, Kassim Kindinda my research assistant, The Tanzanian National Archives and their staff, COSTECH, Ardhi University School of Urban and Regional Planning at The University of Dar es Salaam, John Lupala, and my constant friend for venting about the frustrations of research, Roxanne Miller

I am grateful for the funding and support over the years The University of Texas at Austin Department of History; I am so happy I came here. In particular, I have asked Marilyn Lehman our graduate coordinator countless questions and she always has the right answer. I would also like to thank the University of Texas Continuing Fellowship Committee, The Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the LBJ School of Public Policy’s Climate Change and Political Stability

v program, the United States Department of Defense Boren Fellowship. Finally, I am thankful to my family for all their support and knowing to not ask too frequently when I will be done with school. My amazing surrogate family of friends in Austin may have not had much to do with this dissertation itself but they certainly make finishing it so bittersweet.

vi Growing: An Environmental History of Urban Expansion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Emily Beth Brownell, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Supervisor: Toyin Falola

A study of environment and place, “Growing” is an examination of urban transformation that focuses on Dar es Salaam’s geographical and social fringes. This work examines the physical expansion of Tanzania’s largest city from independence until the implementation of Structural

Adjustment Programs in the mid 1980s. The goal of this work is threefold: to examine how new migrants to the city accessed important resources, to analyze how their tactics for survival change the environment and geography of the city and lastly, to consider the political battles that ensued over these resources and the city’s changing landscape. To deconstruct the nature of this geographical expansion, each chapter focuses on a different fundamental element of the city including land use, food scarcity and production, the politics of waste management, how citizens navigated city spaces in the face of dramatic transportation shortages and how national and transnational narratives of development influenced (and neglected) the formation of the city.

vii Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: Narratives of Development in Tanzania ...... 25 African Development after World War II ...... 28 Tanzanian development and the growth of ‘self-help’ ...... 33 Imagining urban development ...... 55 Dar es Salaam after Arusha ...... 59 Self-help urbanism ...... 66 Fighting urban primacy: creating the non-Dar es Salaam ...... 75

Chapter Two: Going to the Ground: Land and Housing in Dar es Salaam ...... 78 Informality and urban growth in African cities ...... 79 Land in the Colonial City ...... 83 “Best being the enemy of the good” ...... 104 Going to the ground: the hinterlands and mbagala ...... 113 Conclusion ...... 118

Chapter Three: The Political Ecology of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam ...... 121 Colonial Food Supply and Urban Bias ...... 124 Post-colonial Food Distribution and the Evolution of a Food Crisis ...... 131 Dukwallahs and Food Stalls ...... 144 Farming for Life on the Fringes ...... 152 Conclusion ...... 157

Chapter Four: Cars, Buses, and the Energy Crisis: The Politics of Mobility in 1970s Dar es Salaam ...... 160 Mobility and the Migrant ...... 161 Transportation Infrastructure and the Construction of an arterial City ...... 167 Roads And The Hinterland Economy ...... 173 Buses and workers ...... 179 cars 184

viii Conserving oil ...... 189

Chapter Five: Seeing Dirt in Dar es Salaam: Sanitation, Waste and Citizenship in the Post-Colonial City ...... 198 Planning for the city ...... 201 Discipline and Waste: discursive urbanization ...... 213 Reuse and self-reliance ...... 220 Conclusion ...... 223

Epilogue ...... 228

Bibliography ...... 230

Vita ...... 251

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Introduction

In 1972, reporter Guido Magome, writing in the Tanganyika Standard about Dar es Salaam’s “squatting problem,” argued that “if squatter settlements must continue to be established then Party and Government leaders must adopt a rural development approach rather than an urban attitude. We must cooperate with the squatters by making them feel that the settlements are their responsibility, not of an urban authority.”1 In light of events that unfolded during the next decade, Magome’s article reads like a prescient policy recommendation since citizen-led development was forced to fill the vacuum created by the virtual absence of government-instigated infrastructure development on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. “On the other hand,” Magome quickly added, contradicting his prescription for dealing with growing peri-urban populations, “the Government should as far as possible avoid moving whole multitudes of people from town centres to outlying areas… especially when the replaced population cannot be accommodated in new multi- storey buildings which replace ordinary dwellings.”2 Magome seems unaware of what citizen-led settlement was bound to look like without government support, and, as is often the purview of the state in this story, he was eager that it be controlled while also desiring it to be citizen-motivated and funded. A few months earlier, a newspaper editorial by the Standard’s Jenerali Ulimwengu argued a different position, suggesting that poor living conditions for workers in Dar should be considered a “source of shame” for Tanzanians as they were “the acknowledged creators of our national wealth” and

1 Guido Magome, “Urbanization and the Squatter Problem,” The Tanganyikan Standard, August 8, 1972. 2 Ibid.

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therefore should not live in “squalor” while others were living in “palace splendor.” 3 He urged construction of better housing to avoid its transformation into unsanitary squatter hovels in just a few years. “The amount of money spent on the construction of small, hardly planned shacks like those at Ubungo [a neighborhood in Dar es Salaam],” he surmises, “is almost wasted right from the word go.”4

The following year, a journalist for The Tanganyikan Standard wrote an article entitled “The Other Side of Dar es Salaam” after taking a tour of the city’s slums. In capturing the sense of these areas, the article unintentionally captures also the improbable naiveté of the reporter himself:

[O]ur mini-bus stumbled into the heart of the ‘ghetto’. No roads worth the

description. Hovels toad-stooling haphazardly and more than three times we

nearly ran into a shanty house, round a blind corner. This was a slum. We saw

naked children clinging to their mothers, who had thronged the make-shift

markets for smoked fish and green vegetables. Some mothers had tucked their

children on their backs no doubt for fear of spiraling gales founding their infants

eyes, the scene was shrouded in misery.5

With a mix of sympathy and revulsion, he ends the article by hoping that “it will not be too long before these slums are cleared and dumped into the Indian Ocean.”6

3 Jenerali Ulimwengu, “How’s Housing?,” The Tanganyikan Standard, April 1972. Incidentally, Ulimwengu was fired from his post in Dar es Salaam and sent to report in Mwanza two years later when the newspaper was reorganized (and state control increased). Ulimwengu writes on his personal webpage that he was fired because “some people “in high places” were not impressed with what some of us at the paper were writing” http://www.jenerali.com/cms.php?cmsid=2 4 Ibid. 5 “The Other side of Dar es Salaam,” The Tanganyika Standard, November 25, 1973. 6 Ibid.

2

When reading Dar es Salaam’s newspapers these three narratives of city development—that citizens have failed, that the state has failed, and that both have failed and the resulting squalor posed a moral threat to the city—can quickly be identified as recurring tropes. Thus the task of writing an environmental history of the city to uncover its lived reality is embedded within a larger project of uncovering what Dar es Salaam meant to both to the Tanzanian people and the state and how that meaning was articulated through lively, thorough discussion of the city’s environmental vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Like many African cities Dar es Salaam’s postcolonial geography from independence until the implementation of first state-led and then IMF-led structural adjustment in the early 1980s, evolved in spite of, rather than as a result of, healthy economies, industry and infrastructure.7 Organized into thematic chapters, this project focuses on the material and political struggles citizens faced when establishing themselves in the city—struggles both mundane and monumental—such as finding land, using public transportation, securing food resources, sanitation, and participating in development during the two and a half decades that comprised Julius Nyerere’s presidency. In chronicling the city’s changing landscape through these struggles, my aim is to write an environmental history not simply of a city but also of an urban crisis. The movements and everyday inconveniences of urban citizens reveal an environmental map of the city that becomes both a point of departure and the core of this work. Thus, this environmental history intends to be doubly revealing; it examines people’s daily lives to

7 Alphonce G. Kyessi. “Community Participation in Urban Infrastructrure Provision: Servicing Informal Settlements in Dar es Salaam” Dortmund: Spring Research Series No. 33: Dortmund, 2002.

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learn more about their environments, while creating a picture of a city that evinces the presence of its citizens.

In this introduction I will briefly introduce Dar es Salaam, my sources, subjects and methodology. I will also explore what environmental historical thinking I bring to bear on considering the two fundamental relationships this work explores: urban citizens relationship to the state's image of Dar es Salaam and the triangular relationship between citizens, their city, and the rapidly expanding peri-urban zone.

Sources and subjects

Julius Nyerere was the first president of Tanzania, taking office at the time of independence after having come up through the ranks of first the Tanganyika Africa

Association, which he helped transform into the Tanganyika African National Union.

In 1967, Nyerere announced the beginning of a new era in Tanzanian policy, known as

Ujamaa. Ujamaa, or “familyness” was a development philosophy that took as its core goal the creation of a self-reliant socialist nation with distinctly African values and

African methods of development attained through freedom, equality and unity. Nyerere envisioned Tanzania becoming a country of collective, rural villages producing food and other agricultural commodities for domestic consumption and international export.

Ujamaa become the official development plan in 1967 with the publication of The

Arusha Declaration and the nationalization of much of Tanzanian industry and social services. Not a sui generis philosophy by any means, Ujamaa was highly influenced by the Catholic faith and Fabian socialism, which Nyerere studied while in England. In

1968, Nyerere announced his villagization scheme to promote rural development known

4

as Ujamaa Vijijini, which then became compulsory in the mid 1970s for citizens, compelling them to aggregate in villages no smaller than 250 people (in the beginning

Nyerere conceived of these villages as much smaller groups of citizens 7-20 citizens).8

Agricultural production, after initially increasing, plummeted and in turn sank the country into crisis. While food scarcity was the major outcome and persistent obstacle,

Tanzania’s crisis was hydra-headed both in its causes and consequences, including prolonged drought, the international oil shocks of the 1970s, and a war with Idi Amin beginning in 1978.

The role of Nyerere in the course of Tanzanian history in the first three decades of its independence is somewhat daunting to quantify, yet important to consider. It is often tempting yet misleadingly simplistic to allow the head of state to stand in for the state itself when such an imposing and intriguing personality can be used to embody and articulate state policy. However, in the case of Tanzania, it is hard to avoid the omnipresence of Nyerere both behind a majority of policy decisions and in the written record of newspapers, quotes, speeches and rallies as the nation’s mwalimu (teacher).

Thus it is hard to avoid conflating Nyerere with the state, even if one is conscious of the potential pitfalls. Throughout the following chapters, I use Nyerere and “the state” interchangeable with great reservation.

The City

8 Richard E. Stren, “Ujamaa Vijijini and Bureaucracy in Tanzania,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 15, no. 3 (1981): 591–598, 593.

5

Dar es Salaam, also known as Mzizima before the colonial period, has roots before the arrival of Europeans along the Swahili coast, yet it remained less important than other coastal towns such as Bagamoyo until the Germans made it the administrative center of the new colony. The city’s original indigenous population was mostly comprised of Shomvi and Zaramo peoples. The name Dar es Salaam, which in Arabic means “harbor of peace,” points to the strong presence and influence of Arabic traders in the region long before the construction of the city began in 1862 as a safe haven for

Sultan Majid when faced with pressures in Zanzibar.9

Dar’s most advantageous physical features are its natural harbor and position midway along the Tanganyikan coastline. It also has a generally flat topography punctuated by gentle hills formed around the contours of the creek system that filters through the city and forms much of its geography. Deep water berths were constructed in the harbor in the 1950s, increasing port activity and also displacing populations in

Kurasini by the harbor, spurring the outward development of residential housing in the city, encouraged by the government. By 1913, the city’s borders along its major roads extended between 2 and 2.5 kilometers from the city center, growing in the next thirty years to stretch between 3 and 4 kilometers. By 1969 the city’s reach into the hinterlands was between 6 and 10 kilometers, and by 1978, 15 kilometers. By the early 1990s, the city had in some directions almost doubled in diameter since the late seventies, now

9 James Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusuf Lawi, Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2007), 16.

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reaching out 27 kilometers. By another estimate, from 1968 to 1982 the city surface area multiplied by a factor of five.10

The population of Africans in Dar in 1900 was 18,000. By 1921 it had only grown to 20,000, while by 1948 it had more than doubled to 50,765. The African population in

Dar in 1957 was 93,363, the city having experienced a 7.1% growth rate. Ten years later in the first census after independence the population had grown at an annual rate of 7.8% to reach 272,821.11 By 1968 official population numbers were at 348,000 and ten years later in 1978 852,000. By 1988 the population of Dar was estimated at 1.3 million. Two thirds of this population growth was attributed to migration from rural areas.12

This project employs a particular definition of environmental history as a social and political history of place. My intention is to examine how people exploit resources, deploy strategies for survival, and cope in neglected or chaotic landscapes that may be simultaneously one person’s home, another person’s garden, and yet another person’s waste bin. In both acknowledging these layers and trying to pull them back, I am interested in engaging in marginal places and undervalued and neglected environments to understand how they are constructed. This project also looks at the multiple ways that the everyday use of city spaces dramatically diverges from the way the space is imagined by agents of the state and city. This project is not therefore a type of history rich in traditional archival sources since there is absence (particularly structural, government absence) at the center of my research questions.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 53. 12 J Kombe, “The Demise of Public Urban Land Management and the Emergence of Informal Land Markets in Tanzania A Case of Dar-es-Salaam City,” 25.

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Thus, my methodological approach has been fueled first and foremost by the problem of scant archival documents in the postcolonial period. Nevertheless, the diversity of my sources ultimately has served far more than simply as a stopgap measure for dealing with paltry archives. Each source animates a different aspect of the story. I have utilized archival sources to examine the colonial period in order to see the city from points of continuation and divergence, and wherever possible to uncover the role of city governance through, for example, city council minutes. Secondary sources from the

1960s, 1970s and 1980s have also provided rich detail. Conducted at the University of

Dar es Salaam and often funded by development agencies, social science researchers undertook small-scale studies on the obstacles impeding development for a wide range of populations such as orange growers, female factory workers or building cooperatives.

The strength of these sources resides not just in their data but in their representation of local development work at the time.

Newspapers have been invaluable in revealing how individuals conceptualized and negotiated access to resources and struggled to define the entitlements of urban citizenship and the responsibilities of which it was comprised. I most often use the Daily

News (known as the Tanganyika Standard until 1972), one of four major daily newspapers in the city. Written in English (which actually allowed it a bigger readership in Dar than one might presume), it catered to a more middle-class audience than other newspapers such as the Swahili daily Ngurumo (the Thunder), but it also had the most

8

column space and the highest daily printing.13 As Andrew Ivaska and Louise White have pointed out, newspaper distribution numbers or even literacy rates do not necessarily illustrate newspaper readership within urban communities where copies were often read by multiple readers and also read aloud.14 The Daily News remained an independent paper until it merged with the ailing Nationalist newspaper in 1972 and Nyerere handpicked the editor.15 While one can clearly see in reading the articles that the newspaper became a mouthpiece for the state and disseminating policy objectives it also remained undeniably an outlet for citizen complaint and observation of their lives and city, making it an incredibly fascinating source. Out of the four most popular dailies, the

“Reader’s Forum” in The Daily News offers the most lively site for citizen-authored editorials personalizing debates over urban issues. Andrew Ivaska in his recently published Cultured States makes a compelling argument for more centrally using media sources in African history (in his case, cultural history) destabilizing the strangely entrenched authority of oral sources. Undeniably, there is an immediacy to reading newspaper accounts of the daily minutiae of inconvenience and description of the municipal state of affairs that would be near impossible to recapture years later in oral histories. Ivaska also notes that writing in to the “Reader’s Forum” itself was an act that must be examined and considered when engaging with the question of what constituted urban citizenship:

13 John C. Condon, “Nation Building and Image Building in the Tanzanian Press,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 5, no. 3 (1967): 335–354, 336. Daily printing statistics from this article naturally only represents numbers prior to publication of the article. 14 Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, 1st ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar Es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 15 Ivaska, Cultured States, 30.

9

Participating as a writer or co-composer (for letters were sometimes written

collectively) in these readers’ fora involved not only making a point but also

performing a certain kind of public self. Often writing in prose calculated to

variously demonstrate rhetorical sophistication, education, social status, moral

uprightness, civic responsibility, or mastery of older traditions of verbal jousting,

letter writers put themselves on paper with an evident enthusiasm for the form.16

These letters animate in dramatic and immediate language so many of these otherwise rather dry municipal issues. Yet these editorials, as revealing and immediate as they may be as source material, were also generally written and read by a middle class segment of Dar es Salaam. Since the focal point of my dissertation is the expanding periphery of the city, geography more than class or tenure in the city constitutes the population I am interested in here. But new migrants too poor to establish themselves in middle-class urban neighborhoods generally occupied the periphery, urban residents pushed out of the city by high prices or through squatter removal schemes. Knowing that the demography of the periphery must be included along with these middle class voices from the newspapers, I conducted a series of oral history interviews. I interviewed migrants living in the peri-urban community of Mbagala a community comprised of people from the coastal region, particularly Rufiji, which also reflects Dar es Salaam’s larger population. Two thirds of the city’s migrants from 1957 to 1967 originated from the three coastal districts of Bagamoyo, Kisarawe, and Rufiji.17 This constant stream of

16 Ibid., 31. 17 Brennan, Burton, and Lawi, Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, 53.

10 migration allowed for the consideration of multiple moments of migration and transition within the city from the perspectives of various communities.

Conducting oral history interviews also allowed me to keep the subjects of my study as a central voice, not letting the city itself eclipse the importance of its inhabitants’ role in creating and shaping it. Jamie Monson in her work on the Tazara railway uses life history narratives to look at how the building of the new train line affected the livelihoods of those living along it or in proximity to it. Monson describes her use of the narratives in much the same way that I approached collecting and utilizing mine: “I recorded life stories as part of a larger research project, in order to increase my understanding of a particular topic. This topic was known to the people I interviewed, and therefore to a large degree the topic shaped the chronological and substantive focus of our exchanges.”

Monson describes her methodology as one Susan Geiger calls “modified” or “directed” life history interviews where the topics of the interview are shepherded by the researcher’s interests rather than open-ended.18

In my oral history interviews, I took as a point of departure how, why, and when people moved to the city from the coastal areas surrounding Dar es Salaam. However, as the interviews progressed I became attuned to asking them what the hardest time in their lives was, why they remembered it as the hardest, and how they coped with the particular set of obstacles that were sometimes personal but most often structural. My goal for the interviews was to see the urban crisis through personal experience in order to understand better how citizens navigated and changed the city as a result.

18 Jamie Monson, “Maisha: Life History and the History of Livelihood Along the Tazara Railways in Tanzania,” in Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed edited by Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 315.

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It also gave me a window onto events that were important to investigate further and would not necessarily have noticed through reading newspapers. In looking at the everyday in urban Africa, I am borrowing in part from Karen Tranberg Hansens’ work in

Keeping House in Lusaka where she focuses on households and families coping with economic collapse in Zambia within the context of a growing city.19 Hansen points out that this sort of history works best in dialogue rather than in isolation: “local-level observations do not replace grand questions about the economy; we must reckon with the wider structural relations and social forces that have shaped and are changing the urban opportunity structure in a country like Zambia.”20 Hansen uses the household to link together the personal and the structural and form a “crossover point between biography and history, the intersection of what C. Wright Mills perceptively termed private troubles and public issues.”21

Another valuable aspect of my interviews was that I recovered a sense of what motivated people to move to Dar es Salaam and their answers were often not what I expected. Here again, I was struck by the similarity in Monson’s tale of beginning research on Tazara with a similar question. Monson noticed that when she asked people why they moved to a certain place, they answered often with phrases such as kwa sababu ya maisha (because of life) and kutafuta maisha (to seek a life). This answer struck me as qualitatively different than what I expected. I had assumed people would recite a list of reasons for their move to the city rather than explain the move with a totalizing notion that they were seeking a life or simply because of life. One example comes from an

19 Karen Tranberg Hansen, Keeping House in Lusaka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 20 Ibid., 8. 21 Ibid., 9.

12 interview with Hamada Ali Mnora in which he says, “Before I came [into Dar], I was just helping with farming activities and fishing. I left Rufiji to come to find a life still when

I’m young because when you saw others your age coming from urban areas to the village to visit looking active, you find yourself attracted, to be honest, life in the village is different from town, so I came to just find life.”22 Mnora is describing a typical coming of age moment, when each successive generation of young men and women compared their own lives with those who came back to visit from the city, envying the autonomy and activity of these new lives. Grappling with this answer informed my work in two ways.

First, it suggested that indeed there was a “bright lights” effect motivating people to come to the city; it served as a reminder that all the reasons for massive migration to the city could not be reduced to sociological indicators but were also personal and emotional.

Second, it served as a reminder of how fundamentally different peri-urban Dar and rural

Tanzania was when I was tempted to see them as almost entirely similar. For example, someone from the rural areas who had spent her life farming could move to Dar es

Salaam and continu to utilize farming as a key form of survival in a undeveloped peri- urban area, living in a home built out of traditional materials still had a variety of choices far more diverse than in a village. Not to mention the new cultural and social milieu that men and women from the village were immersed in upon their arrival in Dar. One woman

I interviewed, when I asked her if she regretted leaving the village, responded with a powerfully illustrative answer. She simply noted that when she sees women now her age who never left the village, they “walk with a stick and look very old,” demonstrating that

22 Hamada Ali Mnora, Oral History interview.

13 they clearly endured a harder life.23 Her evocative response, however, does not mean the choice to stay or go was straightforward. Ultimately, when looking at motivations for urban migration, separating choice from necessity as a scholarly act is a slippery slope.

As Hansen writes, the personal choice of migrants to move into the city fits into a much larger structural constellation of choices that is hard to untangle, though central to writing a political ecology of the city’s transformations. By the 1980s, Nyerere himself agonized over preserving Tanzania’s ability to choose its own path while realizing how much his choices were diminishing with continued economic collapse and growing reliance on foreign aid. At the same time that he protected the ability of the state to choose its own path, citizens’ ability to make both large and small decisions became increasingly constrained.

Urban and Environmental Historiography

Late colonial cities in Anglophone Africa were places of confrontation between

European development ideals and African forms of urbanization as their populations rapidly grew after the Second World War. Political unrest provoked the British to reassess their approach to the growing presence of African laborers in cities and towns.

This tension and ultimate transformation of urban Africa was also fueled by colonial administrators’ moral panic, fearing the “dangerous classes” of urban Africa, most particularly characterized by an itinerant, unattached class of laborers. 24 In conjunction with reforming labor, their goal was to change the way Africans lived in these cities.

23 Rahema Shabani, Oral History interview. 24 Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

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Shantytowns and informal areas had increased apace with labor while colonial governments hoped Africans would initiate development on their own behalf in the likeness of European towns. However, they neglected to pay workers enough to realize this vision. Furthermore, Africans showed that they had their own forms of urbanization in these colonial cities. While hesitant to employ overly simplistic categories, twentieth- century African cities became frontiers for the clash of African forms of urbanization and the inflexible implementation of western models. Building costs remained too high and

European models of nuclear family homes and neighborhoods proved unrealistic both culturally and economically. Instead, unpaved streets, lack of electricity, poor sanitation, and homes that often accommodated multiple families marked the majority of urban growth across the continent. As Bill Freund writes in his history of African cities, “not only to conservatives but also to those who admired the rise of African nationalism that

African cities could not keep pace with the demands for basic improvement in living on the part of the masses. The potentially antisocial ‘urban crowd’ presented an ever greater challenge to the philosophy of development tied in a desire for order.”25 The postcolonial moment of confrontation between diverse desires and expectations in cities cemented their cosmopolitan nature. Cities had also become sites of aesthetic and structural negotiation over what was a city and what constituted urban citizenship.

Recent scholarship on urban Africa, particularly exciting new work on Dar es

Salaam (colloquially referred to as Dar throughout) looks at the vibrant cultures of these cities that experiment with appropriation and reinvention of “modern” and “traditional”

25 Bill Freund, The African City: A History, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99.

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African forms. For example, new work by Andrew Ivaska focuses on the lively decade of the 1960s in Dar es Salaam, examining contested cultural ground over youth politics, shifting cosmopolitan nationalisms, and public protest over issues surrounding the growing presence of women in the city. Ivaska powerfully portrays Dar as a point of convergence of new international, African, and Tanzanian cultural and political forms.

Yet there remains an absence of histories that focus on urban environments as more than a tableaux of social clubs, office buildings, bars, and music halls. While these details are by and large not the purview of such scholarship, they add great depth to the story of the city. Urban planners and geographers who have paid careful attention to urban development tend unintentionally to augment the existing scholarly blind spot by employing a bit of a time machine effect, jumping from late colonial Dar to the chaos of the early 1980s.26 Perhaps this anachronism in part reflects a sense that many of these

Tanzanian scholars might have felt in their own lives that one had only looked away for a moment, yet so much had changed, mostly for the worse. The 1980s have also garnered attention through two important books on Dar’s informal economy that are in effect fascinating biographies of a rapidly changing city but also quickly gloss over its history to arrive at the point of crisis.27

26 Geoffrey Ross Owens, “Post-colonial Migration: Virtual Culture, Urban Farming and New Peri-urban Growth in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 1975–2000,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 80, no. 2 (2010): 249-274; John Briggs, and Davis Mwamfupe, “Peri-urban Development in an Era of Structural Adjustment in Africa: The City of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” Urban Studies 37, no. 4 (2000): 797-809; Wilbard Jackson Kombe, “Land Use Dynamics in Peri-urban Areas and Their Implications on the Urban Growth and Form: The Case of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” Habitat International 29 (2005): 113- 135; S.S. Mushi. Regional Development Through Rural Urban Linkages : the Dar-es Salaam Impact Region [S.l.: s.n.], 2003; and Leslie McLees, “Access to Land for Urban Farming in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania: Histories, Benefits and Insecure Tenure,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 49, no. 4 (2011): 601-624. 27 Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

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In the context of this gap in scholarship on the city, one must remember that the collapse of urban infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s remains merely a description rather than an analysis of events. In undertaking this project, a few seminal texts have shaped the questions I have asked in seeking out a more analytical understanding of these decades. The three texts I have used to frame my project reflect how I incorporate environmental history into this work. The first two are quite interconnected. James C.

Scott’s work in both Seeing Like a State and Weapons of the Weak has been influential in developing my conception of political ecology and writing about the “thick” city versus the “thin” city.28 William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis has served as a model for considering, both constituently and philosophically, the role of the hinterland in forming the environment of the city.

Seeing Like a State looks at how state planners sought to “rationalize” the built environment through imagining their sites of intervention as cultural tabulae rasae, ignoring and in many cases obliterating local knowledge and learned experience in remaking high modern cities, forests, villages and farms. Work by African environmental historians in particular has taken aim at the sacred status of scientific knowledge and planning in high modernism, mostly with attention to spheres of agriculture and conservation. Relying on “the expert” without considering local knowledge, or an inability to turn back from an intractable plan has a long history of devastating environmental and livelihood effects. President Nyerere’s biography reveals him to be the epitome of a planner in this mold, and it is not surprising that Scott includes a chapter on

28 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) and Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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Tanzania in Seeing Like a State. Yet, in the case of Dar es Salaam, Nyerere ultimately abandons planning, knowing that pouring attention into city infrastructure can only increase its desire and importance when he wants to do the opposite. Ultimately, his contempt for urban spaces and his desire to limit populations led him to invest more in defining and limiting urban citizenship than in defining the city’s geography.

At the end of his chapter on Tanzania in Seeing Like a State Scott, muses that if a stranger from Mars were to show up in an Ujamaa village, he would perceive the state to be the empiricist or the believer in comparison to the peasant.29 “Tanzanian peasants,” notes Scott, “had been readjusting their climate settlement patterns and farming practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new markets with notable success in the two decades before villagization.”30 From the perspective of the city, the equivalent form of peasant-led development Scott refers to as a “deep” or “thick” city as opposed to a “thin” or “shallow” city created by planners. According to Scott, the thick city has a history and a lived logic that also has potential to change and adapt, absorbing the changes wrought by all classes and preoccupations of its people, whereas a shallow city has little recourse beyond the plan. In this regard, one can consider the same thought exercise of an extraterrestrial stranger arriving in Dar es Salaam. However, when taking

Dar’s history into account, the dialectic seems less to be between citizen-led and state- planned urbanization, and more between state control and state neglect. The “thick city,” after all, does not necessarily mean one devoid of any urban planning.

29 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 253. 30 Ibid.

18

Another of Scott’s interventions is his work on everyday forms of resistance marshaled by peasants to avoid state projects that threaten their livelihoods, providing a political ecology of agrarian change. Political ecology looks at both real and discursive struggles over environments and environmental resources, with particular attention to the

“third world.” Tanzanian peasants facing state enforced agrarian changes employed similar tactics to untether their own fortunes from the sinking fortunes of Ujamaa villagization in ways that were non-confrontational and reflected the slim choices of their economic and social reality.31 Three main forms of rebellion from the Ujamaa state were smuggling, black marketeering, ‘loafing,’ and lastly migrating from the fields into towns.

Building on thinking about the “thick city,” I utilized Weapons of the Weak to conceptualize the environment of Dar es Salaam as the result not just of neglect and control, but also peasant resistance to the state.

In looking for examples of urban environmental history in Africa, what I came across more frequently were calls for more work to be done on African cities. William

Beinart in particular, in his essay on the state of African environmental history, notes that

“an environmental element may also be profitably inserted into analyses of the social and economic history of African cities, and their relationship with their hinterlands,” particularly citing Cronon’s analysis of Chicago in Nature’s Metropolis.32 Cronon focuses on the development of the city through the harnessing of its hinterland resources and how both “nature” and the “city” are changed in this process of extraction and

31 W. M. Freund, “Class Conflict, Political Economy and the Struggle for Socialism in Tanzania,” African Affairs 80, no. 321 (1981): 483-499, 495. 32 William Beinart, “African History and Environmental History,” African Affairs 99, no. 395 (April 2000): 269–302, 301.

19 manufacture. To chart this mutual transformation, he insists that his readers rethink the common conceptual framework that has excised the city from nature, framing the two as

“separate and opposing worlds.”33 When thinking about Dar in light of Cronon’s insistence, the city struck me as, if anything, mired in nature. Nature is constantly encroaching, sometimes in welcome and directed ways, but at other times due to neglect and lack of resources. The porous boundary between the hinterland and the city in Dar es

Salaam seems profoundly felt and exploited by individuals while never built up sufficiently through major agriculture projects or sustained managed forestry in the postcolonial period. Yet Nyerere certainly constructs a rhetorical hedge around the border of Dar, separating the city from ‘traditional’ and virtuous village life.

Cronon’s work is a remarkable example of how to construct an urban history that centrally considers a city’s economic and material relationship with its hinterland. In heeding his example, I have shifted my focus from the city’s geographical center to its expanding outer edges. But Nature’s Metropolis also serves more broadly as a reminder to consider rhetorically, socially, and culturally what sort of porous or impermeable boundaries exist between the two. A 1952 report by the Department of Town Planning confirmed the fruitful potential of bringing Cronon’s approach to bear on Dar’s environmental history:

Towns do not just happen. They grow in response to a wide variety of needs,

often unexpressed and inarticulate; they are the resultant of a complex of

component forces, social, political, geographic, topographical, industrial and

33 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 17.

20

commercial. For this reason, it is most important that an attempt should be made

to determine what might be called the catchment area’ of each town – the area of

country within which the inhabitants, by necessity, turn towards the town at the

centre for trade, industrial outlet, social services, government and enjoyment. …

Within this catchment area, it is necessary to carry out a fairly detailed ecological

survey, and to determine the industrial, natural and economic potential of the area.

It is upon these factors alone that it can be determined whether the central towns

will develop and to what extent, or whether new towns and villages with shorter

focal lengths will spring up out of a fragmentation of the catchment areas.34

In other words, regardless of how robustly cities come to use their hinterlands, their fortunes are tied together and their environments reflect one another. Or, as AbulMaliq

Simone writes, “There is an oscillating relationship where both rural and urban offer always transitional sites for the remaking of the other, depending on their respective economic fortunes.”35 Of course, it is not just the hinterland and the city that are transformed in this process of interaction, but also the livelihoods of those who bring these two places closer together.

Chapter Summary

Chapter One, “Narratives of Development in Tanzania,” looks at a variety of development projects and perspectives that shaped Dar es Salaam from independence to structural adjustment. The chapter first charts development trends across Africa after

34 1952 Annual Report of the Department of Town Planning (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers). Tanzanian National Library. 35 AbdulMaliq Simone, For the City yet to Come, 180.

21 independence, examining large-scale shifts in Tanzania’s development policy and its economic fortunes. This chapter also looks at how development experts from United

States government agencies and multilateral banks perceived Tanzania and Nyerere, and how their perceptions changed over the course of the twenty-five-year period examined here. Following this discussion, the chapter then considers development projects undertaken specifically in Dar es Salaam by the state, the World Bank, and local communities. Lastly, as a point of conceptual comparison, I look at the plan to move the capital to Dodoma and the master plan for the city that embodies Nyerere’s ideals for urban planning and development.

Chapter Two, “Going to the Ground,” looks at issues surrounding land use in the city, charting the expansion of the city into the hinterlands and the processes for owning and renting land. Pervasive informal development throughout the period of this study was the key element that both allowed for citizen adaptation to circumstance and thwarted official development plans. Thus the chapter considers what circumstances provoked the development of the hinterlands as a product of the meeting of two different land policies on the edge of the city. The difference between municipal and regional land policy allowed the municipal government either to gain access to land for “planning” purposes or, alternately, to draw the city border in order to avoid responsibility for marginal communities as it suited their needs. I also try to uncover citizens’ own strategies for using land and relocating throughout their lives depending on their fortunes and needs.

Land ownership and use issues framed many of Dar es Salaams’ most fundamental debates between the executive planning power of the state and individual rights.

22

Chapter Three, “The Political Ecology of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam,” explores agricultural land use and how individuals would find ways to cultivate food for their families in the city or bring produce in from the rural areas to sell for supplemental income. This chapter also considers the politics surrounding food shortages in Dar es

Salaam, including the government’s campaigns against food hawkers and street vendors.

State fears of “saboteurs” stockpiling scarce resources and thwarting the state’s attempts to cultivate proper channels for food distribution transpired into a series of campaigns against urban street vendors and small non-government foodshops. Ultimately, I suggest that the city became more agricultural over time rather than less so, as a result of the economic crisis. Also, citizens acting outside of legal channels helped ensure that nutritional food found its way to the city’s outer communities.

Chapter Four sketches out the development and expansion of Dar’s roads and transportation system and its eventual chronic shortcomings that caused a transportation crisis. By the 1970s, problems in public transportation severely affected workers’ ability to get to their jobs, particularly as working class families were priced farther and farther out of town where the commute to work could often be more than two hours due to infrequent buses and poor roads. Relatedly, workers saw company cars as symbols of privilege that allowed bureaucrats a way of sidestepping this everyday inconvenience that they could not avoid. In The Daily News, debates over buses and use of company cars echoed a much larger and less concrete debate about who was responsible for upholding

Ujamaa values.

The fifth and final chapter examines narratives of waste and wastefulness in Dar es Salaam. To illustrate the city’s complicated sanitary past, the first section considers the

23 three master plans of Dar es Salaam. This section examines the initial emphasis planners placed on partitioning neighborhoods and preserving open space as buffer zones intended to prohibit overcrowding. As a result of colonial planning, the postcolonial city initially perpetuated this approach, exacerbating chronic sanitation and infrastructure problems.

However, as landscapes of waste and sanitation became more chaotic and blurred, definitions of what dirt and dirty places represented also ultimately changed. Colonial conceptions of waste were anchored to racial ideas of the congenital uncleanliness of

African populations, whereas postcolonial conceptions of dirt conceived of it as representing undisciplined and lazy populations. These understandings of dirt and waste were utilized to purge populations from the city and to control urban citizenship and promote productivity, which was defined as distinctly rural in nature. As the city expanded despite the government’s attempts to discourage growth, residents were forced to find their own ways to handle and utilize waste in their lives. As a result, Nyerere and the state ultimately came to reappraise some of these survival methods as examples of his philosophy of self-help and discipline.

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Chapter One: Narratives of Development in Tanzania

“Our poverty does not affect either our sovereignty, our rights, or our duties.”36

In the late seventies, as President Nyerere was helping to formulate the master plan for the new Tanzanian capital, Dodoma, he sought to create a city that equalized urban and rural development and emphasized “the brotherhood and equality of man.”37

He planned to capture these ideals by evoking the rural village in the outlay of the city, preserving space for pastures, and developing food self-sufficiency through agriculture and afforestation.38 Nyerere’s imagined green city was an ambitious and inspired vision, yet in the context of Nyerere’s larger policy toward cities, and Dar es Salaam in particular, it loses some of its luster. Beyond the plan’s idealism, one could speculate that

Nyerere’s vision reveals his inability to accept the reality of urban life with its own productive industry and energy. In trying to connect rural and urban spaces across

Tanzania into one seamless agricultural nation, Nyerere aimed to flatten out the spaces of development. In order to make this transformation, he sought to improve the lives of rural

Tanzanians who toiled as subsistence farmers with little ability to participate in building a

36 “Letter from Nyerere to J. De Larosiere Managing Director 22nd February 1980” International Monetary Fund Archives. Central Files Collection Series: Country Files Subseries: Country Files Box: 3 File 1 Title C/Tanzania/701 Fund Assistance to and Relations with Members. 37 Garth Myers. African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice. (London: Zed Books, 2011), 65-66. 38 Ibid.

25 national agricultural economy, nor even sometimes with any access to markets, schools, and health care.

Nyerere knew that development in a poor country was a matter of choice and that

“the problem of choice is very much greater for Tanzania” than for other, richer countries.39 Fewer resources meant harder choices. This chapter considers those hard choices and their effect on the development of Dar es Salaam. It examines how development rhetoric—both national and international—articulated the environment of

Dar es Salaam through projects, through the lack of projects and incumbent state neglect, and through the promotion of small-scale self-help schemes that citizens undertook to improve their lives and secure their tenure in the city. This chapter also describes the diminishing set of choices left to Tanzanians as individuals and as a nation over the course of Nyerere’s presidency due to myriad factors both national and international.

Beyond establishing that Nyerere’s development policy was biased against Dar es

Salaam, which scholars have already established to varying degrees of granularity, I aim to look at how the landscape of Dar was transformed through community-initiated self- help development, the rhetoric of national urban development plans, and the influence of international development. Furthermore, I examine whether these were compatible visions of development for the city.

During the late sixties and seventies, Dar es Salaam was the intellectual ground zero for several African-centered independence movements in Mozambique and

Rhodesia as well as the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The University of Dar es

Salaam also served as a refuge for influential scholars and politicians from across Africa

39 Nyerere, Freedom and Development, 83.

26 and the world. Yet amidst the discussion and production of African ideologies of development and liberation for a new generation, the development of Bongoland (a contemporary nickname for Dar es Salaam meaning, “Brainland”) itself seemed to be of no practical concern. In fact, Dar actually suffered intentional and sustained neglect through policy efforts to encourage rural development and to fight urban primacy. Dar in this era becomes an interestingly contradictory place in terms of development: it thrived intellectually while eroding physically.

Examining the idealized version of development is somewhat like being perpetually stuck in a counterfactual world. Just as Nyerere saw the future of Tanzania in

Ujamaa villages, in 1973 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thought Tanzania’s balance of trade would improve the next year (it did not) and that 1974’s campaign for self-sufficiency in food would work where the previous year’s had failed.40 What did not happen must therefore be considered along with what did. This chapter grapples with the question of how to write about something that is largely absent. By the late 1980s, “75 percent of urban households sill had no piped water, 12 of Tanzania’s 19 major towns still had no sewage systems, and two-thirds of urban refuse remained uncollected.”41

Swallowed up into a vortex of development, Dar was still treated as an over-privileged urban area as it became increasingly dysfunctional. Ronan Paddison, writing about the state’s fight against urban primacy, points out that Tanzania faced the major paradox of urban development that many developing countries were also confronting: namely, that

40 “The aim of the authorities is to encourage farmers to increase food production so that by 1976 Tanzania could be self-sufficient in food-grains, and also to expand the production of export crops.” Tanzania Staff Report and Proposed Decision for the 1975 Article XIV Consultation, IMF Archives. 41 David Reed, Structural Adjustment, the Environment and Sustainable Development (Boulder, CO: Earthscan Publications Ltd., 1996), 111.

27 the state either had to deal with urban inequality by working to stop (or at least severely curtail) rural urban migration, or improve the living conditions of the poor majority in cities. As Paddison points out, though, “Clearly, administering to both could be doubly contradictory.” It was impossible to address urban development, even if Nyerere had been so inclined, separately from rural development; as long as Ujamaa villages failed to offer sustainable livelihoods to rural Tanzanians, cities would continue to grow despite their lack of funds.42 While Tanzania was one of the least urbanized nations in the world, it also had one of the highest urbanization rates. Thus the city emerges between the crosshairs of planned projects, lack of planning, and the unintended consequences of both. Also, in writing a history of “development,” sources that outline the lofty intentions of projects are far easier to find than evidence of their execution or eventual impact. This shortfall has been an ongoing critique of development. William Easterly in particular has leveled criticism at the “planning” obsessions of development experts, and there has been a growing focus in contemporary development practice on measuring outputs and outcomes.43

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT AFTER WORLD WAR II

In 1994, Goran Hyden outlined the three stages of development that Africa had undergone since the advent of independence in the late 1950s: “trickle down,” “basic needs,” and “small is beautiful.” Tanzania’s experience from the 1960s to the structural adjustment era of the mid 1980s aptly illustrates the first three of these stages. Following

42 Ronan Paddison, Ideology and Urban Primacy in Tanzania (Glasgow, UK: University of Glasgow Centre for Urban & Regional Research, 1988), 8. 43 William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (London: Penguin, 2007).

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World War II, colonial administrators and later the first generation of African leaders tinkered with methods and lessons learned from the reconstruction of Europe to engage in what Hyden has titled the “trickle down” approach to development. Development in the first stage was characterized by states taking an active and prominent role in development and essentially embracing a notion of modernization characterized by large public capital expenditures and trying to shift populations out of peasant and subsistence agriculture.

African states faced a dramatic shortage of educated civil servants to execute these projects and thus education and public health became key to both fostering a civil servant class and delivering on the demands of a population with high hopes following political independence. As Crawford Young describes, Africans at this time had a contradictory mix of expectations based on their experience with colonial governance: “The profound paternalism of the colonial state imprinted on the popular mind the expectation that

[social] services were an entitlement… at the same time the state was perceived as a hostile, alien intrusion.”44 Trickle down development was also almost wholly underwritten by foreign aid. The idea was to promote “progressive farmers” and, in so doing, modernize agricultural practices through institutions such as rural cooperatives that would aid in distributing these benefits to communities. The state at this stage also faced imposing obstacles due to the generally modest executive capacities that most

African countries inherited at independence.45 Tanganyika’s newly established government generally followed this gospel of big development projects proselytized by

44 Crawford Young, “The African Colonial State and Its Political Legacy,” in The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa edited by Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (Boulder, Colo., 1998), 59. 45 Goran Hyden in African Perspectives on Development : Controversies, Dilemmas & Openings edited by Ulf Himmelstrand, Kabiru Kinyanjui, and Edward Mburugu (Nairobi; New York: E.A.E.P. ; St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

29 the colonial administration since World War II. The goal of these schemes was to increase agricultural development aimed at increasing agricultural commodities and reclaiming food independence. Focusing on rural areas was sensible considering that

Tanzania was overwhelmingly rural and it would remain so through Nyerere’s presidency.

Following the general failure of these early modernization attempts, the second stage, “basic needs,” was a radicalization of the “trickle down” approach. This shift in development approaches emerged from the profound dissatisfaction that many new nations felt in the 1960s after failing to reach their optimistic goals for independence. In this stage, the “progressive farmer” was replaced with the “poor peasant” as the subject and object of development. Realizing the abject situation of its general population, the state no longer expected goods to trickle down to communities and began instead to intervene in the distribution of goods to poor populations. Nations that refocused their efforts toward developing their most destitute populations were rewarded by the international aid community, garnering them “special attention.”46 During this period

Nyerere, like other African leaders, initiated universal primary education and opened up health care facilities assuming that, without fulfillment of basic needs, peasants would remain unable to actively participate in their own development, let alone the country’s.47

Many states also decentralized their administrations to empower local authorities since manpower shortages were not as dire as they had been in the immediate aftermath of decolonization. Great importance was placed on coordinating and integrating government

46 Ibid., 311. 47 Ibid., 312.

30 activities. Yet decentralization often did not lead to any lessening of control from the center. The “plan” as a document and an idea perhaps became tantamount to executing it.

Hyden writes, “The importance of architectural blueprints reached its peak at this point.”48 A Tanzanian example of the preeminence of “the plan” was Nyerere’s decision to relocate the nation’s capital to Dodoma, a city centrally located in Tanzania. His main reason for relocating the capital was to expedite the process of administrative decentralization of the state. In developing a vision for the new capital, Nyerere aspired to create a new map for the city that would embody the spirit of political and social transformation. As will be discussed at the end of this chapter, the Dodoma plan itself relayed far more meaning than the actual construction of the city and its resulting form ever captured.

Hyden’s next stage, “Small is Beautiful,” was a distinct break from the two earlier stages where development was the purview of a strong and deliberate state. Brought about by the 1973 oil crisis, this phase was brought about by skepticism of the power and efficacy of government-initiated change. This shift away from the state as executor of development was further encouraged by the World Bank report in 1981, Accelerated

Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report argued that the private sector and voluntary organizations would be more efficient engines of development than the state could ever be.49 African governments handed over the control and management of sectors such as public utilities and water management to community-based organizations.

Ordinary people, often women, were in the forefront of this ‘green’ movement and took

48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 312.

31 on projects in community building and conservation. Multinational banks began withholding loans unless states agreed to structural adjustment programs administered to discipline sluggish economies and reform public spending. These were hugely unpopular measures, damaging programs and further exacerbating impoverished public services.

The 1980s also saw the flourishing of a relatively new engine of development, the non- governmental organization (NGO).

The emergence of NGOs began two decades earlier as voluntary aid transitioned with the Kennedy administration from relieving immediate cases of suffering to addressing development objectives more holistically.50 The Congo famine was one of the first international crises that cultivated this new breed of international aid. NGOs focused on addressing crises caused not so much by natural disasters, but by the collapse of governance and the state.51 By the 1980s, these once marginal organizations took center stage in development narratives. Provoked by the oil crisis and the ensuing crisis of confidence of major donors in the solvency (and often legitimacy) of third world states, agencies and individuals sought out local methods of aid administration.52 James

Ferguson describes these emerging development organizations as creating an “anti- politics machine,” which promoted the “suspension of politics from even the most sensitive political operations.”53

50 Michael Jennings, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development, and Ujamaa in Tanzania (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008), 26. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 27. 53 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 256.

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NGOs began popping up in Tanzania during the late 1970s. From independence until 1978 only seventeen new local NGOs were registered in the country, while ten already existed from the colonial era.54 Even as early as 1964, at an international aid conference in Dar es Salaam, a participant noted that the types of NGOs that would probably come to Tanzania would be those that “basically sympathize with what we are trying to do.”55 These were organizations that were not seen as posing a threat to state power and authority. Early on, development experts and the state sensed that there would be many sympathetic supporters of their cause across the international community.

Jennings notes, “NGOs did not prove to be Trojan horses in which Western imperialist intentions were hidden, nor did they challenge the right of the state to plan development at all levels, to implement those plans, and to control and direct non-state elements participating in those interventions.”56

TANZANIAN DEVELOPMENT AND THE GROWTH OF ‘SELF-HELP’

As noted earlier, Tanzania’s trajectory of development fits very closely with

Hyden’s general stages. Following independence, Nyerere’s vision of Tanzania’s future as primarily agricultural and rural gained him respect as a pragmatist in the international development community. Robert Young, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, writes that Nyerere’s conceptualization of postcolonial development and its emphasis on

“self-reliance and the preferability of small-scale projects” over grandiose plans has become “the basis for debates about the most effective social strategy by economists,

54 Jennings, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development, and Ujamaa in Tanzania, 92. 55 Ibid., 91. 56 Ibid., 92.

33 theorists and practitioners of contemporary African Development and Ecological

Studies.”57 This development legacy is still evident today across the continent and remains the subject of lively debate.

The geography of colonial development left the country with only pockets of development along routes from agricultural zones out to the coast. Even as late as the

1950s there were only 30 companies in the country that had more than five employees.58

The British efforts to industrialize East Africa had generally been targeted at Kenyan industry, neglecting Tanzania and Uganda.59 The export-oriented economy of cash crops had created axial and skeletal “exceptional zones” such as city ports and transport corridors, while massive swaths of Tanzania were left largely devoid of any infrastructure to participate in a “modern economy.”60 The movement for independence developed generally from calls to ameliorate this pockmarked development and its effects on the livelihood of farmers. To address the isolation and neglect of these farmers, advocates of independence first cut their teeth forming trade unions, agricultural cooperatives and clubs for African civil servants and teachers, which eventually transformed into the first political party."61 With independence in 1962, Tanzania became a member of the World

Bank, the International Development Agency and the International Finance Corporation

(IFC) and the IMF.

57 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 247-8. 58 Kjell J. Havnevik, Tanzania: The Limits to Development from Above (Nordic Africa Institute, 1993), 32. 59 Ibid. 60 B.S. Hoyle, “African Socialism and Urban Development: The Relocation of the Tanzanian Capital,” Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie 70, no. 4 (1979): 207-216, 209. 61 Andrew Coulson, Tanzania: A Political Economy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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The new nation’s first development plan was the Three Year Development Plan from 1961-64, which was largely created on the recommendation of the World Bank.

This plan was followed by a five-year plan in May of 1964 commissioned from a team of

French economists. Jennings and Havnevik have divergent interpretations about the nature of these plans that occupy the period before the Arusha Declaration in 1967. Kjell

Havnevik sees the Three Year Development Plan (1961-64) as a conglomeration of capital development projects that extended the work of colonial officers and colonial development schemes.62 These plans have been written off by many scholars as “colonial hangovers” rather than examples of any particularly new approach to development.63

Money for these projects came from the British state and local and foreign private sources. John Hummon, a program officer for AID who arrived in 1964, remembers this period as one in which the development world had imbued the future of Tanzania with much optimism: “When we first arrived it was heartening. Tanzania (then Tanganyika) was considered as the great (pun intended) white hope of Africa in many respects at that time. It was a country that was given special attention.”64

The main mode of development in the sixties was to expand the cooperative movement and cultivate the self-help movement as official engines of development.65

Jennings argues that the view of these early development efforts as an extension of colonial policy largely controlled by outsiders is wrong. In his estimation, this was a

62 Havenik, Limits of Development from Above, 37. 63 J. F. Rweyemamu, Underdevelopment and Industrialization in Tanzania: A Study of Perverse Capitalist Industrial Development (Oxford University Press, 1973), 48 64 John Hummon AID program officer in Tanzania in 1964-66 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/D?mfdip:1:./temp/~ammem_GK8M:: 65 Havenik, 37.

35 period of generative and interesting indigenous development policies that fostered a dynamic relationship between the state and society.66 The goal was to transform the peasantry into highly organized farmers, creating a modern agricultural sector that could then fuel industrialization.67 Hindering progress was the new nation’s policies apparent similarity to British colonial policy. The regimentation and modernization of agriculture had also been the goal of the British, so peasants were reluctant to embrace doctrines of efficiency and production, instead looking for improvements in infrastructure and services that had long been neglected.68

The self-help movement at the center of early development was not new. It had been promoted by missionaries and even accepted on a local level by colonial administrators. Despite this tacit acceptance by administrators, TANU also encouraged self-help as a form of resistance against ineffectual models of colonial development in rural areas. By the 1960s, self-help was incorporated into the official development strategy and policy. The idea was that self-help as the engine of development allowed communities to dictate their own projects and manifest their own results.69 Successful to a fault, self-help became a “canny” way to secure development funding on a local level through peasants pushing for the funds for a school or dispensary in their village to then use part of that money for other development needs as well.70 The resounding popularity

66 Michael Jennings, “‘We Must Run While Others Walk’: Popular Participation and Development Crisis in Tanzania, 1961-9,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2003): 163-187, 165 6767 Ibid., 163-4. 68 Hyden, 86. 69 Jennings, “We Must Run While Others Walk,” 166. 70 Ibid., 171 on civil society and the state: “the extent of self-help in Tanzania in the early 1960s, particularly that operating in the informal development sector, raises questions about the nature of 'civil society' in Africa. The conventional definition of civil society -autonomous (from the state) citizen

36 and proliferation of such programs ultimately came under the scrutiny of the state. Their popularity made Nyerere question whether the state had lost control of development and whether national development goals were being overwhelmed by the ability of communities to corner precious funds by initiating multiple projects.71

Development plans were also stymied in 1964 by a series of converging events that shook the world’s outlook on Tanzania. These events included the revolution in

Zanzibar, the army mutiny on mainland Tanzania, Frelimo’s (the Mozambican liberation front based in Dar es Salaam) declaration of war on Portugal, the government support of uprisings in Zaire, the acceptance of military and financial aid from China, and lastly the spreading allegation that the United States had attempted to overthrow the newly formed

Tanzanian republic.72 Thus, as Tanzania became active and vocal in the politics of the region and the continent, mutual skepticism between the Tanzania and the West grew. In the aftermath of the events of 1964, foreign investors pulled out 290 million dollars worth of capital from the country equaling about half of the country’s “potential capital formation.”73

Despite the turmoil in Tanzania’s international relationships, the big shift in global appraisal of Tanzania came with the Arusha Declaration in 1967. J. F.

Rweyemamu notes that from 1962 to 1966 there was not any apparent “malaise” that

organizations and networks… does not apply to self-help in the early independence period. Yet clearly a massive movement of community action was under way, operating increasingly outside the direct control of the state, and implementing schemes largely desired the that community (or sections within it). If self- help and popular participation in the early 1960s does not quite fit the current definitions of ‘civil society’ neither did it reflect an entirely traditional concept of communal labour and community efforts” (184). 71 Jennings, “We Must Run While Others Walk,” 174. 72 Rweyemamu, Underdevelopment and Industrialization in Tanzania, 43. 73 Ibid., 44.

37 suggested theneed for the policy shift declared by the Arusha Declaration.”74 The West was “shocked” by the declaration and failed to see it within a narrative of historical events in the country.75 One of the major elements of the Declaration was its definition and description of the central role of self-reliance in the future of Tanzanian development. James P. Thurber Jr., who arrived the year of Arusha working for the

United States Information Agency (USIA), recalls the West’s shifting perception of

Nyerere at this time:

We went with stars in our eyes, believed that the future of Africa was on the way

up and it would soon become a full-fledged partner in the western world. …the

stars were out of our eyes when we left six years later. Nyerere had done, up to

that point, a great job in Tanzania. The stores were full of goods. There was

foreign exchange. We could buy what we wanted. To the best of our knowledge,

very few Tanzanians were hungry and they were allowed to lead their lives pretty

much as they had all along.76

While diplomatic and political considerations in the West viewed the Arusha Declaration with alarm due to its socialist framework and language, the development community was at the time very hopeful for what it could mean and what it could model to the rest of the developing world. As noted, self-help was an approach to development policy employed before Arusha; the declaration crystalized “self-reliance” as both an ethos of development

74Ibid., 46. 75 Ibid., 46 (The Times of London 13 February, Newsweek 20 February, Der Spiegel, 20 February, Frankfurter Algemeine, 10 February 1967). 76 James Thurber, Oral History Interview, December 1, 1990. The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 13, 2011

38 and a practical state policy. In the Declaration, Nyerere extensively critiques the kind of development that is characterized solely by a parade of needy government agencies and community groups begging parliament “palms open” for financial assistance.77 He also eschewed the practice of running to other countries for financial assistance:78 “Our

Government and different groups of our leaders,” Nyerere wrote, “never stop thinking about methods of getting finance from abroad. And if we get some money, or even if we just get a promise of it, our newspapers, our radio, and our leaders, all advertise the fact in order that every person shall know that salvation is coming, or is on the way.” Warning against the uncritical acceptance of foreign money and equating it to undermining

Tanzania’s sovereignty, Nyerere declared, “It is stupid to rely on money as the major instrument of development when we know only too well that our country is poor.”79

By 1971, some of these issues of international involvement in Tanzanian decision-making began to manifest themselves and purveyors of foreign aid realized that they were, theoretically, in a powerful position to influence what development projects the country would be able to execute. The US government noted increasing shortages of goods and “local discontent in the urban areas.”80 Merchants from cities far away from

77 Julius Nyerere, Arusha Declaration, 1967 in Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 78 At the end of the sixties, still very hopeful of Tanzania’s future, Nyerere addressed the question of how foreign aid fit into his socialist vision of the nation’s future with the Opening of the Friendship Textile Mill in 1968 that had been funded in part by the People’s Republic of China. The Mill for Nyerere represented that Tanzania “does not mean hostility to the people of other countries, nor a rejection of the help they are willing to give us when that help enables us to becomes more self-reliant in the long run”(Freedom and Socialism, 47). Nyerere’s argument at this time is that contributions from international donors and other countries were ultimately making Tanzania more self-reliant rather than have to look internationally for manufactured products such as cloth. (48). 79 Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, 238 80 “Telegram, State Department, Subject: Tanzania 1971 and US Tanzanian Relations From American Embassy Dar to Department of State” RG 59 General Records of the Department of State Subject Numeric

39

Dar traveled to the capital for basic commodities such as flour and rice. A telegram to the

State Department from the Tanzanian Embassy highlights the growing realization that

Tanzania’s development, despite Nyerere’s intentions, would remain completely vulnerable to the whims of international donors and foreign agendas:

For the near future it is unlikely that Tanzania will be able to finance from her

own resources any significant new development projects: thus Tanzania’s

development plan will essentially consist of those projects which are or have been

attractive to foreign donor rather than those chosen by the Tanzanians for priority

attention.81

The state department understood this vulnerability was in direct contrast to the desires of the newly independent nation.82 There were, of course, self-interested motives for the

United States to assess this growing vulnerability, noting in 1971 that Tanzania had bought 7000 tons of corn from Mexico due to their shortages (which also included vegetable oil and wheat shortages) and had recently contracted for “18 month delivery of

50,000 tons wheat from Australia.” The embassy noted that they intended “to get some

Files, 1970-73 Political and Defense Box 2619 From: POL TANZAN-A to: POL 6 THAI National Archives, College Park, MD. 81 Telegram, State Department Subject: Tanzania 1971 and US Tanzanian Relations From American Embassy Dar to Department of State 7-8 of telegram. RG 59 General Records of the Department of State Subject Numeric Files, 1970-73 Political and Defense Box 2619 From: POL TANZAN-A to: POL 6 THAI. National Archives, College Park, MD. 82 Dept. of State Airgram to AID from Dar es Salaam: “Proposal for preparation of a Development Assistance Program.” June 24, 1972. RG 59 General Records of the Department of State Subject Numeric File, 1970-73 Economic AID (US) 8-Sudent to AID (US) THAI Box 582 Folder “T” 1/1/70 “Unlike some of the other least developed countries, the Tanzanian Government is actively mobilizing its own national resources to address its most urgent problems. In doing so, the Tanzanians are concentrating on improving their own efforts, emphasizing self-reliance and self-help. The development goal is more than achieving as high a GNP growth rate as possible’ it is to uplift the whole society and distribute the benefits of development widely among the people as the economy develops.”

40 piece of the above import requirement.”83 In reflecting on a food aid program he administered in Tanzania, Richard Podol recalled, “Believe it or not, it was cheaper to import corn from the United States than to bring it from Western Tanzania to Dar es

Salaam. That tells you something, doesn’t it?”84

The US government was also interested in keeping up its relationship with

Tanzania because it feared the potential repercussions of a tense relationship in their dealings with the rest of the developing world. After a particularly tense period between the Tanzanian officials and USAID regarding the administration of a program in maternal and child health, a representative of USAID wrote a telegram home noting the larger importance of maintaining a good relationship with the government:

I should think that AID would want to consider carefully the possible effects

elsewhere of Tangov adverse reaction to our new proposals. One of the most

attractive points of Tanzanian MC [maternal and child health] program to me has

been opportunity to present to the rest of the third world picture of one of its most

“progressive” representatives…. This example could be of inestimable use to us

in trying to promote this type of program elsewhere, needless to say, this

advantage would be vitiated if Tangov felt they were bludgeoned into accepting

our conditions in order to salvage their plans.85

83 “Tanzania Para Paper” confidential telegram from embassy in Dar to secretary of state in DC, Department of State telegram Dar es Salaam 4.28.72 RG 59 General Records of the Department of State Subject Numeric File, 1970-73 Economic AID (US) 8-Sudent to AID (US) THAI Box 582 84 Richard Podol, Oral History Interview, Sept. 12, 1996, The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 10, 2011. 85 State Department Telegram Dar es Salaam, 5.21.73 Subject: Tanzania MCH Program RG 59 General Records of the Department of State Subject Numeric File, 1970-73 Economic AID (US) 8-Sudent to AID (US) THAI Box 582.

41

This was a new type of relationship for both donor and recipient country and each was exploring how to inhabit these new rules. Nyerere meanwhile grew increasingly skeptical of the intent and effect of international aid. Delivering a speech at the Conference of

Non-Aligned Nations in Lusaka in 1970, Nyerere warned other developing nations that

The real and urgent threat to the independence of almost all the non-aligned states

thus comes not from the military but from the economic power of the big states. It

is poverty which constitutes our greatest danger, and to a greater or lesser extent

we are all poor. We are certainly all trying to develop. We are all short of capital,

and many of us are short of the expertise which is just as vital to development. It

is in these facts that lies the real threat to our independence. For in seeking to

overcome our poverty we each inevitably run the risk of being sucked into the

orbit of one or other of the big powers.86

Nyerere sought the same independence in decision-making from within the state as he did from beyond the state. Jeanette Hartman argues that he sought to create “a strong state which would be sufficiently autonomous both from internal societal pressures and from

86“Each of our states needs to look outside form some capital investment. We try to lay down conditions so that it will not bankrupt us, nor jeopardize our future independence. But we also have to accept conditions—that is natural and inevitable. Sometimes they are conditions about the rates of interest, sometimes about marketing, sometimes about exclusive purchase from, or sale to, the ‘donor’ country’; or sometimes they involve receiving goods which we can sell in order to raise development money. These are all conditions which we have to consider; we accept them or reject them according to their nature and our general circumstances. If we accept them we do so knowing that we reduce our field of economic choice – our economic independence of action. That is a price we have agreed to pay; it is a deliberate and an economic decision. But then we sometimes find that the aid, or the loan or the personnel, is dependent on other factors which we had not specifically agreed to. WE are told it will be taken away if we make a particular political decision which the donor does not like. Alternatively, it happens that when we are seeking support for economic projects, we find ourselves being encouraged to act in a certain manner because aid will be forthcoming if we do so. At every point, in other words, we find our real freedom to make economic, social and political choices is being jeopardized by our need for economic development.” From 1970 Conference of Non-Aligned Nations held in Lusaka (in Nyerere, Freedom and Development, 164-5).

42 external ones to enable him to implement policies.”87 Ironically, one of the main instruments by which he wrested control of the state was enacting a program of decentralization beginning in 1972. While ostensibly implemented to localize development, decentralization in actuality disabled several instruments of local government. Most devastating for urban areas, all municipal governance was abolished.88

At the same time, sensing a loss of control over development due to the unmediated growth of self-help schemes, Nyerere’s policy of villagization became increasingly statist as he attempted to push against the resistance of peasants to uproot and relocate. 89 To combat the lack of will to move to Ujamaa villages, the state exerted increasing control over its citizens, eventually making villagization compulsory beginning in 1973. After struggling in the early seventies, Tanzania faced a growing economic crisis due predominantly to drought and the dramatic increase in the cost of imports due to the oil crisis. Industrial production was also severely hit by the crisis with raw materials becoming more expensive due to severe interruptions in power and water supplies.90 Along with the drought, the shifting of large populations due to forced villagization stunted local agricultural production. In November 1973, Nyerere proclaimed that “to live in villages is an order” and a Daily News article depicted a rally in the Mbulu District where Nyerere told the crowd that “there was a need for every

87 Jeannette Hartmann, “The State in Tanzania: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” in African Perspectives on Development: Controversies, Dilemmas & Openings edited by Himmelstrand Kinyanjui, and Mburugu, 223. 88 Jennings, “We Must Run While Others Walk,”182. 89 Jennings, Surrogates of the State: NGOs, Development, and Ujamaa in Tanzania, 33. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 90 President’s Report Sites and Services World Bank Report, June 24, 1977, 3 http://www- wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2003/03/11/000178830_981019022857 63/Rendered/PDF/multi0page.pdf

43

Tanzanian to change his mode of life if rapid progress was to be achieved. People who refused to accept development changes were stupid, if not ignorant or stubborn.”91

This period became known as the Great Migration. The number of people living in official Ujamaa villages increased from 2 million in 1974 to 9.1 million in 1975, then to 13 million in 1977, which was 79 percent of the 1978 mainland population and 90 percent of all rural inhabitants.92 Attempting to alleviate the drastic shortage of agricultural commodities for trade and the resulting trade imbalance, the government clamped down on imports, particularly consumer goods and industrial raw materials.93

Taxes were levied on beer, cigarettes and textiles, fees for water and electricity were raised and wages and salaries were restricted. The government basically doubled down on its faith in the agriculture sector and sought food independence as the balm for development woes. The building sector was also damaged by the lack of importation of many materials and spare parts. In addressing the IMF at the annual executive board meeting in 1975, the Tanzanian representative Mr. Zulu wrote that, taking into account all the hurdles of the past year, “it is unlikely that 1974 will be repeated.”94 “However,” noted Zulu, “one should not lose sight of the significance of increasing investment in

‘Ujamaa’ or villagization. In reality, this is investment in support of agriculture insofar as it stabilizes production from land and from people on a comprehensive basis, the kind of

91 Kjell J. Havnevik, Tanzania: The Limits to Development from Above, (Nordic Africa Institute, 1993), 205 and Daily News, November 7, 1973. 92 Rodger Yeager, “Demography and Development Policy in Tanzania, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jul., 1982), pp. 489-510.” The Journal of Developing Areas 16: 489-510, 500. 93 President’s Report Sites and Services World Bank Report, June 24, 1974. 94 Statement by Mr Zulu on Tanzania Executive Board Meeting 1975, 1 IMF Archives.

44 economy which the authorities visualize.”95 Thus, the international community was being gently reminded that their goals and Tanzania’s were still theoretically the same.

In 1976 the economy recovered somewhat due to good weather, rebounding coffee prices, and agricultural production began to stabilize after the massive migration during the mid seventies. After experiencing relatively steady growth in the 1960s, these events, in addition to the growing tension with multilateral aid, major drought, the collapse of the East African Economic Community, and eventually war with Uganda further shook international confidence in Tanzania.

In the seventies, Tanzania reshuffled some of its sources of international aid and investment, also seeking out new potential markets. In the early 1960s, goods from

Britain had made up a significant proportion of imports, but in 1965, following the

Organization of African Unity (OAU) pact, Tanzania cut ties with Britain over its involvement in Rhodesia.96 By the early 1970s, China had taken over as Tanzania’s largest supplier, particularly of military wares.97 James Thurber, who was employed by the USIA in 1967 in Tanzania, remembers Nyerere’s skillfull ability to garner assistance from a variety of nations:

Nyerere was extremely skillful in playing major countries off against each other

for his benefit. As an example, when they needed a highway of some type to

Zambia to bring the Zambian copper out and take in oil to run the copper mines,

Nyerere managed to get both the United States to build a road and the Chinese to

95 Ibid. 96 Martin Bailey, “Tanzania and China,” African Affairs 74, no. 294 (January 1, 1975): 39–50.

97 Ibid.

45

bring a railroad, with very little expenditure on his part. This gave duplicate

facilities and a lot of jobs to Tanzanians.98

With the accumulation of new donors and projects inevitably also came the prospect of waste and the creation of superfluous projects. Richard Viets, the ambassador in 1979, somewhat dramatically remembers the excesses associated with the implementation of international aid projects. In this particular case he lays the crimes of excess at the feet of the Northern Europeans:

I will go to my grave gnashing my teeth over a mental picture I have of Swedish,

Danish, Norwegian, German aid employees spending every afternoon at the Dar

es Salaam Yacht Club sailing their yachts, scuba diving in those beautiful reefs,

living lives of considerable wealth and position, lives most of them I doubt could

undertake at home. They were paid enormous salaries, paid much better than their

American counterparts, and doing fairly well nothing in my judgment to earn their

salaries. It was just a dreadful picture of the worse of the excesses of the donor

world.99

In light of these excesses, in the late 1970s the aid community attempted some soul- searching into how they could possibly avoid executing irrelevant projects. In the case of

American aid, this soul-searching led to an attempt to completely revise the process. In

1979, David J. Fischer, deputy chief of mission in Tanzania, reflected on the process of

98 James Thurber, Oral History, December 1, 1990. The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 10, 2011. 99 Richard N. Viets, Oral History, April 6, 1990. The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 10, 2011.

46 trying to determine actual results of aid and the unexpected ways that aid was often disrupted or derailed completely through attempts to tweak it:

We had a very large AID program, about $30 million a year in direct assistance.

Dick [the ambassador] and I both felt it was badly mismanaged and decided we

would do whatever we could to get it refocused…. We totally stopped it. U.S.

AID in 1979 policy was the most cockamamie policy I've ever heard of, at least

how it was interpreted in the field. It was the end of the Carter administration, and

AID had as a matter of worldwide policy adopted programs, which would only

serve the "poorest of the poor." …Well that sounds great on paper, but when we

arrived in Dar es Salaam, I asked the Director for a list of the AID projects we

were engaged in ten years ago. I got in a Land Rover, I went around the country, I

couldn't find them. I literally could not find any physical sign of the majority of

the AID projects. So I realized that aid was being wasted. Then every year AID

had to come up with a country plan. The AID Director decided to take it to heart

that all our aid, which in those days was forty-seven million dollars, would in

1980 and 1981 be directed at the poorest of the poor. The poorest of the poor were

defined by the AID mission as being people who lived out in the bush area. Of

course, they were the poorest of the poor because they couldn't subsist as farmers.

And we had a program that AID wanted to promote fifty-million dollars in

building some dam irrigation programs in an area of desert. The AID Director had

briefed Dick [Viets, the ambassador] and me on a Friday, and on Monday

morning Dick called me in and asked what I thought about the proposed AID

program. I said I've been thinking about it I threw him some notes. He said that's

47

funny I have been too. We sat down and in forty-eight hours wrote a telegram, a

rather infamous telegram, and we attacked the fundamental concept of

developmental assistance in Africa, why it had failed, this crazy idea of providing

aid only to the poorest of the poor. Well, we threw the whole thing into a cocked

hat. AID programming in Tanzania was essentially suspended for a year while the

bureaucracy churned out how they were going to respond to this telegram. When

the Reagan administration came into power, AID changed its whole approach and

in the process, made equally disastrous decisions which reduced aid levels in

Africa for all the wrong reasons. …We never did get it right in Africa, nor, I

hasten to add, did anyone else. The Swedes were Tanzania's largest donor, and

they saddled the Tanzanians with projects they didn't need, couldn't maintain and

which ended up costing them a lot of foreign exchange they could have used

elsewhere.100

Just as AID began to focus on the “poorest of the poor,” the World Bank also reoriented its focus in the face of increasing failures in Tanzania’s agricultural sector. The World

Bank’s president’s report in 1977 described a transition to operations “increasingly focusing on the rural sector and directly productive projects.” Five years earlier in 1972, ten out of fourteen Bank loans had been for infrastructure projects. By the president’s

1977 report, if projects were aimed at infrastructure problems, then they set their sights

100 David F. Fischer Oral History Interview, March 6, 1998. The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 10, 2011.

48 on “directly productive projects” such as improving the existing urban water supply, rather than larger or new projects.101

In 1978, Tanzania’s economic recovery was disrupted by the declaration of war with Uganda provoking, among other hardships, the need for more oil and military equipment imports.102 Basically, Tanzania’s entrance into the war led to a general collapse of the Ujamaa movement and to an economic state of emergency that more or less lasted until the mid 1980s. In his first month in Dar es Salaam in 1979, David Fischer recalls traveling out into the countryside to get a sense of the state of Ujamaa and the progress of villages:

I went out to try and find an extant Ujamaa village. By 1979 most of the peasants

had pulled up stakes and fled back to their original holdings. Anyway, I did find

one: a depressing sight if ever I saw one. Fields of maize untended, a schoolhouse

with no students. It reminded me of the worst of collective farms in Bulgaria.

When I came back to Dar, Nyerere called me out to his house to ask about my

impressions. He asked if I had visited an Ujamaa village. Trying to be polite, I

said I had but made no comment about my impressions. "Good," he said. "I guess

there's one still left in the country. Was it as bad as you expected?" Vintage

Nyerere!103

Confronting the failure in both domestic and international development projects, the nature of foreign aid underwent a transformation in the early 1980s. One major side effect was that by 1981 the international community had become “cautious of the

101 President’s Report Sites and Services World Bank Report, 8. 102 Havnevik, 56. 103 David F. Fischer Oral History Interview, March 6, 1998.

49 government’s inability to implement projects and skeptical about its willingness to address the heart of Tanzania’s economic problems.”104 Part of this impulse for change emerged out of observations of aid workers and developers such as Fischer, Thurber and

Viets, but perhaps most fundamentally these changes emerged out of the fear among lending countries of the continuing collapse of commodity prices and the anticipation that the Third World was quickly becoming insolvent. In 1970 external public debt (or debt owned to creditors outside of Tanzania) made up 19.4 percent of Tanzania’s GDP while by 1984, it had become 67 percent.105 Wary lender countries becoming more wary welcomed the growing role of multilateral aid and what came to be known as “aid coordination.” This move was initiated by the United States with assistance from Britain,

Germany and Canada. Organizations such as the World Bank, the UNDP and the IMF packaged up aid to countries, leaving the developing world on the hook to giant financial institutions instead of lender states.

Nyerere vehemently rejected the loss of control this shift in aid represented. He had broken off talks the previous year in 1979 when the IMF group sent to Tanzania to draw up a loan agreement had “irritated” Tanzanian officials to the point of closing down negotiations.106 Speaking at the dinner for diplomats in January 1980 at the Kilimanjaro

Hotel in Tanzania, Nyerere was facing increasing pressure to comply with the various long-term recommendations and conditions of the IMF. The IMF generally took on a dual

104 Ishrat Husain, and Rashid Faruqee, Adjustment in Africa: Lessons from Country Case Studies (Washington, D.C: World Bank, 1994), 353. 105 Werner Biermann and Jumanne Wagao, “The Quest for Adjustment: Tanzania and the IMF, 1980- 1986,” African Studies Review 29, no. 4 (December 1986): 89-103, 90. 106 Ann Crittenden, “Tanzania Reportedly to Get Major IMF Loan,” New York Times, September 4, 1980, D6.

50 role in the Third World of addressing short-term problems of insolvencies and also trying to reform the monetary system internationally. Critics of the banks saw this new role as meddlesome and neo-imperialist, reaching beyond their scope as a financial institution.107

By this point, Nyerere was engaging in public confrontation with the IMF over the conditionality of their loans as the options for rescuing Tanzania’s economy increasingly narrowed.108 Nyerere refused to give up control of deciding how the nation would designate its own development priorities and what methods it would promote for addressing the most abjectly poor. “Cuts may have to be made in our national expenditure,” he said, “but we will decide whether they fall on public services or private expenditures. Nor are we prepared to deal with inflation and shortages by relying only on monetary policy regardless of its relative effect on the poorest and less poor.”109

Economists who defended the austerity measures described them as a call for countries to “put their own house in order,” but as Amir Jamal, Tanzania’s minister of finance retorted, “What kind of sense is it when the thatched roof of

107 Werner and Wagao, “The Quest for Adjustment: Tanzania and the IMF, 1980-1986,” 89. 108 Alan Cowell, “The I.M.F.'s Imbroglio in Africa: Underdeveloped countries are attacking the fund for imposing Reaganomics on their economies,” New York Times, March 14, 1982. 109 “When an international institution refuses us access to the international credit at its disposal except on condition that we surrender to it our policy determination, then we make no application for that credit. The choice is theirs – and ours. But such conditions do reinforce demand for changes in the management structure of the IMF. It needs to be made really international, and really an instrument of all its members rather than a device by which powerful economic forces in some rich countries increase their power over the poor nations of the world.” At the end of his speech Nyerere added, “when did the IMF become an International Ministry of Finance? When did nations agree to surrender to it their power of decision- making?” From transcript of “President Nyerere’s Speech at the Dinner Given for Diplomats Accredited to Tanzania, 1st January 1980 At the Kilimanjaro Hotel, Dar es Salaam 1980 Series: Country Files, Subseries: Country Files Box: 3 File 1 Title C/Tanzania/701 Fund Assistance to and Relations with Members

51 that house is catching fire, and the floods or blizzards are deluging in at the same time?”110

Following the public media battle, in September 1980 Tanzania accepted revised terms of agreement for a two-year loan, but it became clear to the IMF shortly thereafter that Tanzania was not making good on its side of the bargain. Nyerere saw the economic problems of 1980 as temporary problems that should not derail overall plans for development, whereas the IMF perceived these problems to be part of the crisis of a country unwilling to accept free market policies.111 This dispute eventually led to anti-

IMF rallies in Dar es Salaam and a continued, contentious relationship between the IMF,

World Bank and Tanzania. In 1982, Tanzania drew up its own Structural Adjustment

Programme (in lieu of a Five Year Plan) which was contingent on a 670 million dollar

World Bank-IMF loan. Despite its ire for the rigidity of these international financial agreements and the political dimensions that accompanied bi-lateral loans, Tanzania by

1983 was second among African countries (behind Sudan) in the amount of concessionary finance they had received in the past ten years. For about two decades,

Tanzania had been able to attract donors from both sides of the cold war in spite of its critiques of international development and multilateral aid organizations. Yet in the early eighties it became increasingly clear that without accepting the terms of economic and monetary reform the IMF called for, the faucet of aid to Tanzania would slow to a trickle.

President Clausen of the World Bank wrote a letter to Nyerere in September 1983 alerting him that other than the Mtera Hydroelectric Scheme, without agreeing to

110 Clyde H. Farnsworth, “McNamara Calls on World Bank To Intensify Fight Against Poverty: ‘Strong and Bold Vision’ World,” The New York Times, October 1, 1980: sec. A. 111 Werner and Wagao, “The Quest for Adjustment: Tanzania and the IMF, 1980-1986,” 94.

52 structural adjustment measures, no other projects would be funded.112 Clausen continued the conversation in a letter the next month, noting that the Bank is determined to “work closely with the IMF” to restore economic “equilibrium” to the nation.113 Beyond being a function of neoliberal ideals, on a practical level Clausen notes that the “The pervasive shortages of materials, spare parts, and supplies are affecting the execution of many of our ongoing projects; these shortages cannot be remedied by financing new projects.”114

While interested in continuing a series of infrastructural and educational programs, Clausen warns that “without determined action on the overriding issues affecting economic recovery, the beneficial effect of this kind of assistance will also become more limited as time goes on—and in consequence – project support in Tanzania less attractive than elsewhere.”115

Officially, it was not until Nyerere stepped down in 1986 that Tanzania’s attempt at a socialist, egalitarian agrarian economy was abandoned. This about-face led to the liberalization of international trade, especially opening up the import sector dramatically, controlling inflation, devaluing the currency and eliminating price controls. Regardless of the frustration that many aid administrators had toward Nyerere, he generally remained a well-respected, idealistic figure in African politics. In particular, American aid workers commented on how loved Nyerere was by the Swedes and what he represented to them.

Richard Podol, Assistant Director Foreign Assistance Program in Tanzania, remembers

112 Letter to President AW Clausen, World Bank from Nyerere 1st September 1983 African Department Fonds Immediate Office; Sous-fonds Series: AFRAI Country Files Box 126 File 1 IMF Archives. 113 Letter in response to Nyerere from AW Clausen, Draft October 6 1983 African Department Fonds Immediate Office; Sous-fonds Series: AFRAI Country Files Box 126 File 1 IMF Archives 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid.

53

Nyerere possessing an allure to foreign governments, particularly the Scandinavians, who

“saw that what he was doing was right. And, in a sense, if you look at what he wanted to do, yes, he was interested in what we call the poor majority… to uplift the lives of people in rural areas…. You never heard about Swiss bank accounts on his part, things like that.

So, yes, his goals in that sense were admirable…. It’s the methods that didn't work particularly well.”116 Deputy Chief of Mission David J. Fischer also clearly admired

Nyerere for his values:

He was a truly extraordinary man. I came to have enormous respect for Nyerere

because he was so disarmingly simple. He was a man who lived in very humble

circumstances. He had a little house outside of Dar es Salaam on a beach. I'm

talking a little house; it was certainly a lot smaller than the house I lived in as

DCM. He returned at least for one month of every year back to his farm. He spent

his time planting, hoeing and weeding. He had been a giant intellectual figure in

the African independence movement. But, he made some incredibly stupid errors.

I guess to sum it up. He was one of the most extraordinary political figures in

Africa in the twentieth century and one of the world's worst economists. What

made him so disarming was that he admitted it.117

It is in this larger narrative of the waxing and waning fortunes of Tanzanian development that we now turn to examine Dar es Salaam.

116 Richard Podol, Oral History Interview, Sept 12, 1996. 117 David J. Fischer, Oral History interview, March 6, 1998.

54

IMAGINING URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Among many indelible urban legacies of the colonial era, Tanzania was marked dramatically by neglect of “African areas” of town and the concentration of economic and political activities into one colonial hub at the expense of developing smaller towns.

The location of colonial administration attracted both migrants from the country and international residents looking for the newest, most modern amenities.118 Yet in no colonial town was there the anticipation and plan for a city of African proletarians, nor for that matter, any expansive infrastructure for a large poor population.119 Even in colonies where there existed a desire to accommodate the new trend of African nationalism, there was still little ability to keep pace with the needs for basic infrastructure and development. In Dar from the colonial era onward, it has been largely up to urban Africans to develop their own city. The unrelenting growth of African populations was both long anticipated and never adequately addressed.120 Writing in

September 1944, a member of the township development committee worried about the impending influx of Africans in Dar after the war, yet suggested doing little to accommodate them:

After the war, this tendency will increase as the demobilized Africans will flock

to the Towns as the only places where can be found the money, the food, the

118 Bill Freund, The African City: A History, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press), 67. 119 Ibid., 98. 120 This is addressed in further detail in Chapter 3: “Going to the Ground.”

55

pleasures and not least comradeship to which Army life has accustomed them. In

my opinion, the African must work out his own salvation in Urban affairs...121

Despite this hands-off attitude, the colonial government did build 4,389 houses under the

African Urban Housing Scheme between the end of the war and 1962. Beyond housing, however, the government did little to influence or develop urban life for Africans.122

Twenty years later, after countless discussions of the dangers of unchecked urban growth, the question of responsibility for developing the growing city was again addressed by the city council in 1963. The council decided it could not keep funding the majority of capital development in urban areas, from which “Dar es Salaam has benefited very considerably”:

We must be careful that this form of subsidy is not allowed to amount to spoon-

feeding, and I feel that in the more mature towns the time for capital subsidies is

nearly at an end. The inhabitants of the capital city, in particular, should be

showing the highest degree of civic responsibility, and giving an example to

people elsewhere in the country. This can only be done if they stand on their own

feet financially, and it is my intention in the future to concentrate Government

funds on development in the rural areas and the newer town, which are less able

121 A September 11, 1944, Letter to The Secretary, Township Development Sub-Committee, C/O the Secretariat, sender unknown member of the township development subcommittee, Township Development Subcommittee File FIl No 643/3 Provincial Office Records, TNA. 122 Richard E. Stren, “Urban Inequality and Housing Policy in Tanzania: The Problem of Squatting,” Berkeley, Institute of International Studies Research Series, No. 24, 1975.

56

to look after themselves. It is the duty of citizens of Dar es Salaam to contribute to

development costs according to his ability.123

The narrative of Dar a haven for the over-privileged as justification for its population fending for themselves has surprising continuity across time. Nyerere feared the possibility that the “real exploitation” the new nation would face would be the exploitation of peasants by town dwellers.124 Infrastructure projects such as hospitals would only service a small fraction of the population, yet peasants would bear the burden of repaying the foreign loans used to build these social amenities with their crops.

Thus while the rationale was different, Nyerere adopted the spartan colonial approach to urban development, mostly addressing only housing needs and clearing out slums. The Tanganyikan government sought external aid assistance for these particular housing projects and received close to a million pounds of support from East Germany from 1964 and 1969. Beyond these injections of funds from abroad, the annual domestic budget for cities remained modest. In 1963, the total development grant for fifteen urban authorities including the cost of new buildings was 70,000 pounds with an additional

40,000 earmarked for roads and drainage improvement in high-density zones.125 Most of those funds were used up supplying services to existing areas, thus arresting plans to open up residential plots in new areas that had been slated for new development. The funding shortage resulted in most towns only entertaining the hope of developing “major

123 City Council of Dar es Salaam Meeting notes “Minutes of the Special Meeting Held in the Council Chamber, Karimjee Hall, 16th January 1963, at 4:30 PM, 17, Tanzania National Library. 124 Julius Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration” in Freedom and Socialism, 243. 125 Annual Report Town Planning Division 1963, 6 Tanzania National Library.

57 schemes for the existing developed part of the town.” 126 Opening up new areas of town was generally prohibitively expensive because the development of plots also required the creation of drainage systems to protect against severe erosion. This protection was essential in Tanzania due to seasonal flooding and tropical rains. When drainage systems were constructed, they often lost their effectiveness by becoming clogged with refuse, transforming these areas into significant public health dangers. Roads remained vulnerable to the weather and intractable erosion problems if not also properly constructed. These chronic problems meant that when there was money for urban infrastructure, it was often directed toward already constructed parts of town due to the daunting costs of developing entirely new areas.

The combination of restricted access to funds and an inability to effectively regulate new migrants building their own homes led to a status quo of “non planning.”127

The council knew that “non-planning” would lead to “widely dispersed towns, uneconomical to service, inefficient in operation, and in my opinion will create more problems tha[n] it solves.”128 As one member of the council expressed,

Whilst appreciating the extreme lack of funds for dealing with squatters it seems

to me most unwise deliberately to embark on a course of making land available

just because it happens to be vacant, without regard for human needs, good

planning, cost of servicing, and ultimate contribution to a well planned town.129

126 Ibid. 127 Town planning division 1964, 3. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid.

58

In 1964, again facing low funds, the City Council drew up a five-year development plan considering the insolvency of capital development projects. The plan was centrally concerned with limiting populations primarily through removing and resettling squatters.130

DAR ES SALAAM AFTER ARUSHA

Following Arusha, Dar es Salaam was, in large part, treated as its own conundrum within national development planning. Nyerere allowed for urban growth but only as long as it worked to combat the primacy of Dar es Salaam within the Tanzanian economy. His plan for doing so was to encourage the growth of towns in multiple regions of the country. Combatting urban primacy was a germane conversation in much of the developing world at the time. Critics saw the unchecked growth of one major city over all others as arresting the development of newly colonized nations and perpetuating externally oriented economies. The general goal of confronting urban primacy was to improve urban rural networks through sustaining small- and medium-sized towns across

Africa, bringing industrial production to secondary urban areas to explore and eventually exploit the comparative advantages of different regions.131 Tanzania, however, was one of the only countries that actually tried to eradicate urban primacy through sustained policy measures.132 Nyerere was convinced that pushing past the initial hurdles of

130 “Removal and Resettlement of Squatters Town Clerk’s Memorandum to General Purposes committee 28th December, 1964 Appendix 135. City Council Reports of Committees, Dar es Salaam: Government Printers, April 1963, 556-558. 131 Carole Rakodi and Tony Lloyd Jones, Urban Livelihoods: A People-Centred Approach to Reducing Poverty (Earthscan, 2002), 54. 132 Larry Sawers, “Urban Primacy in Tanzania,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 37, no. 4 (1989): 841-859.

59 overcoming primacy would allow these smaller cities to flourish. At the time of independence, Dar es Salaam’s population was already four times the population of any other city in Tanzania along with also having the only major harbor in the country and serving as the political and administrative capital.133 The city after independence was home to virtually all Tanzanian industrial production, including cement, textiles, plastics, cloth, cars, tractors, bread and refined petroleum products. The preexistence of these industries promised the continuing primacy of Dar es Salaam.

The aggressive growth of Dar was seen as a threat not only because it signaled less agricultural production, but because it threatened to depopulate regions, creating problems of employment and development both in the primary city and at home. To promote the dispersal of populations, the government in 1969 created investment funds in nine different “growth poles” in Tanzania to try and promote the development of secondary cities, fostering industrial sectors in particular. When Nyerere introduced this plan, the goal of the plan was to keep people out of Dar es Salaam and while spreading out the resources and allure of the big city “the attraction which is now concentrated in one place.”134 The cities slated to be invested in and developed were Morogoro, Tanga,

Moshi, Arusha, Mwanza, Tabora, Dodoma, Mbeya and Mtwara. Dispersing the benefits of Dar across the country would lead, inevitably, Nyerere thought, to increasing development and standard of living:

For it must be recognized that the more factories which exist in any one place, the

cheaper and easier it is to build a new factory there. For example, in a town where

133Ibid., 843. 134 Freedom and Development, 96.

60

there are 5,000 workers employed, there is a ready market of about 25,000 people,

all of whom need to buy food, clothes, and other consumer goods. Their presence

justifies expenditure on building, let us say, a modern baker, a small plant for

making cooking pots, and so on—each of which will employ more people. And

the fact that roads, water supplies, power supplies, etc., have already been

provided for some factories makes it convenient to site new factories in the same

place. This is to say nothing of the fact that a large urban centre provides

opportunities for local farmers to sell vegetables, fruit and other foodstuffs

without great transportation costs. … The aim is to help each of these growth

centres reach the point where it is in itself an attraction to industry without special

Government intervention.135

In an attempt to promote this new regional scheme, the government also enforced uniform pricing throughout the country on consumer goods and on the price paid to farmers for crops, which became one of the plan’s biggest flaws. For farmers close to Dar es Salaam, this price leveling discouraged producers from cultivating because they were

“implicitly subsidizing the distant ones.”136 Additionally, distant farmers who were forced to pay uniform prices for consumer goods could not afford very basic necessities.

Larry Sawers argues that diminishing the productivity of Dar’s hinterlands and holding distant farmers hostage to high prices did not diminish the size of the city because “Dar es Salaam's hinterland is not the region immediately surrounding it, but the entire

135 Ibid., 97. 136 Sawers, “Urban Primacy in Tanzania,” 847.

61 country.”137 If anything, it actually provoked migration due to dropping standards of living in remote areas where they could not afford consumer goods. In conclusion, Sawer writes, “There is simply no basis for arguing that Tanzania’s ability to redistribute social spending toward the poorer regions has been used to redirect growth away from Dar es

Salaam.”138 Thus a dangerous confluence of policy and praxis surfaced early on in the postcolonial period. Development rhetoric was aimed at the country while the growth of cities was actively (if impotently) discouraged, and thus Dar es Salaam grew at the same time that national development policy sought to neglect it.

In the eleven-year period between 1967 and 1978 the urban population of mainland Tanzania nearly doubled in size and the growth rate of cities rose from 6 percent in the late 1950s to 11.1 percent by 1967.139 In 1968, the Town Planning

Division estimated that 20 new temporary and illegal houses were built every day.140 Announcing the Second Five Year Economic Development Plan in 1969,

Nyerere specifically addressed what he saw as the potential effects of preferentially tending to rural development and virtually ignoring the cities.141

Nyerere capped spending on urban infrastructure in the second plan, aware that it meant “less money and less manpower, which can be devoted to improving the conditions in the urban areas.” Nyerere bluntly announced that “it is quite obvious

137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 Saitiel Kulaba, “Local Government and the Management of Urban Services in Tanzania,” in Richard E. Stren, ed. African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Urban Growth Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988. 209. 140 Ministry of Lands, Settlement and Water Development. Annual Report Town Planning Division. (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1968). 141 Julius Nyerere. “The Wider Implications of Priority to The Rural Areas.” in The Plan is to Choose. Dar es Salaam: Ministry of Tourism, 1969.

62 that very little new development will be possible unless there is a great increase in the amount of self-help work done in towns.”142

To promote this self-help, the government mobilized housing cooperatives. The first one was the Mwenge Housing Cooperative formed in 1971, but they were generally unsuccessful due to poor administration and lack of “clear government policy on how housing co-operatives should operate” (see more on housing cooperatives in Chapter

Two).143 Ardhi Institute at the University of Dar es Salaam was founded in 1972 to train professionals for development and planning. The Norwegians also founded the National

Building Resource Centre that was eventually taken over by the Tanzanian government to foster research on housing issues. At this point, there was a real effort to expand the professional base of planners in Tanzania through bringing in international funds and experts for training.

Informal settlements had shifted from being a phenomenon of the urban margins to being the predominant urban form. By 1972, in recognition that squatter eradication was no longer tenable, the state endorsed a sites-and-services upgrade scheme.144 The scheme was seen as both a practical appraisal of what was possible and an opportunity to embrace the spirit of self-reliance that Arusha had made state policy. The houses constructed as part of the scheme often fell victim to the fate of many urban housing

142 Nyerere, Freedom and Development, 96. 143 National Human Settlement Development Policy, Ministry of Lands and Human Settlement Development, Dar es Salaam: January 2000, 14. 144 Squatter upgrading beginning in 1972: “The government policy entailed the recognition of squatter settlements as part and parcel of the urban fabric; legalizing landholding by titling; providing a minimum level of social and economic infrastructure and services in squatter settlements; providing planned, surveyed and serviced plots for new residential areas; and providing house improvement and house construction loans in squatter settlements and in the new sites and services area respsectively.”15 Decentralisation of the government in 1972 until 1978 with reinstatement of Urban Local Authorities and Rural District Councils in 1982. 15

63 projects, in that soon they were highly valuable and only available to middle and high income people.145 Furthermore, the goal of the project to aid 40 percent of Tanzania’s urban population failed to take into account the rapidly increasing rate of urbanization, making the impact of the program less substantial.

Two years later in 1974, when Decentralization dictated the closing of all urban local authorities to be replaced by regional and district development directors, urban governance was integrated with the administration of rural areas with a bias toward rural development concerns.146 The global consulting firm McKinsey and Company, located in the United States and the UK, recommended the decentralization program and drew it up.

The McKinsey plan treated urban spaces in Tanzania as an “afterthought” or, as Ronan

Paddison writes, casualties of a “misplaced ideology” of regional planning.147 During this period, it became very murky who was actually in charge of allocating plots in the city, ultimately leading to a range of party members becoming involved in illegally allocating plots, roads, sites for schools and health care facilities.148 Decentralization led to the unraveling of what nominal control over urban growth the government had maintained.

In the apparent vacuum of national funds for urban development, international donors and underwriters stepped in to shape city spaces in Dar es Salaam. The World

Bank, which was Tanzania’s second largest creditor in the 1970s after China, kept Dar in its sights despite the Bank’s general focus on agricultural projects. In beginning their

145Richard E. Stren, “Underdevelopment, Urban Squatting, and the State Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Tanzania,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 16, no. 1 (1982): 67-91, 85. 146 Kulaba, “Local Government and the Management of Urban Services in Tanzania,” 219-220. 147 Paddison, “Ideology and Urban Primacy in Tanzania,” 16. 148 A.M. Hayuma, “A review and assessment of the contribution of international and bi-lateral aid to urban development policies in Tanzania,” Ekistics 46, no. 279: 349-61, 356.

64 project to upgrade squatter housing, the president’s report noted that one of the major obstacle for any donor-funded project in Dar was the lack of priority given to “urban concerns in national policy.”149 The World Bank, however, supported Tanzania’s emphasis on rural development, noting that “any investments in the urban sector must be closely examined in terms of overall priority and impact on the urban and rural sectors.”150 In the late seventies, the World Bank reoriented its focus in the face of continuing shortages of production in Tanzania’s agricultural sector.151 From the 1960s through the early 1980s, the Bank also took on road improvement projects, a port improvement project, an urban water supply project and a sewerage and sanitation project.

A cholera outbreak in 1978 that catalyzed the reinstatement of the city council and local urban government in general also led to the World Bank’s sewerage and sanitation project. The existing system of sewage removal had contaminated the ocean surrounding Dar so much that there were reports of fungal infections from people swimming in the ocean.152 The inadequate sewerage system caused serious environmental problems that shaped the physical landscape and health of the community by influencing how and where people lived; the most economically vulnerable people tended to be the most vulnerable to these environmental hazards. The Bank’s plan also addressed the fact that improving the sewage infrastructure alone, without massive

149 President’s Report Sites and Services World Bank Report, 9. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid., 8. 152 Harry Osore, “Pollution and Public health in East Africa,” Ambio 12, no. 6: 317.

65 expansion, would only benefit about 10 percent of the city’s population.153 Municipal services often get extended to the middle- and high-income areas where residents pay proportionally lower rates, inhibiting the accumulation of enough revenue to expand the projects. “At present,” Hayuma noted in 1979, “Tanzania is in a situation where investment is heavily committed to bringing high standards of supply to a few, while the needs of the many are left unfilled.”154 Attempting to address this situation, the Bank hoped to concentrate more on low-cost sanitation methods such as pit latrines, waste stabilization ponds, and education in proper sanitation. This policy captures a perennial dilemma of planning in urban spaces. Similar to the earlier shift from advocating slum clearance to proposing sites and services upgrades, the sewerage plan attempted to take account of the reality of Dar’s mushrooming informal areas, realizing that tackling the piped sewerage system alone was tantamount to trying to fix the city fifty years in the past. These types of projects leave open the question of what counted as “infrastructure

Dar was now a palimpsest of development and adaptation. Any development plans were forced to adapt to the city’s rapidly changing landscape, which in turn resulted from citizens adapting to its infrastructural inflexibility.

SELF-HELP URBANISM

Citizens within their communities and neighborhoods also carried out urban improvement projects, which were the intended engine of local development according to

153 DSM World Bank Sewerage and Sanitation Project, 31 http://www- wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2000/04/13/000178830_981019125640 93/Rendered/PDF/multi_page.pdf 154 Hayuma, “A review and assessment of the contribution of international and bi-lateral aid to urban development policies in Tanzania,” 357.

66 the government. One example is the yearly competition to be named the best Ujamaa

Village in Dar es Salaam.155 In 1976 the winner was Gezaulole, a village in the

Kigamboni District of Dar es Salaam situated a short ferry ride across the water from downtown. Before Ujamaa, it was a Zaramo fishing village, Mbwamaji. The name

“Mbwamaji” had been chosen when the original Zaramo village, named Gezaulole, had been taken over by Omani Arabs in the 16th century. Gezaulole, meaning “try and see” in

Zaramo, was deemed an appropriate name to rechristen the Ujamaa village in 1969 in the spirit of cooperation and self-help.156 When the village was registered under this new name in October 1969 it was comprised of 217 people, yet by 1976, at the time of winning the yearly competition, it had grown to include 1,177 people after merging with a neighboring village. Later, when reviewing my oral history interviews, I realized that several people had mentioned that they remembered unemployed people being forced to move to Gezaulole in 1975 if they were caught in the city. These accounts of course complicate the newspaper’s portrayal of an entrepreneurial, self-starting village economy.

Nonetheless, the villagers had begun a fishing project in 1971 “with two boats, one engine and nets bought with money from the Regional Development Fund,” and in two years time, they had netted 15,200 shillings from the enterprise. With the money, they told the Daily News reporter that they intended “to buy modern fishing equipment” to expand their revenue. Some villagers had also begun a major poultry keeping operation that now included “1200 layers.” With the money made from these enterprises the village reinvested in other projects, including “brick laying, charcoal and lime burning. It is

155 Kijakazi Kyelula, “Geza Ulole is Dar’s best Ujamaa Village,” Daily News, July 16, 1976. 156 Jens Finke, Rough Guide to Tanzania (New York: Penguin, 2002), 134.

67 hoped that these activities will boost their development both economically and socially.”157 This level of local development project seems likely to be the type of communal projects promoted by Ujamaa efforts in peri-urban villages.

Similar to the efforts of villages, the Tanganyika Textile Industries also provided small opportunities for employees to begin modest development ventures. The textile employees were surveyed to determine the profile of their lives and evaluate how best they could be helped to self-organize and address “the present and future problems of young workers in Dar es Salaam.” 158 Like Gezaulole, the factory started a fishing group and poultry group. Despite having over 500 employees, these attempts at enterprises seem to have remained fairly small. The fishing group was started by seven people at the factory who hoped to earn extra money to help their families upcountry. The company hoped that, through the expansion of the fishing group, employees could “obtain a source of supply of fish at cheaper prices to add to the intake of protein to our workers.”159 The poultry group trained workers and their wives on how to keep poultry in their homes.

Despite its modest goals, this operation was only mildly successful. In two years the survey reported, 14 percent of the chickens died from diseases and half were lost due to theft, while the remaining third proved “lucrative.”

Workers also participated in a survey to figure out what services they would find the most helpful for the factory to provide. The most requested service was night classes

157 Kijakazi Kyelula, “Geza Ulole is Dar’s best Ujamaa Village.” 158 Agency for International Development Lot No 80-116 Box 22 Accession No: 286-80-112 Folder: SOC-5 Labor October 1969. National Archives, Maryland, USA. The textile mill, however, did not survive the collapse of the East African Economic Community because almost its entire market was Kenyan. S. M. Wangwe, Exporting Africa: technology, trade and industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa, (Routledge, 1995), 215. 159 Agency for International Development Lot No 80-116 Box 22 Accession No: 286-80-112 Folder: SOC-5 Labor October 1969. National Archives, Maryland, USA.

68 for workers, closely followed by a center to train their wives in handicrafts, the creation of a credit union, training for shop-keeping and organizing industries “up country” to create more jobs for the workers’ families.160 Generally it seems that workers were more interested in opportunities to increase their own earning potential and secure their tenure in the city rather than facilities or amenities. While I could locate in the archives only a few examples there are few examples161 of the abundance of projects such as those undertaken by Geza Ulole or the Tanzanian Textile factory, this was certainly the intent of the Ujamaa government of the 1970s.162

In the mid-seventies, when the largest migrations to villages were taking place, the composition of Dar es Salaam was also ruptured as populations were deported to rural areas for rustication. This policy was generally unsuccessful (as many scholars have

160 start night class for workers: 40 workers open a welfare centre to train the wives for handicrafts: 36 to give free loans or to start a credit union: 26 To open shops and to train more people for shop-keeping: 25 To organize industries up-country to create more jobs: 19 To organize outdoor sports, including swimming: 15 To organize small farming schemes: 15 To give interest-free loans to enable workers to build houses at home upcountry:10 To organize cattle and pig farms: 7 To build a social centre for the workers:6 To organize a club for boxing: 5 161 However, according to Swantz, Marja-Liisa and Bryceson, Deborah Fahy’s survey of Women Workers in Dar Es Salaam: 1973/74 Survey of Female Minimum Wage Earners and Self-Employed (Research paper no. 43; [Dar es Salaam]: Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning, University of Dar es Salaam, 1976, the Urafiki textile mill, which was established with funds from the Chinese and Tanzanian government: as noteworthy for its worker welfare services. There was a canteen providing subsidized meals, a cooperative shop, living quarters for 500 families and a kindergarten, which greatly facilitated working women's domestic responsibilities. A literacy programme was underway with the active participation of women." 8 162 Even as early as 1963, the Town Planning Division envisioned that regional planning should promote the blurring of lines between the city and rural areas: “The Villagisation Policy and new village settlements connected with agricultural schemes have drawn attention to the lack of regional planning. So far towns have been treated in isolation mainly because their distances apart render little geographical connection between any two towns, but in villagisation an area should be studied as a whole with a view to determining the importance of each settlement within its own natural region. Some of these settlements will be the town of the future and should be planned as such right from the beginning.” R. L. Sharp Town Planning Commissioner, 1963, Town Planning Division Annual Report, Tanzania National Archives.

69 noted), as people would often just reappear in the city as soon as they could find the means to return. In 1976, a Daily News article describes the role of villages surrounding

Dar as absorbing the unemployed from the city. As part of Operation Tanzania, the massive sweep of citizens into villages, twenty-nine villages in the Dar es Salaam region were slated to absorb 15,000 jobless “loiterers” to “teach them to work” according to the

Regional Party Secretary (Gezaulole being one of these).163 This action followed a decision in the region to “conduct special meetings in urban and rural areas to educate loiterers on their need to participate in nation-building activities.”164 The resettlement villages were all located within the rural portions of the Dar es Salaam region, in the three city districts of Ilala, Temeke, and Kinondoni.165 Five months after the pronouncement, however, only 150 people had reported to their district offices for resettlement and thus it became compulsory in November. To move things along, the state decided that one thousand people from each of the three districts were to be moved every 10 days until they were all relocated. Those who had lived in Dar es Salaam long enough to be established were moved to nearby villages, while newly arrived city dwellers were to be sent back to their home district. The plan failed to create sustainable populations as most made their way back into the city.

This expulsion of the population from the city was not just Nyerere’s idiosyncratic approach to solving development problems but was also articulated in the

163 “Dar villages to teach loiters how to work,” Daily News, July 24, 1976. 164 Ibid. 165 Rodger Yeager, “Demography and Development Policy in Tanzania,” The Journal of Developing Areas 16, no. 4 (Jul., 1982): 489-510, 502.

70 city’s master plans. The 1968 plan by Canadian consultants took a very aggressive approach to limiting the population in cities, including limiting

the flow of urban migration through an identity card system and the enforced

rustication of unemployed migrants, the limiting of squatter settlements, including

some demolition and the resettlement of offenders, without compensation, away

from the city. Added to these, urban residents should bear a heavier tax burden to

support necessary infrastructural services, birth control clinics would be

established, while, within the immediate hinterland of the city, agricultural

communities should be encouraged.166

Most of these tactics were eventually adopted in some form or another.

It is noteworthy, however, that the relocation of urban citizens was not limited to unemployed “loiterers.” Letters to the editor encouraging youth to leave the city after school to take up jobs in Ujamaa villages are not hard to find. The apparent advantages of this move were many in the view of those writing the letters. As one letter pointed out, it would spare money from being given out in “unnecessary salaries,” and it saved “our youths from the psychological strains” of being exposed to “urban hazards.”167 There was a sense among the letter writers that students should be responsible for orienting their education toward developing the rural areas and that remaining in the city was both selfish and irresponsible.168 This was not a new argument. Ten years earlier in 1966, the issue had come to a head after Vice-President Rashidi Kawawa had announced in 1965

166 Paddison, 13. 167 “Why Not go to the villages,” Daily News, July 26, 1976. 168 People’s Forum: “Go back to the Land” Daily News Sept 14 1976; “Why Not go to the villages,” Daily News, July 26, 1976; “Youths should play a bigger role in Villages,” Daily News, August 5, 1976.

71 that there would be a new compulsory service requirement for graduates of the University of Dar es Salaam that required them to embark on two years of service after university.

This service would include a period of basic training, two months of working in rural

“nation-building” work and then eighteen months of working at 40-percent pay as a teacher or in the civil service.169 Students, angered over the imposition of such a requirement, fought back with protests implying in part that the political elite was hypocritical to expect the students to give up opportunities to make money in service to their country. The conflict came to a head with a student march to Kawawa’s office where they were met by him, Nyerere and fourteen ministers. Nyerere, after hearing the students’ statement that this had become a battle between the political and education elite, replied angrily:

You are right when you talk about salaries. Our salaries are too high. You want

me to cut them? …I’m willing to slash salaries. Do you want me to start with my

salary? Yes I’ll slash mine. I’ll slash the damned salaries in this country. Mine, I

slash by twenty per cent, as from this hour…The damned salaries! These are

salaries which build this kind of attitude in the educated people, all of them! All

of them! Me and you! We belong to a class of exploiters! I belong to your class!

…I have accepted what you said. And I am going to revise salaries permanently.

And as for you, I am asking you to go home. I’m asking all of you to go home.170

169 Andrew M. Ivaska, “Of Students, ‘Nizers,’ and a Struggle over Youth: Tanzania’s 1966 National Service Crisis,” Africa Today 51, no. 3 (2005): 83-107, 90. 170 Ibid., 98.

72

With that, Nyerere cut salaries the next day, including his own, and expelled all students involved in the demonstration, which comprised about two thirds of the Tanzanians at the university. Most of them were later reinstated after undergoing a year of “rustication.”171

The altercation with the students and the continuing public opinion that students should relocate in villages suggest that the state’s conception of the role of the city in development was far stronger than any of its imagining of development in the city.

Tanzania’s unabated rate of urbanization had little to do with the development of the city at all. Despite all attempts to neglect the city, urban spaces were still easier in places which places to survive than rural ones. Thus Dar es Salaam, like so many African metropolises, underwent significant transformations thanks simply to the failure of agricultural development. Once in the city, the nature of urban development was characterized by the sustained attempts to remedy urban bias through neglect and to promote development through self-help.

John Briggs in his work on Dar’s peri-urban zone suggests that people who were removed to areas just outside of the city to establish villages “came to accept the move, at least after a few years, largely because they had access to land, and therefore guaranteed source of food” and yet were still near enough to have access to employment in Dar es

Salaam, if the opportunity arose.172 On a larger scale, I would argue that attempts to rusticate urbanites and to expunge them from the city contributed to the expansion of

171 Ibid. 172 J. Briggs, “The Periurban Zone of Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania—Recent Trends and Changes in Agricultural Land-Use,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, no. 3 (1991): 319-331, 327-328.

73 informal peri-urban areas in incremental ways by enlarging the perimeter of the city through small pulses of modest development and by providing food to urban residents.

In short, infrastructure projects failed to keep up with an expanding city. Small- scale local development seemed to have focused (ironically, given Nyerere’s stance on informal economic activities) on promoting small, informal businesses such as selling fish and eggs, and on urban expulsion, which was his most salient and enduring approach to urban development policy. This tactic, when it did not fail completely, seemed to have promoted small instances of urban expansion as people settled into the peri-urban area to attempt to both produce food and find work in the city.

There are practically countless ways that international forces intentionally or unintentionally gave contour to the city of Dar. Most obviously, the city was largely a colonial invention. Also, international consultants prepared all three of the urban master plans. Germans helped fund slum clearance in the sixties, but it remained underfunded and then collapsed. The 1970s plans for decentralization engineered by McKinsey and

Company was a disaster; government housing institutes for training Tanzanian planners were funded by the Norwegian government and the East German government, and later the major sewerage and water plan for the city was drawn up by the World Bank. In addition to these official plans, it is worth considering how the city’s landscape has also been shaped in places due to becoming the home base to a slew of development experts who come from abroad to execute programs in Tanzania’s hinterlands, furthering the segregated nature of the city since expats tend to inhabit geographically segregated

74 areas.173 These areas are marked by high security and remain far more impervious to resource shortages such as electricity and water problems.

FIGHTING URBAN PRIMACY: CREATING THE NON-DAR ES SALAAM

In 1975, an eight-volume master plan for the new capital was commissioned from a Canadian consulting firm, including five years of prospective urban growth that would promote the slow transition of the capital from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma.174 Examining plans for Dodoma is perhaps the best way to get a sense of what urbanism the state actually sought to promote. As B.S. Hoyle describes, the plans reflected the state’s desire to embody the concept of urban villages preserving traditional avenues of communication and contact within the community.175 The new capital would be spatially laid out as a series of zones that fulfilled different functions, such as residential or industrial zones, encircling a “central core.” These neighborhoods or “urban villages” would each house around 5,000 people and in total 20,000 people would occupy about 325 hectares. One of the major elements of the plan was that the city was being built in a terraced area and planning would take advantage of this topography, using hills and valleys to variegate the landscape. Some of the hills were already topped off with national buildings, but in general “it is intended to conserve large areas of open ground within the city boundaries in order to create an attractive and uncongested environment which to live and work.”176

173 Sarah L. Smiley, “Patterns of Urban Life and Urban Segregation in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” PhD diss., Department of Geography, University of Kansas, 2007. 174 Myers, African Cities, 65. 175 Hoyle, “African Socialism and Urban Development: The Relocation of the Tanzanian Capital,” 212. 176 Ibid.

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The plan to utilize the natural topography of the land echoes colonial planners who took advantage of the various streams and waterways that ran through Dar es Salaam to cordon off neighborhoods and preserve the sanitary sanctity of white populations.177

This vision, however, served the different purpose of keeping the city as “natural” as possible. These urban villages would be at the core of a “man-centered city” promoting traditions of “cooperation and consideration for others.”178 This configuration of living would coincide with the ten-cell formation of units that TANU promoted to foster “self- help activities and collective decision-making”179 with the goal of fostering a way of life in urban areas that does not also mean the “loss of access to vegetable gardens, fruit trees and flowers.”180

While parts of the plan may have unconsciously embraced some of the habits of colonial planning it was nonetheless an attempt to re-conceptualize what a capital city would look like and how it would function as an exemplar of Nyerere’s African socialism. In this reconceptualization, it was not simply a matter of aesthetic rejection to the old capital. Dodoma was an attempt to distance the new nation from the history of colonial exploitation, characterized by a coastal capital for easy extraction of resources.

Dar es Salaam, in the “very fabric of [its] settlement—the streets, houses, administrative and public buildings, the morphology and social structure,” embodied consecutive

177 This is discussed further in Chapter Four on sanitation. 178 Hoyle, 213. 179 Ibid., (quote from the Capital Development Authority 1976, 15). 180 Ibid., 213-4.

76 generations of Arab, German and British urbanism; it was a city that bore the hallmark of

Tanzania’s oppressors.181

Ultimately this attempt to control postcolonial development and develop a decidedly different capital, representative of the new state, failed to materialize. As geographer Garth Myers points out, the desire for a new capital represented an opportunity for Nyerere to reclaim Tanzania from foreign exploiters and reimagine its postcolonial future.182 And despite the independent spirit of the endeavor, old economic dependencies remain just below the surface. For example, the cost of relocation was to be

“defrayed” by the United Nations Development Programme and the governments of

Australia, India, Mexico and Pakistan, while technical and managerial support was provided by the United Nations Environment Programme.183 Thus, even Tanzania’s idealized version of urbanization was both supported and hindered by international elements.

181 Ibid., 215. 182 Myers, African Cities, 44-45 183 Hoyle, 215.

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Chapter Two: Going to the Ground: Land and Housing in Dar es Salaam

The central crisis of land development in Dar es Salaam has been that urban improvements have continually displaced people and worked to attenuate rather than resolve the encroachment of informal development. Planning has begotten informality at every turn, forcing poor residents to look further afield into peri-urban areas, expanding the city outwards. The goal of this chapter is threefold: to examine the changing patterns of inhabitance of new urban migrants; to look at what resources and will created these urban spaces; and to understand how land issues both reified and confounded definitions of urban citizenship.

Property ownership for Africans, especially in urban areas, has been particularly elusive and often unobtainable. Africans were first racially excluded from property ownership and capitalist accumulation under colonialism and later excluded under

Nyerere in deference to his vision of African socialism saw an acquisitive, property- owning class as threatening to the health of Ujamaa. While this exclusion from property ownership did not deter people from moving to the city and establishing their livelihoods and families in Dar es Salaam, it has profoundly influenced the strategies and livelihoods of migrants who do. What ultimately becomes clear is that the tenure of citizens in the city was not based on their status in terms of land, but rather based on whether one was employed productively.

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Thwarted from land ownership yet facing the state’s predatory approach to unemployed urbanites, many migrants to the city eventually settled into the per-urban zone. The environmental and social history of this zone is the result of the converging failures of both urban and rural development meeting at the edges of the city (and still rooted in faraway, unseen rural areas). As one woman I interviewed in Mbagala noted, it was “people from Kurasini [industrial area by the docks that people were kicked out of as it expanded] who changed Mbagala. In the past it was just bushes, people from Kurasini were given plots in Mbagala for resettlement, they are the ones who change Mbagala.”184

The growing peri-urban edges were not simply the result of the city growing from outside, but also illustrated the crisis of the city from within. People who lived in the surrounding areas of town relied on some amenities of the city, while those that moved out from the city attempted to remain urban yet could no longer afford the city.

INFORMALITY AND URBAN GROWTH IN AFRICAN CITIES

Considering the body of literature that already exists on Dar’s rapid growth, my goal here is not primarily to examine the historical motivations of this trend beyond establishing the history of land tenure in the city and the growth of “squatting.”185 More generally, the history of emerging African cities in the twentieth century has been

184 Zaina Salehe, Oral History Interview. 185 Richard E Stren, Urban Inequality and Housing Policy in Tanzania: The Problem of Squatting (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1975); James Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusuf Lawi, Dar Es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2007); Wilbard Jackson Kombe, “Land Use Dynamics in Peri-urban Areas and Their Implications on the Urban Growth and Form: The Case of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” Habitat International 29 (2005): 113–135. Issa G. Shivji, Not yet Democracy: Reforming Land Tenure in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: IIED/HAKIARDHI/Faculty of Law, University of Dar es Salaam, 1998).

79 discussed by multiple generations of historians, geographers, and anthropologists.186

There seems to be a penchant for obsessing about cities as representing both the logical fallout of the economic crisis in Africa and a mystical, bewildering agglomeration of causes and effects persisting past the point of rationality.

Much of the literature on the sprawling growth of the postcolonial city has curiously put morality center stage. This literature either highlights the sense of danger, irrationality, and abject poverty these cityscapes seemingly reproduce or defends the burgeoning, overcrowded cities as more inhabitable than one thinks. Historically, policy decisions regarding urban areas have tended to act out of fear and a desire to control these areas. Freund points out that this anxiety is not something unique to Tanzania:

The colonial call of panic at the presence of impoverished, semi-educated

concentrated masses of people was taken up in new forms. Such people were seen

as social parasites, absenting themselves from the export-producing agrarian and

mineral zones of rural Africa to settle in seething slum quarters where access to

incendiary literature and ideas was easy. In the 1960s and 1970s, most African

countries, wherever they belonged on the political spectrum, took up systematic

round-ups and expulsions of urban dwellers living in self-constructed shacks.187

186 Carole Rakodi and Tony Lloyd Jones, Urban Livelihoods (Ear, 2002); Mohamadou Abdoul, Under Siege: Four African Cities-Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos: Documenta11_Platform 4 (Cantz Editions, 2003); Bill Freund, The African City: A History, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara (University of California Press, 1992); Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, The History of African Cities South of the Sahara: From the Origins to Colonization (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005); Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World (Verso Books, 1996); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006), http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844670228; AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Duke University Press Books, 2004). 187 Bill Freund, The African City: A History, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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One of the central issues that receives much moralizing rhetoric is the rise of informal development in African cities. Due to its ubiquity as a phenomenon and term, it is worth examining briefly what “informality” even means.

The term informality has a range of implications when reflected on from different scholarly vantage points. Whether it be its particular legal implications, its environmental implications, or its implications for the future of the city as a healthy, safe, functioning organism, it is a term that is central to looking at late colonial and postcolonial African cities, representing often the accumulation of fears about urban living and its implications for the postcolonial state’s economic stability and rural productivity. Particularly at the moment of high modernist planning, the term “informal” has become the antithesis of planning and the highly centralized and organized state. It is seen as having no foresight, no history, no blueprint. Yet obviously there has been much done to complicate that flat understanding of informality and to suggest that in challenging the planning vision of a highly controlling state citizens made room for otherwise marginalized individuals and communities.

“Informality,” as ubiquitous as the term has become, remains a bit of a blunt object, still defined by that from which it deviates. Particularly this dialectic has emerged as a critique of the term “informal economy” by scholars who note that the term misleadingly suggests there is no structure to the informal economy.188 Clearly, after over three decades of talking about the growth of informality in third world cities, the term is

188 For more on Tanzanian informal economic activity: Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (University of California Press, 1997); T. L. Maliyamkono and Mboya S. D. Bagachwa, The Second Economy in Tanzania (J. Currey, 1990). Focusing on informal urban development, see Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lexington Books, 2004).

81 not so much a description as a denotation of difference.189 In her work on Tanzanian informal economy, Tripp defines ‘informality’ as economic activity that exists outside the parameters of legality as defined by the state. Yet particularly in terms of informal housing and urban development, this definition is troublingly simplistic; it suggests that informal development is not only opposite to formality, but also not even necessarily in dynamic relation to it. In the case of land use in Dar es Salaam, informal development is not just that falls outside of legal definitions of land ownership and use by the state, but it is often the direct result of formal housing and development displacing people, a process sanctioned by the state. Thus, is it really ‘informal’ if it is literally the result of formal planning processes? As the previous chapter demonstrates, formal planning collapsed in the postcolonial era, nominally replaced by self-help urbanism. A term such as ‘informal’ used so ubiquitously to sum up urban environments is particularly well suited to benefit from environmental historical thinking. Telling the environmental history of informal development highlights the points of conflict between how individuals and the state define built environments based on materials, use of space, level of planning, level of services, permanency, and how those ideas confront national ideas of the state as a modernizing instrument. Whereas in rural areas the state was an instrument of modernization (an instrument that failed), this does not necessarily seem to be the case in urban areas. And, whereas Tripp has argued that the informal economy developed as a sort of “weapon of the weak” for citizens attempting to survive in the city with ever- narrowing formal economic options, it becomes very cloudy whether the state and citizens were on opposing sides of informal land use. Indeed, Nyerere by the 1980s

189 Tripp, 19.

82 promoted self-sufficiency, subsistence agriculture, and eventually ‘native,’

‘impermanent’ building material all within the city limits.

LAND IN THE COLONIAL CITY

Until the 1940s, the development of Dar was primarily guided by a zoning plan that was prepared by the Germans in 1891, six years after their initial arrival. The city as zoned by the Germans was a particularly racially divided city with neighborhoods designated for European, Indian, Arab and African residents.190 The German administration buildings were located by the harbor in the center of the city, with the area westward from the port slated as an industrial area. Behind the administration building were German residential quarters. As the colonial presence grew, the German residential area moved eastward eventually out to the Msasani peninsula. This area, however, did not become more fully populated until after the war. Msasani, consequently, also became known as “houseboy village” because of how many Africans servants lived in the area.191

Indians owned shops and lived close to downtown in a northwest commercial district known colloquially as “Unhindini.” Neighborhoods for working class Africans began popping up in 1920 close in to the commercial and administrative areas. Even before

World War I, the Germans had begun re-planning the neighborhood of Kariakoo because

190 For work on urban planning and racial (and class) segregation in Dar es Salaam see Garth Andrew Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa. 1st ed, Space, Place, and Society, (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2003); Sarah L. Smiley, “Patterns of Urban Life and Urban Segregation in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” PhD diss., Department of Geography, University of Kansas, 2007; and Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar Es Salaam, (London: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2005). 191 J.E.G. Sutton, “Dar Es Salaam: A Sketch of a Hundred Years,” in Dar es Salaam: City, Port, Region, Tanzania Notes and Records, No. 71 1970, edited by JEG Sutton, ix + 213pp.

83 it had become a crowded, ad hoc African neighborhood close to the center of town.192

Many Africans had built six-room Swahili style houses there out of mud and mangrove poles called fadhahausi, where they would live in one room and rent out the other five.193

As the town expanded, a land ordinance in 1895 determined the guidelines for development in the peri-urban areas around Dar es Salaam. The 1895 ordinance also opened up a way for Europeans to purchase land in this zone from local African communities with customary ownership of the land. German colonial administration encouraged this practice in order hopefully to promote their vision of creating a plantation economy in the hinterlands of Dar es Salaam both for export and to help foster the city itself.194

With the arrival of World War I in 1914, all development in the city ceased and the town became a military base. When control of Tanganyika after the war was handed over to the British as the trustees of the United Nations mandate, they planned to develop the colony as a peasant and plantation economy, much as the Germans had. Not surprisingly, little thought was given to the question of Africans living in Dar es Salaam or other Tanganyikan towns. Their populations were seen as modest, containable and not prone to much growth.

Until World War II the city remained largely a resource for services and administration and commercial goods rather than for jobs.195 Thus, the pool of stable

192 Ibid., 13. 193 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 385. 194 Brennan, Burton, and Lawi, Dar Es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, 24. 195 John Leaning, Housing and urban land distribution in Tanzania (Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar Es Salaam, 1972), 8.

84 wage earners was relatively small and renting was quite common. Yet people would often move to the city to be closer to amenities and services without having employment, confounding colonial desires for urban citizenship to be extended only to employed

Africans. These drifters to the city, however, often remained on the outskirts on small shambas [farms]. They became a major point of contention for urban governance, as

Andrew Burton has claimed in his book, African Underclass.196

Before mandate rule, the Germans had created a land system in which land was treated as “unowned” with the exception of land that was alienated for German colonial settlers who received deeds and titles. This distinction created two very different land systems and rights regimes along racial lines.197 German settlers had accumulated by the end of World War I some 1.3 million acres of the best farmland in Tanzania, while

Africans owned virtually no land. When German land went up for sale following the

War, Africans bought less than one fifth of one percent.198 The rest of Tanganyikan land

(roughly 99 percent) that had not been German owned or subsequently passed on to the

196 Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar Es Salaam (London: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2005). 197 Tanzania. Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters. [Dar es Salaam Tanzania]: Ministry of Lands Housing and Urban Development Govt. of the United Republic of Tanzania, 1994,(9) This report, heretofore referred to as The Commission was a committee chaired by Tanzania scholar Issa Shivji in the early 1990s to look at the nature of land laws in Tanzania from colonial period to the present and to look at the nature of disputes that have erupted as a result of those land laws. The government anticipated that The Commission “would rationalize and legitimate the impending liberalisation of land in line with the policy diktat of the international financial institutions. Far from doing this, the report recommended inter alia that the radical title to land be divested from the government and vested in the village assemblies and an extra-executive body to be called the National Commission of Lands. It further recommended that a large and powerful part of the executive arm of the government, the Ministry of Lands, be abolished.”Ambreena Manji, “Gender and the Politics of the Land Reform Process in Tanzania,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 36, no. 4 (December 1, 1998): 645–667, 648. 198 Report of The Presidential Commission of Inquiry Into Land Matters, Vol I. Land Policy and Land Tenure Structure Pub by The Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Government of the United Republic of TZ in cooperation with the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, Sweden. 1994 10-11

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British was decreed by the 1923 Land ordinance to be “public land.”199 Access to public land for Europeans could be obtained by gaining a right of occupancy lease for up to 99 years. For Africans, however, land was dispensed under customary law. They received rights of occupancy awarded through tribal communities who were then in charge of dispensing land within a community. These rights gained through customary law were only permissive rights, meaning that the government essentially would observe rights to land but not necessarily protect them; customary land dealings were administrative rather than legal policy.200 Following independence, despite Nyerere’s rhetoric that he was transforming land rights and beckoning in communal ownership with Ujamaa, land laws remained virtually the same until 1995. Under Nyerere, land was declared ‘public land’ but was still dispensed and governed in accordance with the colonial Land Ordinance of

1923.201 While customary rights were conferred on communities, it was then up to the discretion of the local chief to distribute land accordingly.

From the colonial government’s point of view, the issue of urban land for African town dwellers was not surprisingly primarily a desire to control the influx, organization, and tenure of laborers. As the 1928 labor commissioner stated, “Every African city of any importance has had to face these problems, and whatever the solution arrived at may be, it is very certain that the difficulties of the problem increase rapidly the longer the

199 Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Food Insecurity and the Social Division of Labour in Tanzania, 1919-85 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 41. 200 Issa G Shivji, Not yet Democracy: Reforming Land Tenure in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: IIED/HAKIARDHI/Faculty of Law, University of Dar es Salaam, 1998), 3. 201 Presidential Report on Land, 17.

86 solution is deferred.” 202 In his appraisal of the situation, housing problems had become crucial for both temporary laborers “at present the victim of all kinds of harpies and the cause of much irregularity” as well as adequate dwellings for more permanent native populations.203 The expense and time of creating a labor camp, as the labor commissioner suggested, would allow the government to have more control over labor issues in the city, and to continue to exclude Africans from the heart of the town. Officials saw their role regulating populations to serve a dual purpose. They had to be strict in regulating how people arrived in towns and how long they stayed for the purpose of retaining law and order, but also to paternalistically protect the morality and temperament of laborers who would benefitted from being collectively located and monitored.

Monitoring populations, though, was neither straightforward nor easy. Partly this was due the lack of control the colonial administration exerted over how urban Africans often found their way to the city. Sociologist Joan Vincent writes that a traditional

Swahili institution known as utani, which means “to treat in a friendly, joking or teasing manner,” created relationships that allowed individuals to travel between tribes and find hospitality as they arrived from up country to the coast, eventually establishing personal relationships in the city.204 Utani aids people (and information) to pass into areas where they may not know anyone.205 In terms of town settlement, utani created the tendency for

202 Letter to the Provincial Commissioner from the labor commissioner October of 1928 on the issue of how to regulate populations and create a labor camp for Dar es Salaam and to the larger question of accommodation for the floating population of the town. Folder: Labor Camps Dar es Salaam, Provincial Office Files: Eastern Province File No. 311. 203 Ibid. 204 Joan Vincent, “The Dar es Salaam Townsman: Social and Political Aspects of City Life,” in Dar es Salaam: City, Port and Region edited by J.E.G. Sutton, African Affairs 70, no. 280 (July, 1971) 149-156, 151. 205 Ibid., 151.

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“migrant groups to settle down on the side of town nearest to the direction of their coming,” often creating tribally distinct neighborhoods.206 This rather simplistic conglomeration of communities has changed over time to become more diverse and intertwined, but when first settling into Dar, it allowed passage to the city, and safety upon arrival while one established oneself, and it was largely or entirely outside the purview of the city’s official eye.

The Township Authority, established in a township ordinance in 1920, was the governing body for the town and consisted solely of white and Indian members. Issues pertaining to natives were generally set aside to be handled by the District Officer and district administration. African leadership in town during the Germans was initially covered by unpaid headmen called majumbe, later replaced by five paid positions held by

Africans, which then, after many iterations, became known as the wakili in 1942.207 In

1941, one African was allowed on the Township Authority and then in 1943, a second.

Also following the War, three Ward Councils were set up for African affairs, or at least, as Brennan and Burton put it, as “an outlet for urban African opinion.”208 Thus, before the War, Africans had little ability to speak up about urban issues outside of the issues that arose completely within their own communities. Also, district and municipal governance often tried to pawn off certain administrative and financial duties on the other one, a habit that eventually came to thwart governance and order in the region.

From the 1930s onward, Dar es Salaam went through many different names and configurations of districting due in part to its changing status as a city. In 1938, the

206 Ibid. 207 Brennan, Burton, and Lawi, Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, 38. 208 Ibid., 42.

88 district that Dar was engulfed within was divided in two, forming Dar es Salaam and

Temeke Districts. In 1947, these two districts were united again as the Uzaramo district, which two years later was renamed Kisarawe at that time Dar es Salaam became a municipality. One year later in 1950, the Kisarawe district was then split into two again to form a new Dar es Salaam district and the Kisarawe district, the latter composed of most of the rural land in the area. Then facing more reorganization in 1959, Dar was detached from the Eastern Province and assigned status as an independent unit known as the Dar-Extra Provincial District to be governed by a senior administrator.209 This constant reorganization of districts resulted from government attempts to navigate the question of how to administer at a regional level in an area where the urban population tended to dominate development concerns and absorb financial resources. This remained an essential problem for Dar es Salaam: the perimeter of the city being a stark meeting point between two different administrative authorities and levels of development.

These meeting points become points of collision over land policy tied to how communities conglomerated and absorbed new migrants. While land rights and laws are never straightforward in their application, the tension of who owned or rented what land came under particular strain along the perpetually shifting boundary of Dar es Salaam as the government alternatively sought to control populations but avoid financial responsibility for them. These struggles were manifested as conflict between freehold land and native land, and conflicts between urban “planning land” and rural customary land. If land was deemed part of the township, and later the municipality, it then fell out

209 Guide to the Microfilms of Regional and District Books by the Ministry of National Education National Archives Division.

89 of the hands of the native authority and was either subject to determination by the planning authority or available through leases. With that shift, however, came responsibility to zone the land, extend public services to it, and make it available for people applying for land leases. The history of land use has generally been a struggle between planning and non-planning, yet to align citizens versus the state along lines of planning would be misleadingly simplistic. The designation of an area of town as a “town planning area” alienated land from poor squatters and often reassigned the land to developers or middle class citizens with the ability and money to go through the onerous planning process. As a rights issue, town planning has been a particularly potent and blunt object that, as Issa Shivji writes, “has literally meant the expropriation of customary lands and the extinction of land rights.”210 More tangibly, it has meant the evolution of the squatter in Dar.

The first master plan for Dar es Salaam in 1949 described the current obstacles to planning to be the combination of unorganized building and high land prices “exceeding the price of land in the centre of London and other European cities.”211 This master plan also came about in the period when living conditions for urban Africans were very low as a result of a new influx of workers in the city and municipal funds being channeled towards the war effort. Dar’s labor force was 14,000 in 1931 growing to 36,000 by 1952 not including people working in peri-urban industries such as quarries and sisal estates.212

210 Shivji, Not Yet Democracy, 31. 211 John Leaning, Housing and Urban Land Distribution in Tanzania (Economic Research Bureau, (University of Dar Es Salaam, 1972). 212 Brennan, Burton, and Lawi, Dar es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, 47

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Until the 1950s, despite the colonial government’s concern about the issue of

African housing, squatting in Dar was not a real problem.213 Dar from 1931 to 1943 grew only an average of 2.8 percent per year and then in the next five years, while populations did rise dramatically by an average of 9 percent due to labor demands during the war and following, Dar remained relatively small and self-contained. For the most part, the government was able to successfully handle housing Africans moving into the city. There were plots on public land made available and the government did not enforce any rules of development on that land. In other words, Africans were able to take as long as they needed to build their houses piecemeal and the government subsidized services such as road building, water, and drainage. Thus there was little reason or incentive to inhabit unplanned plots that lacked services. The government, however, could evict squatters under the auspices of development very easily and with little to no compensation until the

1950s when compensation was granted to “placate” the growing nationalist movement.214

Customary land rights did not exist within city limits, marking the city’s expanding boundary as an intense point of confrontation. The 1953 Government Circular

No. 4 made into law what had already been practice:

The disposition of land in a township has become largely a matter of town

planning but administrative action does lie with the District Commissioner in the

case of expanding townships, for which new and wider boundaries are proclaimed

by the Governor, in dealing with the question of rights of Africans living in

213 Richard Stren, Urban Inequality and Housing Policy in Tanzania: The Problem of Squatting (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1975), 56 214 Ibid.

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accordance with African customary law on land which it becomes necessary to

include within a township.215

The “question of the rights of Africans” referred to in the circular was the evicted squatter’s access to an alternative plot, which is common in the displacement of squatters in expanding cities across the developing world. In return for giving up their prime land at the center of cities, they are often pushed to the margins out of reach of transportation and thus unable to hold their same jobs or engage in their same livelihood strategies.

Anyone who was removed was compensated the value of the occupier’s “unexhausted improvements.”216 Also as urban planners and researchers have noted, in times when governments have little financial capacity to compensate squatters, the result as been to often secure the rights of squatters and in some cases greatly effecting legitimate urban infrastructure development.217 After occupiers have been removed, and the planning scheme approved, land is dispensed with Rights of Occupancy certificates for which people can apply.

Another factor that influenced how squatter developments spread was that British administrators encouraged a “garden city” approach to urban planning that allowed for

215 As quoted in Shivji, Not Yet Democracy, 30. Shivji also comments on the endurance of this 1953 circular in urban land rights issues until the 1980s, even when officials did not know the source of their understanding of the law. “In the 1960s, the then Minister of Lands Settlements and Water Development reaffirmed the principles underlying the 1953 Circular. In late 1970s and 1980s when policy statements are rarely come by, land officers could not even cite the 1953 Circular or the Minister’s speech as their authority for the assumption that customary rights were extinguished on the declaration of planning areas. By the 1980s even minimal ‘rights’ for the provision of alternative plots and payment of compensation had become illusory” (30). 216 Kironde JM Lusugga, “Land Policy Options for Urban Tanzania,” Land Use Policy 14, no. 2 (April 1997): 99–117, 101. 217 Dennis A. Rondinelli, “Housing the Urban Poor in Developing Countries: The Magnitude of Housing Deficiencies and the Failure of Conventional Strategies Are World-Wide Problems.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 49, no. 2 (April 1, 1990): 153–166, 158. .

92 the existence of many small villages in the outskirts of the city held under traditional law.218 These communities were, in many ways, the main exploiters of Dar’s hinterlands.

Timber, sand for cement, mud for bricks, stones, coconut leaves and grass, discarded tins and used oil drums and corrugated tin are the materials that have long composed most

Swahili houses and vice versa. Because the city itself has never grown as an industrial powerhouse, links particularly to the coastal region have not been defined by systematic exploitation of coastal resources, which is often the narrative of urban environmental case studies. The city’s main agricultural resources came from upcountry.219 By the 1970s, however, this dynamic began to change with populations reaching into the hinterlands once they were displaced from Dar es Salaam, and people from “up country” coming to settle in the city’s margins.220

Despite lacking the infrastructure to systematically exploit the coastal hinterlands for resources, the outlying forest zones surrounding Dar es Salaam, particularly in the

Rufiji region, were essential resources for the growth of the city.221 As a result, they became highly controlled first under the Germans in trying to remove Zaramo farmers and new squatter communities out of forests and shift to scientific forest management.222

The British were also reliant on coast forests for meeting the city’s building needs. Even before the arrival of Europeans, the Rufiji area had for centuries been the site of Indian

218 Stren, “Urban Inequality and Housing Policy,” 56. 219 Nimrod Mushi, Regional Development Through Rural-urban Linkages the Dar-es Salaam Impact Region (Dortmund: Universitätsbibliothek Technische Universität Dortmund, 2004), 36. 220 Ibid. 221 For more on this, see Chapter Four on transportation. 222 Thaddeus Sunseri, “Fueling the City” in Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, edited by James Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusuf Lawi, (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2007), 79.

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Ocean trade, particularly for harvesting mangrove poles for Zanzibari markets.223 These relationships between forest dwellers and the colonial state became politicized and important to the nationalist movement by the 1950s as conflicts over land and resource use evolved.224 Mushi also suggests that one of the reasons why the land around Dar es

Salaam remained under minimal cultivation after independence is because party officials, senior government officials, and parastatal leaders were all not allowed to own property under Nyerere’s ‘leadership code,’ and thus there were never plantation-style agricultural estates or large scale farms.225 Thus the hinterlands, except for the forests, were underexploited and were not subject to intense agricultural use. Therefore the main set of conflicts over land were based on small-scale resource extraction and residential or subsistence farming land use.

Looking retrospectively in 1957 at the lines they drew around the city in 1948, the

Municipal Council discussed many of the issues and reverberating effects of this decision.226 The council recalls that nine years earlier, they had decided to include in the new municipality a large portion of rural land surrounding Dar es Salaam. This decision was made for two reasons: first, it seemed easiest to control public health problems in the surrounding rural areas if they were part of the township; second, it was cheaper to administer and run the Dar es Salaam area under one authority.227 Yet enlarging the township boundary meant “bringing within its periphery an unknown number of inhabitants who will sooner or later have to be accommodated in approved layouts” and

223 Ibid., 82. 224 Ibid., 79. 225 Mushi, 40. 226 1957 Municipal Council Records 275-76, Tanzanian National Library. 227 Ibid.

94 knowing that “urban workers living outside the boundary should properly accommodated within it.”228 This enlargement created a level of neglect of the rural areas of town and a level of anxiety in urban zones where people feared the encroachment of rural populations into the cityscape.229 Africans wanting to escape rural authority, the municipal council suggested, are

drifting to the uncontrolled and completely rural areas [within the municipal

boundaries] such as Kipawa and Buguruni, where problems of considerable

magnitude are now being created. The problems of Buguruni and Kipawa may be

expected to appear in other rural parts of the Municipality in the near future, and

will undoubtedly create conflict between the Provincial Administration and the

local urban authority.230

Problems also emerged at a lower level than regional and local government debates due to the penchant of developers who wanted the government to designate land for high density housing, yet avoided the task of improving the areas where they were building.

Putting up pell-mell housing estates without services or the provision for services made it incredibly hard for the government to enforce uniform standards across the city.231

228 “Dar Es Salaam Extra Provincial District, District Book,” n.d. Tanzanian National Archives, section on African housing written in 1948 (n. pag.). 229 “The tribe, standard of living and habits of the immigrant need to be known. To what extent does the immigrant become a ‘dar-ite’ and lose his connection with his previous homeplace? It would be possible to ascertain in a survey the existence or absence of inks between the townsman and his place of origin in the form of remittances, visits and correspondence. The hypothesis has been put forward that it is the new immigrant who tends to be the law breaker and trouble maker.” “Dar Es Salaam Extra Provincial District, District Book,” n.d. Tanzanian National Archives. Section: Notes Leading up to Recommendations that a Sociological Survey Should Take Place. 230 Municipal Council of Dar es Salaam Reports to Committees September 1957 Dar es Salaam City Council Minutes Appendix 83 275-76, Tanzanian National Library. 231 Looking back in 1958, the city council noted that “while the allocation of Government land for high density housing may solve or ease a present demand for houses, the persons who build house and the

95

Furthermore, the council’s critique of the building culture of Dar es salaam pointed out that people who had not been in urban settings long enough to know better failed to know the required process by which to seek proper building permits at town hall while,

“deliberate law breakers have been able to reap the advantages inherent in the fait accompli procedure.”232 While this argument for excising rural areas was being tossed around in the late 1950s, planners were also hoping to gain control of the encroachment of informal development from the outside in by claiming customary lands on the outskirts of the city as “planning areas.”233 The government realized that the cheapest way to deal with growing geography of the city was to leave land in the hands of customary authority outside the bounds and expense of municipal governance and, when it seemed necessary for planning, they would simply take the land for “planning purposes

Yet it was not just the government that saw the different areas of Dar es Salaam as serving different purposes. Town dwellers themselves also manipulated different spaces for their own benefit and to serve different needs when able. Even those who had residences on the outskirts, for the most part, spent their days in town. Leslie in his study of Dar es Salaam notes that this was the case despite having their own councils and executive heads, and in theory their own schools, shops, entertainment halls and

persons who live in them cannot afford the cost of providing essential public services. The experience of the last eight and a half years indicates that a Development Corporation with specified capital funds, charged with the function of providing capital services and a municipal council charged with maintaining existing services and taking over capital services when completed by the Development Corporation might have been more appropriate than the present system under which the Municipal Council with or without its consent, is regarded as being responsible for capital provision and maintenance, with little or no capital funds to provide services,” Municipal Council of Dar es Salaam Reports to Committees September 1957 Dar es Salaam City Council Minutes Appendix 83 277. Tanzanian National Library Africana Collection. 232 Municipal Council of Dar es Salaam Reports to Committees September 1957 Dar es Salaam City Council Minutes Appendix 83 275-76, 280. Tanzanian Library Africana Collection. 233 Presidential Land Report, 71.

96 mosques. In fact, “it was a fundamental object of the plan that each suburb should be so self-sufficient as to develop a corporate spirit of its own.”234 Yet to Leslie’s eye, this idea had not yet taken deep root by the early 1960s:

a man may live in Temeke but he looks to the centre of town, using his own

suburb merely as a place to sleep; facilities and amenities such as schools,

hospitals and markets do not make a community, though their absence may help

to destroy one; nor do institutions which have had to be manufactured, such as the

ward councils (had there been a community spirit there, something like these

councils would in the course of time have grown up). Such a spirit manifests itself

in many ways: where a man finds his friends, where he goes for his stroll in the

evenings (and here the pattern is twisted by the very newness of most of the

suburbs, for a man’s old friends are by these large-scale shifts of population

scattered all over town, some in the old parts and some in the new and his evening

visits are similarly scattered…in an illiterate and uneducated population, ward

newspapers, but even ward branches of political societies lack any parochial

warmth; interest in ward council elections, meetings, requirements of the ward, all

would be developments to be expected were the ward units, but all are lacking.

Even shopping is to a very large extent done in the central market rather than in

the ward markets.235

Despite the reliance on the center for much of their livelihoods, and the need to traverse the city for social calls, neighborhoods did have certain personalities and reasons for

234 Leslie, 61. 235 Ibid., 62.

97 existence. Keko kwa Birali became “an old halting place for the travelers from the south;

Chang’ombe Kwa Wnubi housed retired askaris (soldiers) after the German’s left;

Kigogo “formed as a settlement dependent on the Msimbazi mission”; and “Buguruni, the biggest of them all, was founded around a nucleus of landowners who lived on their freehold plots and permitted others to settle around them.”236 While population growth after the war changed the nature of outlying neighborhoods, often the authority of original inhabitants gave a larger structure to these areas long after the influx of new arrivals.237

Leslie seems especially interested in considering the question of belongingness for new migrants to Dar, a subject that certainly reflects colonial concerns as well. Leslie brings up belonging as a way to reflect on the actual geography of the town and different environments seem to foster different relationships with urban living, community, and the government. His Survey offers a window into different transitional urban environments, why they developed, and why many people chose to live on the edge of town, either out of a sense of community or out of financial necessity. Municipal policy and the bureaucracy of acquiring legal rights to land also did much to foster peripheral communities, as has been the case in the history of many postcolonial cities with booming informal sectors.238

The government in the 1950s opened up areas such as Temeke for settlement by parceling out land and constructing identical units that people simultaneously moved into,

236 Ibid., 98. 237 Ibid. 238 Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2003).

98 lacking any innate leadership or traditional elders. “In fact,” writes Leslie, “no framework of society in which a newcomer can fit himself in his appropriate place.”239 In situations where the land is under customary tenure, when migrants are moving into land first claimed by one individual on behalf of himself or as chief of a community, they have to receive “his permission to do so,” becoming followers, in a sense, rather than leaders.

This tended to create communities with a core center and it is around “this nucleus that the shanties were built,” creating more of a special sense of leadership and community.240

Leslie describes those who live on the outskirts of the city in the Kisarawe district at the time as somewhat part of town by accident of the municipal boundary, usually living in a Swahili-style house connected to a plot of land for cultivation. Their lives remained in the late 1950s and early 1960s mostly unchanged by proximity to Dar es

Salaam. Those living in the ‘bush’ would go to town for goods and for selling, but not necessarily “go completely urban.”241 Peripheral communities were often full of people marginally employed or “unable or unwilling” to replace piecemeal forms of living with consistent employment, and thus their living on the margins was more complicated than simply being marginalized.242 One informant I interviewed remembered how, after he was fired from the railroad company for going on strike, he decided never to return to formal employment. Instead, he came seasonally to Kariakoo where he rented a room and brought with him a bag of rice for the season to eat while he sold potatoes, returning to

239 Leslie, 97. 240 Ibid., 98. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid., 92.

99

Rufiji when his food ran out.243 While he ultimately could not afford to return to

Kariakoo, this was his way of life for many years. Leslie calls these seasonal swells— both bringing people out from the center and bringing people in from rural areas to the city’s margins, through waves of unemployment, increases in wages, strikes, or coming to help family members with work in the fields—“going to ground.”244 These areas created complex safety nets that perhaps in some ways actually controlled the growth of the city proper by offering a sometimes more appealing buffer zone:

Unlike the stranger who attaches himself to a relative, in, say, Kariakoo, and who

is adrift … until he can find footing for himself, a stranger coming to a rural part

fits himself into an already integrated structure of which each part knows its own

place and function; by attaching himself to the one part which he previously

knows he has attached himself to the whole.245

These two configurations of communities that Leslie presents in some ways seem to be in contradiction with one another: those who live on the outskirts and are generally ambivalent towards the town, and those communities closer in seem to be somewhat ambivalent towards their own communities and oriented towards the town for most goods and services.

Following independence, in 1963 all freeholds that had existed since the Germans were converted to government leaseholds. In Dar es Salaam, this change ultimately affected most immediately the Indian community and the bureaucratic elites who had accumulated rental property. Nyerere called for a return to “traditional Africa custom of

243 Interview with Omary Ally Sobo Lualha 244 Leslie, 93. 245 Ibid., 93-94.

100 land holding. That is to say, a member of society will be entitled to a piece of land on condition that he uses it. Unconditional, or ‘freehold,’ ownership of land (which leads to speculation and parasitism) must be abolished.”246 While clothed in a new rhetoric, land policy as experienced by most Africans was hardly affected by this “new” policy.

A transition in name only, the shift in land policy did not change the central issue plaguing the city: squatters.247 Squatters were individuals or families who erected structures that were viewed by the government and planners as comprised of impermanent building materials on land to which they had no formal legal right. From independence until 1972, there were two main policies in place for checking the growth of squatting in Dar: a building strategy and a land control strategy. These approaches included massive slum clearance schemes focused on the peripheries of the town and replacing these unplanned areas with new homes.

246 Julius Kambarage Nyerere, “Ujamaa,”the Basis of African Socialism http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol1no1/thejournalofpanafricanstudies1987.pdf, 8. “We made it clear a long time ago, even before Independence, that land was not the property of individuals, but the property of the State; the national property and not individuals’ property. When we became independent, we found that land to the extent of half a million acres had been distributed to individuals as their own personal properties, just as shirts might have been. We said that we could not agree that land should be the property of an individual, just like a shirt, so that one could do whatever one liked with it. Normally, you use your property without being questioned by anyone. But it is not possible for land to be used just as one likes without your being questioned by anybody. Land is God’s property and not any human’s property. Since when did land become the property of individuals? We just come (…into this world: ed.) and make use of the land and leave it here when we go (…i.e. die: ed.) and this process repeats itself. But land surely cannot be a person’s property. So what we did when we came (…to power at independence: ed) was the make the ownership of land revert to the Government. We made the titles of the half a million acres of land revert to Government hands.” General Records of the Department of State RG 59 Records of the Bureau of African Affairs, 1958- 66 Box 32 Tanganyika 1964-Tanganyika 1964 Folder: Political Affairs and Rel. POL- 2 Tanganyika-U.S. Translated transcript of speech by Nyerere talking about the interference of other countries in Tanzania and that it was preposterous of the US to think that it was aligning with the East. The US saw it as an accusation of the US plotting to take over TZ. 247 John Leaning, Housing and Urban Land Distribution in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar Es Salaam, 1972), 5.

101

Squatting was not an unseen or unanticipated problem that somehow flew under the radar of urban planners; it was talked about incessantly, with administrators perpetually projecting into the future what would happen if it was not addressed. Yet a set of contradictory laws as well as a burgeoning urban population ensured that “squatting” would remain the predominant urban form. In the 1960s, residential housing could be considered squatter housing either by its location (without title or right to land) or due to the type of building materials used. The first major exercise in squatter removal undertaken by the municipal government was in an industrial area called Makaburi, where there were over 300 hundred houses demolished with residents slated to be resettled along Kigogo road to open up real estate for industrial growth by the harbor.248

The resettlement failed for several reasons. As the Town Planning Division noted, there was a need to consider how the town could channel the resources and housing stock of self-help communities for common welfare, already discussing the possibility of serviced plots for “individual building in traditional materials.”249 The Makaburi squatter relocation exercise had failed because the process of surveying and servicing plots had taken so long that the impetus to even move the squatters eventually waned entirely during the wait.250

A land clearing and resettlement scheme was also undertaken to house 500 urban unemployed in the Kilombero valley in the early 1960s, a tactic that Nyerere continues to use into the early 1980s for getting urban unemployed to be productive members of

248 Annual Report of the Town Planning Division 1966- 7 Ministry of Lands, Settlement and Development Printed by the Government Printer Dar es Salaam, Tanzania National Archives 249 Ibid. 250 “Annual Report of the Town Planning Division 1965 Ministry of Lands, Settlement and Development” Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 7.

102 society through agriculture. According to the minutes of a cabinet meeting regarding the

Kilombero plan, the creators sought to offer “counter-attractions to the excitements which led people to endure the discomforts of unemployment in large towns.” 251 Following the plan in Kilombero, another 3,000-acre scheme was initiated with 200 unemployed in

1962 and another in Mapinga in 1963.

To achieve these goals of speeding up the process of distributing zoned plots ready for building, both the state and multinational organizations began undertaking schemes in the 1970s and 1980s to distribute urban land and ready it for development.252

Yet, while many of these plans initiated by the likes of the World Bank were ambitious

(phase 1 of the World Bank services scheme was slated to provide 8,000 new units starting in 1974, while the Mbezi Planning Scheme was supposed to open up over 7,000 plots by 1978), they perennially ended up falling short. Slow to come into existence and then often left unfinished. In fact the bar for calling a house “complete” more than 10 years after plot allocation remained as low as simply having a roof. Many “finished houses lacked windows and doors.”253 Urban squatters frequently did not seek legal plots, even though it was hypothetically in their best interest to secure their future ability to get water, electricity, and waste disposal. While there was an incentive to upgrade one’s plot

251 Burton, “Haven of Peace Purged,” 135. 252 “Various planning schemes have been undertaken in the last two decades to provide land for orderly urban development. These have included the World Bank assisted Phase 1 and Phase 1 sites and services projects of the 1970s and the early 1980s; locally financed planning schemes like the Mbezi Planning Scheme in Dar es Salaam, in the late 1970s and 1980s; and Phase 3 of the sites and services projects affecting the new planning areas of Tegeta and Tabata…” JM Lusugga, “Land Policy Options for Urban Tanzania.” 253 Ibid., 104.

103 over time because it allowed an extension of the lease up to 33 years, the process to obtain a legal plot was prohibitively expensive and a bureaucratic maze to navigate. 254

Houses from these projects did slightly increase the housing stock and improve sites but they did not do so dramatically since most of the new units replaced old ones that had been torn down. Additionally, newly minted units ended up in the hands of the upper and middle classes since their relative scarcity made them valuable. Those whom the project had been set up to help did not benefit. Between 1972 and 1994, “no more than 40,000 plots (or an average of 2000 plots per annum, i.e. less than 10 per cent of the demand) were surveyed and allocated by the authorities in the city.”255

“BEST BEING THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD”

Turning to a new approach in the 1970s, the state began actively promoting adopting he the principles of Ujamaa living in urban housing and settlements. Following his announcement in 1973 that the capital of Tanzania would be moved to Dodoma,

Nyerere’s vision for the new capitals’ Master Plan highlighted his conception of the urban village living as an antidote for colonial cities.256 The new capital city was to consist of “homogenous ‘communities’ composed of a system of ‘neighbourhoods’; small

254 Richard E. Stren, “Underdevelopment, Urban Squatting, and the State Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Tanzania,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 16, no. 1 (1982): 67-91, 80 255 Tumsifu Nnkya, Shelter Co-operatives in Tanzania: Contributions of the Co-operative sector to shelter development, (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements and International Cooperative Alliance, n. d.), 41. http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/3602_67297_HS-616.pdf 256 Garth A. Myers, African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2011), 65.

104 holdings and a village character….”257 Thus, the capital would embody the dense village plans under which Nyerere imagined all of Tanzania would soon be organized.

Another way to read this plan for the city, however, is not that it represented the village replacing more common urban configurations, but that it represented the planning tradition of the Canadian firm who drafted it, steeped in the tradition of English neighborhood city planning. Of course, this legacy of mixed origins is even further blurred in Dar es Salaam, where colonial town planning has such deep roots.

Nonetheless, there seems to have been confusion about the platonic ideal of what city living should look like, how it should be executed, and inevitably who was responsible for executing those plans, as much as there was actual confusion among citizens about how to navigate proper channels for living in the city.

The contention over what cities should look like and how they should be composed came down to the most basic building blocks of development: building materials. Throughout the sixties, Nyerere had adamantly opposed the traditional Makuti roof and mud walls of the Swahili style house. In a 1965 Daily News article about housing, he was quoted as gesturing towards makuti houses in Kariakoo and Magomeni and claiming that “such houses were not fit dwellings for the citizens of the United

Republic of Tanzania.”258 Yet he rhetorically switches course over the next ten years, inverting his definitions of what constituted a modern, independent Tanzania. Modernity as a key development goal had shifted from meaning Tanzanian adoption of certain technologies and standards sought by Western countries, such as modernizing agriculture

257 PPA National Capital Master Plan—Dodoma—Tanzania; Toronto, 1976, 1. 258 “A ‘Housing Revolution Next’ Mwalimu warns bad landlords,” Tanganyika Standard, February 13, 1965.

105 with fertilizer use and modernizing building with modern, endurable materials, to viewing these things instead as signs of unhealthy dependencies.259

In the campaign to resurrect the dignity of traditional construction materials, a housing study conducted in 1972 warns against the fallacy of “impermanence” in the use of traditional building materials:

The term ‘substandard’ and ‘non permanent’ are official ones but very confusing

and based on the popular fallacy that if anything is built of mud, sticks and makuti

then it is not permanent. This is only true if the walls are not rendered and the

thatch not kept in good repair. If this is not done then true enough, the houses only

last 3 years or so, but if properly rendered, thatched and maintained these

substandard non-permanent houses last at least 20 years.260

That same year, facing a continually growing squatter population, Nyerere announced a shift away from squatter removal to a sites-and-services upgrade approach. This shift to sites-and-services programs, funded by multilateral organizations, was a trend across

Africa in the 1970s. The idea was to upgrade current informal neighborhoods with services and infrastructure, allowing for self-help building rather than ineffective and costly slum removal.261

Nyerere’s cabinet passed two documents that defined this new direction. The first, an urban housing policy that recognized squatter housing, allowed for their improvement and promised the extension of basic services. It also allowed for the use of traditional building materials such as thatched palm leaves. The second allowed for the allocation of

259 I discuss this point as well in Chapter Five on waste and sanitation. 260 Leaning, Housing and Urban Land Distribution in Tanzania, 8-12. 261 Freund, The African City, 156.

106 minimally serviced plots as well as fully serviced sites and for a massive squatter upgrade program, funded through a loan from the International Development Association.262

Further endorsing the use of traditional building materials in sustainable ways, the

Daily News in 1975 promoted the use of burnt bricks for building through a series of articles walking people through the process of making them. The author, a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, wrote in the first installment that cement was costly for

Tanzanians because between 40 and 59 percent of their contents and materials used in production was “foreign exchange content”:

I think this is nothing less than the attempt and concerned effort of the metropole

economies to establish and get hold of a ready market for their products – cement

itself, spare parts, machinery and chemicals used. Working programmes should

therefore be directed to shun away from this historical bias and colonial hangover

as it doesn’t pay.263

Nyerere himself made a similar argument during his speech in 1977 celebrating ten years of the Arusha Declaration:

Although we know that most of our people cannot afford the mortgage or rental

costs of the cement house, we persist in promoting its construction. Obviously it

is more comfortable, and lasts longer. It is a case of the best being the enemy of

the good… [F]or most people the only effective choice is between an improved

and an unimproved traditional house – they cannot afford the cement house…It is

no use expecting the National Housing Corporation to supply all the houses we

262 Stren, “Underdevelopment, Urban Squatting and the State Bureaucracy,” 77. 263 W.D.S. Mmbaga, “Using Burnt Bricks,” Daily News, January 1, 1975.

107

need; it does not have the resources, and people’s failure to pay the inevitably

high rents of N.H.C.-type houses has reduced its capacity still further… Instead

we should concentrate on the development of Site-and service projects so that

people can build for themselves houses which are appropriate to their income, and

which can be gradually improved over time… The present widespread addiction

to cement and tin roofs is a kind of mental paralysis. A bati (corrugated iron) roof

is nothing compared with one of tiles. But those afflicted with this mental attitude

will not agree. Cement is basically earth’ but it is ‘European soil’. Therefore

people refuse to build a house of burnt bricks and tiles; they insist on waiting for a

tin roof and “European soil If we want to progress more rapidly in the future we

must overcome at least some of these mental blocks!264

Despite Nyerere’s newfound sensitivities concerning the cost of cement, this strategy did not liberate new residents from the burdensome legal process of trying to procure housing. In other words, if someone could not afford cement, they also would not be able to pay legal fees, deed plans, annual land rent, nor have the ability to go through the estimated 280-day process for receiving a right of occupancy.265

To try and mitigate some of these issues caused by the lengthy and expensive process of procuring lots and building houses, in 1969 the government initiated a housing cooperative section in the Ministry of Lands Housing and Urban Development. This department sought to provide standard guidelines for those interested in forming either

264 Julius Nyerere, “The Arusha Declaration: Ten Years After” (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1977), 29-31. 265 Richard E. Stren, “Underdevelopment, Urban Squatting, and the State Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Tanzania,” 81.

108 urban or rural building. While the idea of cooperative building was not new, it experienced a popular resurgence as an alternative to the insurmountable building costs for many poor families through communal labor and shared expenses.266 The discussion about cooperative housing also touched the larger issue of what the predominant urban form should be:

If it shall be possible to reach the broad masses of the population with the

essential services, and with a separate dwelling for each household, it will be

necessary to use higher densities…it will be types of houses which are not really

fit for the ownership form where each household owns individually its own

house… It would…be in the line with the general policy of the country if many of

them could be owned by housing cooperatives, which would let them to their

members. This would also form a natural part of a stronger development towards

cooperative living and working in urban districts, an element of urban Ujamaa.267

The first major cooperative housing project in Dar es Salaam was actually the result of a meeting held in Addis Ababa by the United National Economic Commission for Africa and the German Foundation for Developing Countries, who were looking for a country to launch a pilot cooperative housing program.268 Their interest in cooperatives was spurred in part by Nyerere calling for the increase in cooperative housing in Tanzania. While there had been an explosion of cooperative societies in Tanzania following independence,

266 J.M. Kerenge, 4. 267 J.V. Mwabuti, “Urban Housing Cooperatives,” (Dar es Salaam: Registrar of Cooperatives, 1973), 1. 268 Tumsifu Nnkya, 48.

109 urban housing cooperatives were a new concept and remained after their inception only around 2 percent of registered cooperative societies.269

The UN ultimately chose Tanzania from a list of potential countries and helped initiate a program in Mwenge, a suburb of Dar es Salaam, in 1971.270 Mwenge Housing

Co-Operative Society (first referred to as the Kijitonyama sites and services scheme) became the first urban housing cooperative of its kind on the continent.271 Mwenge, with

395 members, was not only Tanzania’s first cooperative society, but one of its largest.

The following October, two more cooperative building societies were registered. All three of these cooperatives were generally very successful in building units for their members and also provided road and sewerage infrastructure. Yet Mwenge’s particular success reflects its international backing and support. The future of housing cooperatives was ultimately much bleaker than their beginning. As Nnkya points out, attempts on the part of cooperatives to acquire titles to land from the local land department became part of a vicious cycle. Land offices were unwilling to give titles to unregistered cooperative societies, but often people did not want to join a cooperative without the promise of attaining titles to land or having them already. 272

There was also the problem that often cooperative members did not know how to build houses. Between two of the more formidable cooperatives in Dar es Salaam, Sigara and Mwenge, an average of 70 percent of the participants did not know how to build

269 Settlements, United Nations Centre for Human, and International Co-operative Alliance. Shelter co- operatives in eastern and southern Africa: contributions of the co-operative sector to shelter development. UN-HABITAT, 2001, 10. 270 Tumsifu Nnkya, 48. 271 Ibid. 272 Ibid., 68.

110 houses. This lack of skill demonstrates the potential role that cooperatives could fulfill in encouraging people to share building knowledge through group construction, but it also posed a sever handicap. The Mwenge cooperative sought to avoid this problem by requiring house construction to be executed in groups involving skilled builds so as to increase the amount of knowledge and share experiences.

The Sigara cooperative established in 1976 consisted of employees at the

Tanzania Cigarette Company. Sigara troubled path to fruition and less success than earlier cooperatives. Sigara coordinated on all fronts of raising funds, making building plans, and constructing houses. The coop applied for a plot for each member, but was given only 80 by the Dar es Salaam city council. In order to afford to build houses on these lots each member was forced to apply for a loan from the Tanzanian Housing Bank to cover construction costs. The bank then began to worry about the ability of the cooperative’s members to repay those loans and as a result ultimately only 40 were actually parceled out, with the deeds to the other 40 withheld.273 In 1980, the bank refused to issue any more installments of loans until Sigara could produce land titles, which they were not able to obtain until 1981, halting all construction. Sigara’s home building was also plagued by poor workmanship and thefts from building sites further enervated construction. With each delay, loan repayment increased. Additionally, the price of building materials in the early 1980s was also on the rise. The initial 1977 building cost estimate of 40,000 shillings by the time the issue of the title deeds was

273 Mrs. Ndatulu and H B Makileo, Housing cooperatives in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Building Research Unit, 1989), 32

111 resolved in 1981 had jumped by half to 60,000 shillings.274 Also, in the time-intensive process of getting deeds, loans and beginning to build, plots allocated to the cooperative were sometimes doubly allocated to someone else who illegally made a deal with land officials and could commence building sooner.275 According specifically to National

Housing Policy and more generally to the spirit of Ujamaa, housing cooperatives were supposed to enjoy priority over individual building developments and therefore, in theory, have first priority in land allocations. But this was not necessarily the case.

Regardless of attempts to mitigate and direct the nature of growth in cities,

Nyerere remained adamantly anti-urban. James Brennan, in his article “Blood Enemies,” describes the state’s attempts to cajole urban citizens back to rural areas through propaganda cartoons, often depicting lazy urban dwellers refusing to use agricultural tools, for example. The government furthermore encouraged the production of “stories, plays and personal testimonials, and produced its own propaganda pamphlets to convince urban residents that life on Ujamaa or cooperative villages was far superior to the uncertainties and immoralities of town life.”276 These propaganda campaigns were attempts to keep citizens away from the draw of the city and to keep rural life at the heart of Tanzanian culture. While their point of attack was to depict cities as the moral, structural and economic opposite of the country, this seems increasingly not to be the reality, since so many urban migrants at this time retained a sense of belonging with rural areas in addition to land, remitting their money to rural areas, and even utilizing similar

274 H. Ndatulu, Housing Cooperatives in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Building Research Unit, 1989), 41. 275 Ibid., 42. 276 James R. Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania 1958-75,” The Journal of African History 47, no. 03 (December 4, 2006): 389–413, 401-403.

112 building and survival strategies. To say that urban and rural Tanzania were the same would certainly misrepresent the reality of both and, yet it is important to point out that they did not necessarily represent different or opposing livelihood strategies.

GOING TO THE GROUND: THE HINTERLANDS AND MBAGALA

It was in large part because of the incredibly limited nature of housing opportunities— even cooperative building enterprises that fulfilled Nyerere’s vision of a socialist state were thwarted at every turn— that people turned to the hinterlands for building resources and land. Wilbard Kombe, in an article for Habitat International on the collapse of public urban land, writes that the process of applying for a plot in Dar es Salaam reported that it was “inconceivable” to imagine they would be given a plot simply by applying.277 It helped immensely if you had some way to include a note from a party or government official to help with your application.278 As seen earlier in this chapter, this circumstance does not represent a radical break from the settlement patterns of the past in which people often lingered at the margins of the city, exploiting their proximity to goods and services while living more cheaply. But the migration to the margins in the 1980s did mean that families and individuals, who had lived in town and had been slowly priced out, were now joining those communities and villages already on the outskirts as more and more people were “going to ground” to cope with the untenable nature of staking claim to a surveyed city plot.279 Furthermore, the state displaced unemployed urban residents as part

277 Willard J. Kombe, “The Demise of Public Urban Land Management and the Emergence of Informal Land Markets in Tanzania A Case of Dar-es-Salaam City,” Habitat International 18, no. 1 (1994): 23–43, 29 278 Ibid. 279 Leslie, 93.

113 of their campaign against idlers in Ujamaa-type villages on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam further encouraging the legitimacy of peri-urban living. In a 1976 speech declaring a

“war on drunkards, lazy people and other parasites,” Nyerere announced that he did not want to hear of people staying in towns without work: “And I do not want to see people queueing at labour offices looking for jobs. I have work on the land. There are fifty villages in Dares Salaam region alone with good land.”280

Certainly not exclusively the desire of the state, home and land ownership has been highly valued by Tanzanians as well, historians have long commented . In 1931,

E.C. Baker wrote a colonial memorandum on the social conditions of Dar es Salaam and noted how important to Africans the ability to own a housewas. Baker estimated that building a house “takes the place of the cattle of the backward tribesmen— it is the one form of investment of the urban native.”281 He noted that even “old women…will embark on the building of a house with no ostensible means at their disposal but what they can make from the sale of rice cakes and friend fish.”282 Iliffe also makes note of this desire for home ownership in his history of Tanganyika, mentioning that, as one official conveyed to him, the ability to own or build a home was “the great aim of the urbanized

African” and a buffer against the infirmities of aging.283 Residents of Mbagala whom I interviewed found their way to the community most often via circuitous routes, rather than landing on the periphery straight from the rural hinterlands, but almost all chose

Mbagala because of the high value they placed on being able to own a home. They all

280 “Idlers are Enemies,” Daily News, July 4, 1976. 281 Brennan, Burton, and Lawi, Dar Es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, 37. 282 Ibid. 283 Iliffe, 385.

114 recalled how much Mbagala throughout the early 1980s continued to look like the bush rather than the city. As Zubeda Hussein said, it was a “village, only a few houses.” She bought land to build a house there because it was cheaper than renting a room in the end.

Omari Hussein Nguyu, who had six children, could not rent a single room for accommodation and realized it was cheaper to build a house: “to build its hard but it is simple if you get money because its not a must that you build a full house, you may start to build a room by room till when you finish up.” Nguyu explained that in his estimation there are three trajectories from the village. There are those who:

come from the village and when he reaches town he gets a good job, and finds a

house to rent and later on built his house and move in, another person may be

renting at a certain area and afford the cost of living so this one wont shift many

times, but the one who earn very low income, he will shift many times, because

when he sees that the rental cost has risen up, and he cannot afford to pay the rent

he have to move, that is something which has made us move from Temeke to

Mbagala.

Fatuma Abdallah after her mother had accumulated enough money selling fish to begin building a home, they moved from Tandika (closer in to the city center) to Mbagala.

Another woman named Fatuma (no last name given) recalled how she and her husband used to come in to Dar es Salaam and stay with relatives:

In that period … people may even sleep outside without harm. I came to live in

Tandika, after my husband’s death. I sold Maandazi (donuts) for 25 years. I

accumulated some money from my business then I bought a plot in Mbagala in

115

1980 for 200 shillings. In that period Mbagala was just a bush, it was an

agricultural land and the bus fare to Tandika was five shillings.

Hassan Mohamedi moved to Mbagala in 1981 because he wanted to build a house.

“While I decided to buy a plot in Mbagala, to make a life here, I imagined that after 5-10 years Mbagala would grow up,” he said. “At first people laughed at me, they told me I was going to live in the bush but nowadays, people are still coming to settle in Mbagala.”

He recalls that when he first arrived, the closest place to fetch water was a 5-kilometer walk. Uwesu A. Kipoloya decided to move from Keko to Mbagala because his family was growing and his wife suggested they buy a plot and build their own house rather than rent. Kipoloya describes how he went about securing a plot:

I met with one man called Mzee Bendi, we went together in Mbagala to a man

called Mzee Mgaza and he gave us a plot. I had 100 Tsh only and my fellow (the

person he was building with) had 400 Tsh. The plot sold for 800 Tsh. We paid

that 500 Tsh and Mzee Mgaza told me to pay in installments. I paid in

installments and when I had paid him 300 Tsh, he allowed me to start building.

My brother in law in Magomeni was a house contractor, I invited him to construct

my house, he agreed and came to construct a mud and pole house for me. I moved

in, without roofing. The building material used to construct my house was

obtained from the site, because there were people selling poles in the site. At that

time one pole sold for 50 cents. I moved in without roofing though later on I made

a roof using coconut tree leaves “makuti” which I bought on the site.

Mariam Hassan also remembers how when she arrived it looked like a village. Water was obtained from wells, drinking water fetched from a certain area called Behasi. Cashew

116 nut trees and coconut trees dotted the landscape and people cultivated cassava. The land around Mbagala is sandy and not particularly great for planting. Since there were only a few houses, Hassan recalls that it was easy if you were building a house for thieves to steal supplies and bags of cement left out. Omari Hussein Nguyu noted that “if a person wanted to buy a shamba (small farm) he just bought one, if he wants to cultivate, he may do so, he may cultivate fruits or vegetables for his own use and who has an ability to make development (build a house) he was doing so.” Nguyu was not so much saying it was easy to afford these things, but that land use on the outskirts of town in actuality remained fairly unrestrained by government regulation.

It seems that people with scarce means and scant income were able to purchase land in Mbagala when they could no longer afford to live closer in to the city. They could do so slowly, in relative peace. Mbagala represents the convergence of failing urban and rural development—yet also somewhat of a refuge from both. It was the cheapest place to live that afforded people access to every exploitable means necessary for unskilled laborers who had minimal education and often large families. Today it is a place that still lacks piped water; most houses lack electricity and many remain partially built. What is starkly different, however, is that now Mbagala is packed with houses. It is hard to imagine that it once was simply sandy coconut groves. The charcoal truck still comes up the unpaved streets and many places are hard to access by vehicle at all due to the ad hoc nature of house construction. Nonetheless it has its own logic. Houses are still built in the same Swahili style, with bathrooms in the back and kitchens outside or in the courtyard.

It is also the sight of two recent tragedies in 2009 and 2011 when munitions dumps at an

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Army barrack in Mbagala exploded.284 The first explosion in 2009 left more than 1000 wounded when a series of explosives went off due to improperly stored devices. While the tragedy represented neglect in proper storage it also illustrates the potential toll of unrestricted and dense housing. Mbagala has allowed for a sense of security for urban residents, yet exposure to potential violence, sanitation hazards, and environmental hazards continually mitigates those advantages of location and cost.

CONCLUSION

Nyerere’s conception of urban citizenship was full of troubling contradictions, some of which the previous chapter explored. Nyerere regarded cities as anti-socialist and exploitative of rural citizens. Yet he also calls on urban residents to be vigilant and hostile towards unchecked urban growth and act as gatekeepers to their communities, protecting their highly exclusive and classed nature.285 Furthermore, while seeking to limit the physical expansion of the city, he at times required urban residents to be involved in peri-urban farming and displaced unemployed workers in the city’s borderlands, not necessarily severing any reliance on the city nor squelching its expansion. While most fundamentally, he wanted to discourage urban growth, he ultimately shifted his housing policy to allow for informal development with impermanent materials.

284 “Hundreds Hurt by Tanzania Blast,” BBC, April 30, 2009, sec. Africa, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8026929.stm. 285 Brennan, “Blood Enemies,” 401-403.

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James Brennan, reflecting on Nyerere’s attitudes towards urban growth, points out that acquiring urban citizenship required much ideological commitment.286 Leslie, on the other hand, writing in the 1960s, depicts urban expansion in Dar as being carried out with a healthy dose of ambivalence by the typical Dar African. Leslie’s profile of the urban migrant reveals someone who arrives impermanently but perhaps indefinitely, with “no call to immerse himself too deeply in town affairs.”287 Perhaps Brennan and Leslie do not have contradictory pictures of the story so much as stories indicative of the different roles and expectations of class in building the city. Brennan’s ideological torchbearers belong to a certain class and tenure in city life. The state’s ideological expectations of urban citizenship as well as its practical parameters were in dynamic relation to one’s class and gender.

Gezaulole, the site of an Ujamaa village in Kigamboni across the bay from Dar es

Salaam used to be a place where people feared being sent to work if they could not prove they had a job. Today, land in Gezaulole is incredibly valuable. With new plans to put in high-rise buildings for residents and tourists on the beaches, it is one of the largest planning projects in Dar es Salaam. As a recent article on Kigamboni pointed out, “It will be a transformation that a few could have thought possible a few decades ago, when people had to be persuaded to move to Kigamboni.”288 One taxi driver interviewed for the article noted, “They used to compose songs to sensitise people to go live in

286 Ibid. 287 Leslie, 89. 288 Stella Barozi, “A dream behind the plush Kigamboni,” IPP Media.com 31 May 2009. Accessed on 2/ http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/?l=2807

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Gezaulole, Kigamboni, but even then people were not interested…today Kigamboni is a hot cake. Everyone wants to buy land there.”289

289 Ibid.

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Chapter Three: The Political Ecology of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam

The dramatic growth of Dar es Salaam in the Nyerere years led to an increasingly complicated relationship between urbanization and food supply. Through examining the policies of the state, the eventual collapse of municipal governance, and the food practices of new migrants in the city, this chapter looks at how the threat of food insecurity played a crucial role in urban politics and the transformation of the city’s environment as the state descended into economic crisis. I am ultimately interested in the role food insecurity290 played in the geographical expansion of the city. This insecurity, I argue, blurred the lines of what defined urban and rural citizenship and ways of living.

The collapse of food production in Tanzania is a complicated, multi-causal issue that will be discussed later, yet the magnitude of the collapse is worth briefly sketching out here. For several reasons, urban food supply is often prioritized and protected more than rural food supply. Cities tend to be the domain of government officials, diplomats and crucial populations of industrial laborers, which results in political pressure ensuring the stability of urban food supply before rural areas.291 Also, as high-density habitats, they are simply easier places to ensure food security than rural areas with more dispersed populations. As a result, developing countries routinely face problems when cities become the best source of food with the collapse of agricultural subsistence in rural areas.

In postcolonial Tanzania, this collapse created a positive feedback loop for urbanization eventually causing food prices (in the face of failed production and the high costs of

290 Throughout this chapter, I use the terms food insecurity and food supply interchangeably. 291 Kenneth Lynch, “Urban Fruit and Vegetable Supply in Dar es Salaam,” The Geographical Journal 160, no. 3 (1994): 307.

121 importing food) to become too high for urban incomes. Overwhelming urban migration coupled with low wages and the failure of domestic food production eventually made Dar es Salaam and Tanzania unable to support its own population’s food needs. Cities across the continent faced similar problems from the 1950s onwards. Whereas prewar estimates for many cities put food expenditure at 20 to 25 percent of incomes, by 1950 laborers in

Nairobi spent 72 percent of their wages on food, while in Accra they spent 53 percent.292

By 1980 In Dar, a household budget survey reported that “85 percent of expenditure in low income households was for food.”293

In the 1960s, Tanzania exported food to neighboring countries and had the highest rate of increase in food production on the continent. Yet, by the 1970s, the country was importing food and by the middle of the 1980s food had become 20 percent of all imports.294 The relationship between urbanization, food supply and food production is not merely a narrative of agricultural collapse and escape to the city. Urbanites in Dar es

Salaam did not abandon cultivation to become solely consumers of food, nor did they trade in mobility to become entrenched urban citizens.295 This chapter examines the evolution of food supply problems in Dar es Salaam during the Nyerere era, and discusses how new migrants coped with these problems and found solutions that allowed

292 Jane Guyer, introduction to Feeding African Cities: Studies in Regional Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the International African Institute, London, 1987), 38. 293 Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Food Insecurity and the Social Division of Labour in Tanzania, 1919-85 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 211. 294 Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (University of California Press, 1997), 62-63. 295 For an interesting discussion of rural urban dynamics in developing world cities, see David Satherthwaite and Cecilia Tacoli, “Seeking an Understanding of Poverty that Recognizes Rural-Urban Differences and Rural-Urban Linkages” in Carole Rakodi and Tony Lloyd Jones’s Urban Livelihoods (Oxford: Earthscan, 2002).

122 them to survive, if not thrive. These new migrants like many of the citizens already residing in Dar es Salaam, had little money to spend on food despite it being a major expenditure. Living in cramped quarters with little to no ability to refrigerate food and limited ability to store grains meant that the majority of Dar es Salaam’s citizens bought or harvested food for daily consumption. Increasingly constrained by poor transportation as the city expanded, they could not always make it to markets far from where they lived.

Thus, as the city grew, food supplies came to accommodate its expanding. Despite, and sometimes because of, myriad obstacles of transportation, storage, and supply, the outskirts of Dar es Salaam grew as sites for the cultivation and sale of food.

As real wages and thus ability to purchase goods eroded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the poor and middle classes began to cultivate their own food to supplement wage labor. Beyond cultivation on the fringes of the city, families often split up, sending members back to the rural areas during growing seasons to buffer the economic vulnerability of wage labor or informal labor in the city. Returning to rural areas to grow food was both a source of income to protect against falling wages and a supplemental source of nutrition. It also potentially protected families from expulsion from the city during the colonial and post-colonial waves of forced removals of “undesirables.”

Farmers and urbanites remained collaborative rather than contending populations unlike how Nyerere and the state portrayed them. Not all peasants shed their land and ability to produce food when moving to Dar es Salaam, though many who did were forced to reconsider this strategy as their families grew and urban food supply shrunk. Food policy embodied a state ideology created in the course of decades of attempts to expunge citizens from the city and encourage them to cultivate. The relationship between the city,

123 food, and the country represented the state’s image of what makes a healthy or an ailing socialist economy, as well as body. Agriculture and rural life were healthy; urban life, with its street hawkers, tea stalls and vitumubua [donuts], signified a lazy, ineffectual nation. The “body” or shape of the city, as it changed, represented citizens pushing back against this ideology in order to sustain their own livelihoods. Ultimately the state arrived at a stalemate and allowed for a diversified food supply in large part through encouraging people to cultivate small tracts of land and produce their own food. In a story seemingly about clashing choices, citizens had little alternative but to try to exploit what resources they did have; the government, for its part, ultimately had little choice but to accept and encourage this urban self-reliance.

COLONIAL FOOD SUPPLY AND URBAN BIAS

Emergent issues in the post-colonial era, not surprisingly, have roots in the evolution of food supply beginning in the interwar period. Historian Gregory Maddox depicts the shifting nature of food supply for rural Tanzanians during the interwar period as a crucial transition between subsistence farming and involvement in commercial food crops.296 While famine and shortages had certainly existed before this period, the choices that individuals and groups were forced to make between cash and subsistence crops brought about new and complicated problems. A bad year of commercial crops could leave farmers with no money to buy food, further isolated by a poor transportation structure. Widespread food shortages could consequently erupt in areas generally well

296 Gregory H. Maddox, “Njaa: Food Shortages and Famines in Tanzania between the Wars,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1986): 17-34.

124 suited for successful agriculture.297 Thus, as Tanzanian farmers commercialized and adopted high-yield crops that were also less drought-resistant, food scarcity remained a pervasive threat.298 This phenomenon occurred particularly in coffee producing areas such as the Bukoba region. If coffee prices were low, tenant farmers lacked the ability to access food since coffee and banana plants took up seventy percent of the cultivated land.299 While African producers understood the risk of poor crop yields and bad weather, cash crops led to a general unpreparedness for hard times. In summarizing the new situation, Maddox writes, “It made Africans gamblers, and because of the extractive nature of British colonialism in Tanganyika, it gave them little opportunity to hedge their bets.”300 This situation did improve in the post-war flurry of colonial investment and development. Infrastructure brought the Tanzanian hinterland closer to the world economy and vice versa. However, with these improvements came increased expectations of production, ratcheting up the risk, which galvanized African nationalists and became key examples of exploitative colonial rule.301

While debates surrounding colonial rule reflected disruption of rural food supply, urban Africans also experienced volatility and disruption in their diets. For the most part, scarcity was far less of a risk and variability in food choices was attainable, contingent on one’s dissipating monthly paychecks. Iliffe describes the hypothetical diet of a stevedore over the course of a month:

297 Ibid., 18. 298 Ibid., 33. 299 Ibid., 20. 300 Ibid., 33. 301 Ibid., 34.

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When in funds at the beginning of the month his favourite food was rice. Much

was imported, chiefly from Burma, but quantities also traveled along the central

railway from the Luiche delta, arrived by lorry from the Kilombero and Rufiji

valleys, or were carried into town by the 500 or so residents who cultivated the

surrounding creeks. A stevedore’s pay bought only a day or two of rice before he

turned to millet and maize. Quantities trickled into the market from surrounding

villages, but much millet came by dhow from the south for Kilwa, Lindi, and their

hinterlands had been the coast’s granary since German times. At the month’s end

the stevedore ate manioc from Uzaramo. For his relish he drew on the whole of

the capital’s hinterland. Dried shark, a favourite delicacy, was produced locally,

as were many fruits and vegetables. Each region along the central railway

supplied its specialty.302

Iliffe’s description demonstrates the variability of food choices based on one’s income and highlights how many different regions, both nationally and globally, were part of this production. With each successive day of the week, it seems, the sources of food edged closer and closer to the city itself. Leslie’s Survey is also a fascinating source for descriptions of local eating habits in the late colonial period. The working men Leslie describes began their day with tea and a slice of bread “at one of the roadside tea vendors who are to be seen in almost any street, or at the municipal tea house where stallholders sell tea and bread or rice-cakes in the same way.”303 Skipping lunch, the typical worker instead bough “some peanuts, or another cup of tea and a bun or cake or corncob or he

302 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 311- 312. 303 Leslie, 117-118.

126 may have nothing at all.” In the evening, on his way home, he may have a “reviver, an orange (which is sold in the market and by any vendors, ready peeled) or a cup of tea, or a milk coconut,” and then wait until the evening meal, either cooked by a wife or mistress or from a cheap place on the street “with bare board and tin mugs and plates” where a shilling provides a generous portion of rice and beans.304 Sometimes, Leslie writes, he will also cook for himself on a primus to save money. For women, Leslie notes that they usually do not drink tea first thing in the morning but wait until the “menfolk” have left and, by midmorning, all the women in the Swahili house will come together to cook in the same area, if not share food.

Leslie also addresses the question of hunger in the city. He is skeptical, however, about how often those he interviewed actually went hungry. This doubt prompted him to consider that perhaps a less literal understanding of “hunger.” At first he noticed that people seemed naturally to pair hunger and unemployment as the worst aspects of urban life. Leslie surmised, “Hunger in this context does not necessarily mean literally lack of food, but embraces the whole idea of shortage of cash, unemployment and uncertainty what the morrow will bring. Its opposite is often ‘money’ or ‘work.’”305

Thus, with more work in urban areas, city dwellers felt more assured of food than their rural counterparts, who lacked adequate transportation and remained vulnerable to drought. Nevertheless, cities represented a new insecurity in the face of one’s growing reliance on cash and income for food. The colonial government seemed to have diverging views on whether urban Africans’ concerns about food were tied to wages, or if they

304 Ibid. 305 Leslie, 115.

127 were looking for opportunities for cultivation. In all likelihood, it was both, depending on how well one was paid. In a letter discussing whether crown lands around Dar es Salaam should be opened up for cultivation, the provincial commissioner wrote:

there is no great clamour in Dar es Salaam for land in the vicinity. There may be

riots yet in Dar es Salaam (and probably will be strikes) but they will not be

because of the lack of land to cultivate, but rather because of cost of food and lack

of wages to pay for it. The native men and women who like to live in Dar es

Salaam have adopted a new style in living and have put behind their old native

traditions to a greater or smaller extent. They are there because they like the place

and have not any urge to cultivate 2 acres of indifferent soil.306

Yet just the next year, in 1941, the local government reassessed the link between land and food supply, considering the possibility of opening up land surrounding Dar es Salaam for cultivation in hopes of controlling the population from stealing food to meet their needs. “In Bagamoyo,” an annual report to the provincial commissioner explains, “petty crime in the township was considerably reduced by making the town dwellers cultivate shambas [farms] to provide for themselves with adequate food supplies—unfortunately such a course is only partially possible in Dar es Salaam owing to the very limited public land in its vicinity.”307 Colonial officials were torn between losing control of how land around the city was developed and the fear that criminality based on want was a

306 22 July 1940 Letter to the Honorable Chief Secretary Tanganyika Secretariat from Provincial Commissioner Files No 26177 Investigations into the conditions under which natives occupy land on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzanian National Archives. 307 Annual Report 1941 To the Provincial Commissioner from the Dar es Salaam Police Headquarters (February 21 1942) p 5 File no. 3/XVI. Bryceson does demonstrate that earlier, under German rule, much cultivation at the family level went on around Dar es Salaam since transport was limited to “human porterage” and food spoilage was therefore rampant. Bryceson, “A Century of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam” in Feeding African Cities: Studies in Regional Social History, 152.

128 burgeoning problem to be addressed.308 With real opportunities for cultivation limited,

Africans who sought to supplement their income with food cultivated close in along the creeks that ran through the city. By 1953, city officials noted that the drained creek areas were being used for everything from rice cultivation to grazing cows and growing vegetables. This practice posed a new set of problems as “the town grows, and as its inhabitants acquire a higher standard of living.” The Medical Officer of Health opined that “to keep out herds of cattle and the local vegetable planters will be a task amounting to guerilla warfare.”309

Interestingly, when luck and hard work allowed for food choices among urbanites, they remained somewhat set in their alimentary habits. There were so-called

“preferred cereals” that were popular in the cities, if one could afford them, such as rice and wheat.310 But when money was tight, maize and cassava won out since they remained the cheapest. Yet, despite this diversity, a 1969 household budget survey showed that racially and regionally distinct food consumption patterns persisted in urban settings despite the seeming diversity of choice.311 Middle-income Africans had more food habits in common with low-income Africans than they did with non-African populations with similar incomes. Regardless of purchasing power, Africans in urban areas tended to retain

308 “Land is scarce around Dar es Salaam, and since, in Native Eyes, the planting of coconuts entitles the planter to the palms even though they grow on Crown Land, squatters should not be allowed to plant palms on Crown Land. Muhogo or beans will produce more in cash, and will involve Government in less for compensation should Government require the land. “African Housing, Dar es Salaam (written in 1946) Dar District Book 1955” p28, TNA. 309 Sgd. B.O. Wilkin Medical Officer of Health “Water Supply Reserve of Dar es Salaam” 18 March 1953 File No 27/32 TNA. 310 Deborah Bryceson, “A Century of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam,” in Feeding African Cities: Studies in Regional Social History edited by Jane Guyer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the International African Institute, London, 1987), 156. 311 Bryceson, Food Insecurity and the Social Division of Labor, 160.

129 a diet almost evenly split between maize and rice.312 This preference in part evolved through cultural affinities and routines, but also due to the fact that employers who fed their laborers as partial payment uniformly fed them maize.313 A literature had even surfaced for plantation owners detailing how to “wean” Africans who ate bananas or rice slowly over to maize.314 With the finishing of the central railway and the construction of a few arterial roads, food supply to Dar es Salaam became much more reliable and diverse. Tanzania remained almost entirely self-sufficient in foodstuffs during the late

1950s, and relatively secure in the 1960s, with the 1970s especially in comparison to the next decade.

Under colonial rule, the city remained a racially segregated space where not only living quarters and neighborhoods were cordoned off by race, but city markets as well.

Kariakoo market at the center of the city was a market for the town’s African population, selling “native” foodstuffs. Africans were not allowed in European trading zones.315

Thus, the colonial period ended with local governance in Dar es Salaam attempting to halt subsistence cultivation too close in to the city despite a dramatically growing urban population. The colonial government prescribed all aspects of how Africans in the city accessed, grew, or sold food.

312 Bryceson, “A Century of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam,” 172. 313 Ibid., 165. 314 Ibid. 315 Joe L. P. Lugalla, “Development, Change, and Poverty in the Informal Sector during the Era of Structural Adjustments in Tanzania,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 31, no. 3 (1997): 424-451.

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POST-COLONIAL FOOD DISTRIBUTION AND THE EVOLUTION OF A FOOD CRISIS Diverging from typical historiographies of anti-colonial struggle in Africa, much of

Tanzania’s independence movement had its roots in rural rather than urban areas.316 One of the key rural organizations that ultimately spearheaded the independence movement were agricultural cooperative societies that evolved as an institutional alternative to the monopoly of private Asian traders. As a result of their role in galvanizing an anti-colonial struggle, these organizations were valorized after independence. Nyerere embraced the cooperative movement as an institution that would assist in the implementation of

African socialism and solve the problem of rural poverty.317 At independence, cooperatives took over the distribution and sale of all commodities from Asian traders.

The shift in power from Asian traders to cooperatives was dramatic. In 1939 Asians controlled an estimated 50 to 60 percent of all imports and exports, 80 percent of all transport services, 90 percent of all town property, and 17 percent of non-African agricultural land.318 In 1944 there were only three cooperative unions319 but by

316 This is not to ignore the efforts of the anticolonial struggle in urban areas and particularly the contributions of women and Muslims that are often omitted. See Susan Geiger. TANU Women: gender and culture in the making of Tanganyikan nationals, 1955-1965. [Social History of Africa series] Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997. Mohamed Said, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924-1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika (London: Minerva Press, 1998) and James Brennan’s work on nationalism and urban citizens such as “Blood enemies: exploitation and urban citizenship in the nationalist political thought of Tanzania, 1958-1975,” Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 387-411. 317 From Nyerere’s inaugural address: “Tanganyika has good reason to be proud of its co-operative movement. But our success so far has been confined to the field of agricultural producers’ co-operatives. It is Government’s intention to extend the cooperative movement into every town, every village and every hamlet in Tanganyika, and to enable these societies to undertake every kind of enterprise which can be run by co-operative effort… All of us have agreed that we must establish a true socialist society in Tanganyika. Two very important instruments we shall use for this purpose are the Government itself and the Co- operative movement.” Julius Nyerere, President’s Inaugural Address, 10 December 1962, in Nyerere Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1952-65 (Dar es Salaam, 1966), 185. 318 Bryceson, Food Insecurity and the Social division of Labor, 71.

131 independence there were 857 cooperatives, while just four years later 1500 cooperatives had been registered.320

During the first decade of independence, the highly anticipated and politically welcome proliferation of cooperatives ended up causing many problems. They became increasingly small and balkanized, suffered from mismanagement and corruption.

Framers lost the purchasing power that cooperatives were supposed to protect.321 While they had played a positive political role in independence, people began seeing cooperatives with growing skepticism and eventually the government intervened in 1967, announcing that it would administer the cooperatives, eventually transferring them into parastatal organizations. This move, however, did not repair their reputation. As one letter to the The Daily News opines, citizens were frustrated by the opacity of the cooperative system and the harm it was causing farmers:

Lots of things regarding the way our cooperative societies and unions function

remain mysterious to the farmer. He finds prices paid to him for his crops to be

frustratingly low. He becomes even more baffled when he goes to the National

Agricultural Products Board, say to buy a bag of maize. He has to pay about

double the price it was bought from the farmer. From this he finds it hard to

believe that the price his crops earn is fair at all. With crops that are sold outside

the country, the farmer is normally not told what prices his crops fetch. If this

319 Andreas Eckert, “Useful Instruments of Participation? Local Government and Cooperatives in Tanzania, 1940s to 1970,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2007): 97-118, 103. 320 Ronald E. Seavoy, Famine in East Africa: Food Production and Food Policies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 183. 321 Eckert, “Useful Instruments,” 114.

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were done there would be less grievances aired by farmers against the cooperative

movement.322

Under political pressure, Nyerere abolished the cooperative system in 1976 to little protest. To replace it, the state created the National Milling Corporation, an agency responsible for all domestic crops that would manage everything from purchasing directly from villages to transporting the goods to the mill.323 The job of regional distribution of goods was then handed off to regional trading companies, each with their own specialization.324 For example, Dar es Salaam’s Regional Trading Company,

National Distributors, held a monopoly on wholesaling dairy products, baby food and other canned foods, rice, maize, wheat flour and sugar.325

As produce and grains arrived in Dar es Salaam from the hinterlands, they were destined for Ilala market in downtown, where they would be sold at wholesale auction to smaller vendors before reaching the retail level.326 In 1975, these wholesale auctions were relocated to Kariakoo, where a new market was erected to replace the old German market built before the First World War. With this move, maximum and minimum prices became fixed by the state. The area around the new market in Kariakoo had long been the hub of economic activity in Dar es Salaam, being both at the heart of the city and close to the harbor. One reporter who spent a day in Kariakoo as they were building the new market describes its sights and sounds:

322 “Something Rotten about Co-ops,” Daily News, March 3, 1973. 323 Bryceson, Food Insecurity, 201. 324 Anders Sporrek, Food Marketing and Urban Growth in Dar Es Salaam (Royal University of Lund, Dept. of Geography, 1985), 77. 325 Ibid., 77. 326 Ibid., 79.

133

All the vegetables were laid out dead on the ground’ the cookers of snacks and

purveyors of coffee had taken up corners; women’s baskets began to swell with a

fish’s head or limping greens;…a steady hammering of iron on iron from behind

the corrugated barrier surrounding the new market mixed with the richer

orchestrated colouring web of voices from the stalls and roads and houses and

pavements that are Kariakoo.327

This sole, centralized locale for food distribution in the city hindered access to food markets for residents as the town continued to grow, especially as Dar es Salaam’s municipal transportation infrastructure became crippled and ineffective.328 In general, during the first two decades of independence, food distribution in Tanzania became increasingly centralized and under the purview of state control. With this shift, the state employed a rhetoric of economic sabotage aimed at all food distributed outside of official channels. Private shops were accused of hoarding, price gouging, and inhibiting the socialist process. The call to eradicate this sabotage was often put forth by the newspapers as well as debated in the letters to the editor. For example, a Daily News article in 1972 accused all food stores that were not cooperative shops of participating in political and economic “sabotage” and called on citizens to help “eradicate middlemen and fight capitalism.”329 Another article that year vilified these shops for holding back the nation:

These private shop owners are out to create the impression that shortage of

foodstuffs is perpetual in this country. They malign the national struggle to free

327 “Getting rid of one’s money at Kariakoo,” The Daily News, March 4, 1973. 328 Sporrek, 89-91. 329 “Ruining socialism,” The Daily News, April 27, 1972.

134

ourselves from capitalistic bondage, so that they can rob the people of Tanzania of

their hard-earned money by putting too high prices on merchandise. …These

traders are exploiters of the highest order, with no idea of justice or “honest

business” apart from the honesty of a trading license. …now is the time to begin

to phase out the remnants of exploitation. Mwongozo330 says that the people are

the basis of Tanzania’s development. Any action that gives us more control of our

own affairs is an action for development.331

Ironically, it seems patently clear that increasing centralization of food supply and distribution did not empower individuals to control their own affairs. While some of these shops were certainly hoarding and hiking prices to take advantage of people’s desperation, they also served as crucial distributors. As Kerner writes, the shadow economy in Tanzania was by this point an essential survival strategy employed by people on all levels of the economic scale who could “manage to divert some essential goods or services from legal channels would do so.”332 The search for alternative ways to gain money or food even extended to university professors who came to be labeled as “the banana and chicken petty bourgeoisie” since they often had operations for selling farm goods or poultry to subsidize their salaries.333 As citizens of Dar es Salaam sought goods anywhere they could, the existence of these shops, as overpriced as they were, perhaps

330 Mwongozo was the Party Guidelines that were issued in 1971 that “signaled the end of capitalist forms of management in Tanzania.” Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (University of California Press, 1980),156. Mwongozo “stressed in particular Africa’s continuous vulnerability to neo-colonist behavior” (159). Particularly after the release of the Mwongozo statement, which I talk about in Chapter 4, citizens writing in about social issues would often couch their accusations of transgressing social norms or damaging civic good as exploitation. 331 “Inflated Food Prices,” The Daily News, May 14, 1972. 332 Kerner, Traders Versus the State, 48. 333 Ibid.

135 gave them more control over their lives and affairs than government shops with empty shelves. By the early 1980s, official per capita food deliveries to Dar es Salaam had dropped to between 15 and 20 percent of the 1970 number. Certainly, this drop did not represent an actual 85 percent decrease in food consumption in a city that was rapidly expanding. As Tripp writes, “There is little doubt that the difference between official marketed produce and consumer needs was met by the parallel markets.”334

By 1973 Tanzania was importing 25,000 tons of maize a year, and by August

1975, they had depleted their foreign exchange reserves by buying grains on the foreign market. These purchases were due in part to forces outside of their control, such as the world economic crisis in 1974 and a severe drought. Attempting to stem this growing dependency on international grain, Nyerere reinstated old colonial bylaws that had been abolished at independence, requiring families to cultivate a minimum acreage per family.

There were some regions of Tanzania where, in order to board trains or busses, citizens had to get a certificate from their local TANU/CCM branch demonstrating that they had planted a minimum acreage.335 These measures were attempts to invigorate agricultural production, to control the flow of goods to official channels, and to stem the flow of migrants to urban areas by requiring cultivation.

The implementation of Operation Maduka in 1976 signaled the fight against private stores moving into rural areas as well. Operation Maduka called for the replacement of all privately owned food shops (madukas) with government- and community-run Ujamaa shops. In some cases, communities were given just ten days to

334 Tripp, Changing the Rules, 165. 335 Zaki Ergas, “Why Did the Ujamaa Village Policy Fail? - Towards a Global Analysis,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no. 3 (1980): 387-410, 392-3.

136 close down shops and open new ones.336 In the Kyela District in the Mbeya region, the regional party secretary closed down forty privately run shops, replacing them with just three Ujamaa shops.337 Changes implemented with the intention of aiding farmers had perversely come to undermine their ability both to get reasonable prices for their crops and to have reliable access to goods in return. The result was a “black hole, into which resources disappeared, neither to the benefit of the peasantry nor to other identifiable groups, except the marketing bureaucracy as such.”338 Peasants received less for their crops since they had only one outlet through which to sell them, and consumers had only one option for where to buy their goods at state-owned dukas.339 For example, the peasant’s share of cashew crop profits between 1969 and 1978 decreased from 70 to 35 percent.340 More generally, from 1970 to 1980, the prices paid to producers for fourteen key crops decreased by 31 percent while on the global market they increased “in real terms” by 12 percent.341 This price fluctuation led local producers to divert their commodities to black markets when possible, where they could profit from the scarcity of

336 Hyden, 133. 337 Ibid. 338 M.S.D. Bagachwa, A.V.Y Mbelle and Brian Van Arkadie, eds., Market Reforms and Parastatal Restructuring in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam: Economics Department and Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar es Salaam, 1992), 14. 339 To illustrate the gap in prices between state dictated prices and what prices these products actually got in the market, the IMF recorded that, for example, cloth (khanga) in the Mbeya region sold in the market for 800 per unit while the official price remained 200 Tsh. Soap’s official price was 15 per until while in the market it went for 50Tsh, Cooking oil was official 80 Tsh a kilogram when in reality it was 200 Tsh and a kilo of sugar was 50 Tsh in the market while listed official as 15TSh. from the IMF African Department Fonds Immediate Office Sous-fonds Series: AFRAI Country Files Box 126 File 3 Tanzania— Correspondence 1985 January-March Office Memorandum January 30 1985 to: Mr. Anupam Basu Division Chief Mideast African Div., IMF from Florent Agueh, Cheifl EAISE Subject: Tanzania: Policy Package for Supply Response in Agriculture Table 5 Illustrative Official and Open Market Prices for Consumer Goods, 340 Seavoy, 183. 341 Tripp, 65.

137 goods in official shops. Resulting decreased stocks in government cooperative stores presented both the appearance (and reality) of a decline in peasant cash crop production, as producers turned to parallel markets or moved into urban areas to seek employment as a potentially more sustainable means of survival.

Even as peasants adapted to these post-colonial patterns of producing, they remained highly vulnerable to circumstance. Eighty-five percent of agriculture was still done by hand hoe, while ten percent was produced by oxen and plough, and only five percent by tractor.342 The few tractors that communities relied upon often fell into disrepair and were rendered useless since replacement parts from abroad were virtually impossible to afford or access. Villagisation often rearranged rural populations into overly dense areas where agricultural intensification and technological improvement were imperative for continuing success, but not necessarily extant.343 The formula for

Ujamaa at the community level left little room for error on the part of humans or nature, nor did it allow time for personal subsistence, which peasants often prioritized regardless of state demands. As new villages coalesced in places often unfit for intense environmental exploitation, unforeseen changes occurred and the desire of rural inhabitants changed. For example, the density of these new villages, Deborah Bryceson writes, created a “semi-urban atmosphere” replete with growing youth subcultures where young men began cultivating urban tastes and a disdain for rural “agricultural toil.”344

This was something the state feared and responded to with propaganda that manliness,

342 Bryceson, “A Century of Food Supply in Dar es Salaam,” 156. 343 Bryceson, Food Insecurity, 196. 344 Ibid.

138 hard work and good citizenship were all the sole purview of rural agriculturalists.345

Furthermore, the implementation of Universal Primary Education, arguably one of Nyerere’s biggest successes, created a crisis in farm labor. A period of particularly acute and harmfully low productivity occurred from 1973 to 1977 during “The Great

Move,” when 8 million peasants left their villages to move to Ujamaa villages.346 From

1974 to 1976 the relocation of major populations affected grain production dramatically.

Ronald Seavoy estimates that during the three-year period, 72 percent of grain available on markets was imported.347 Edwin Mtei, Nyrerere’s Minister of Finance and Planning, remembers trying to make it through this tough period:

Unfortunately the period of major relocation to the Ujamaa villages coincided

with the severe drought of 1973-74. The famine that resulted from these twin

causes was devastating. Tanzania found itself with a large percentage of its

population on the verge of starvation. Disproportionately large emergency food

imports had to be secured, almost exhausting the foreign exchange reserves. We

even had to import from unfriendly countries, such as Rhodesia and South Africa,

when shipments from far-off overseas areas seemed likely to arrive late.348

While Mtei implies a complete crash in production, one must also take into account the increasing frequency of goods being diverted. The aspiration of creating self-sufficient villages across the Tanzanian countryside is perhaps in crucial economic terms the opposite of the reality that unfolded. Instead of being self-sustaining, villagers were

345 Brennan, “Blood Enemies.” 346 Seavoy, 191. 347 Seavoy, 200. 348 Edwin Mtei, From Goatherd to Governor: The Autobiography of Edwin Mtei (Oxford: African Books Collective, 2009), 162.

139 reliant on aid and struggling to survive in their new surroundings, and either left or, as an alternative, established networks with family members in cities.

In response to the deprivations urban and rural populations suffered, the city and the country remained contiguous, collaborative and interconnected in unofficial (and often illegal) ways. These relationships are reflected in the changing geography of Dar es

Salaam during this period. One example of this relationship was the transfer and exchange of rare commodities among families. In a Daily News story in 1973, the reporter tells the story of his expectant rural family when he goes home to visit and his own realization of their meager access to goods:

When I reached my small village twenty-five miles from Masaai on a short

feeder road, everyone was delighted to see me. I thought all of it was part of my

family spirit and good neighbourly cheer. But no, quite a good deal of it was the

result of calculated relief. They saw in the “son” from Dar es Salaam the answer

to their shortages. Where is grandfather’s blanket? Where are my khanga? And

what about Kaniki (women work clothes, equivalent to Khanga) we have not seen

them here for six months! Have you brought any sugar with you? Bright and early

the next morning I was at the local duka. There was not much I could get from the

local duka[store]. The sugar had got finished the week before and the shopkeeper

did not think he would have any luck at the not-so-local duka when he went to see

the supply position that morning as he was intending to do. The word “shop” is an

awful misnomer for the bare shelves. He “sells” maize, flour, beans, sugar (if they

140

get it), cigarettes, matches, tinned milk, tea leaves, female decorative trinkets,

writing paper, and packets of FAN powder soap.349

In rural areas, the celebration of visitors arriving was also full of expectation of what the city could provide in the face of their own need.

Families also transported goods in the other direction as well. As peasants continued to receive less for their crops through official market channels, they sought alternative routes for their goods through family networks. To monitor the traffic of goods between regions, the government set up roadblocks to check for unauthorized commerce, but patrols turned a blind eye to peasants traveling to and from the city with less than five bags of food.350 This exchange allowed for families to create modest rural- urban networks for trading goods like soap and cooking oil for maize, rice, coconuts and cashews. With potentially many trips to and fro, each bringing a modest amount for trade, this illicit network became a viable way to survive scarcity in both locations.

Peasants also lacked incentive to increase production of agricultural products because they could not afford the goods they desired with their incomes.351 When forced to face this reality of unaffordable or unavailable goods, both rural and urban workers and peasants “occupied the better part of each working day with the search for necessary commodities or trading in such commodities.”352 Thus, somewhat paradoxically, it became increasingly advantageous for urban populations to farm or engage in other forms of self-reliance, but it became far less sustainable only to engage in farming. Realizing

349 “Where Shops are empty shelves,” The Daily News, January 28, 1973 350 Bryceson, Food Insecurity, 215. 351 Kerner, 47. 352 Ibid.

141 this lack of incentive, the state encouraged urban populations to involve themselves in activities that had generally been reserved for rural Ujamaa practices. For example, in

1972, the agricultural minister Derek Bryceson, encouraged “town people” to start cooperatives of their own both to encourage the “building of socialism in urban areas” and to create new productive activities in the face of growing shortages.353

Methods for coping with inaccessibility of goods came up often in the oral history interviews I conducted in Mbagala. Those who moved there often did so after living closer into town in an attempt to find cheaper rent and access to multiple survival tactics to mitigate the effect of the deepening food crisis. Fatuma, one of my interviewees, remembered vividly the hardest time of her life being from 1975 to 1977.354 During this time, there was hardly ever food at the cooperative shops. People would line up to wait for the next truck bringing food to the shop for distribution, or, as Fatuma recalls, “This was the time when people are learning to follow the car.”355 The cars she is referring to are those who would come to the government shops to replenish the supply of food and other commodities. She remembers going to Keko (a neighborhood in Dar) to follow a supply truck full of cassava flour hopeful to claim a good spot in line when it arrived at the cooperative shop. After standing in line for hours, the person in front of her received the last bag of flour, but gave Fatuma the kilo she wanted because she had a baby.

Rahema Shabani, in another interview, recalled what women like she and Fatuma would do if the government shops were empty:

353 “Town People ‘should start co-ops,’” The Daily News, June 28, 1972. 354 Fatuma did not provide her last name. 355 Oral History interview with Fatuma.

142

It’s true that availability of food and many other things was hard, but there were

middlemen in between called “walanguzi” (black marketeers) as you know

humans have the knowledge to know how to live, these men were going into

different regions and bringing back food. You would go in Tandika [market in

Dar es Salaam] and you would find places which have piles of rice or maize flour

on the table, you just go there and put money on the table and leave the place. The

“walunguzi” took the money and brought to you rice if its rice, if the required

kilos would be balanced its ok if not its ok because there was no bargaining or

even making sure if you have got what you wanted.

Rahema’s memory of being powerless to bargain with the walanguzi underscores how vulnerable these men and women were, with little ability to choose where or how they obtained their food, whether they got what they paid for, nor even what they ate. Another woman, Mwenevyale, remembers more viscerally that people sometimes chased “dead body trucks” thinking they were food trucks, and that men in the market would wear big trousers called bugaluu, to obscure the illegal goods they were carrying around to sell.356

These walunguzi, knowing the vulnerability of populations in the outskirts of town, used it to their advantage. As Fatuma commented, “the middleman was clever—they knew that local people have trouble with transport and so they jacked up the prices a lot.” To live in these outskirts then became a gamble for many people, allowing for cultivation in small plots but generally lacking services and in particular, transportation.

356 Oral History interview with Mwenevyale.

143

Understanding this vulnerable position, people often split the difference of these two options, residing in the town closer to markets, but finding a place to cultivate in the outskirts. There is a complicated mixture here of these “peripheral” people uncovering choices among a paucity of choice. The walunguzi selling Fatuma food represent an illegal channel people preserved in order to enlarge the possibility of their dire choices and to improve their lives, as does the decision to live sometimes in multiple locations at once to maximize a family’s ability to make money and grow food. However, as

Rehema’s remarks highlight, ultimately these were not empowering options but rather methods for survival.

DUKWALLAHS AND FOOD STALLS One of the major sites of struggle in the conflict between state distribution of goods and the black market was the political battle between informal food vendors and the city governance. The growing presence of food stalls and unlicensed vendors in Dar es

Salaam played interesting roles both in distributing food and in provoking public discourse about disorder, dirt, and the illegality of informal work in the city. From colonial times until the liberalization of the market in the mid-1980s, the government conducted a series of purges to rid the city of “unemployed” Africans.357 Chief among those who faced removal were unlicensed petty traders. The targeting of food stalls in

Dar es Salaam represents many different municipal fears wrapped into one: unchecked growth; circumvention of legal food distribution channels; public health disasters through unsanitary food; the growth of informal labor, and the loss of peasant labor in

357 James Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Yusuf Lawi, Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2007), 162.

144 rural areas. As official channels for selling and procuring food dried up, petty vendors and illegal food shops distributed food to a growing city. As they did so, they also offered peasants higher prices and limited stock. Urban residents paid dearly for their food, regardless of who sold it.

Newspaper articles and letters to the editor reveal the tensions that surrounded the collision of food vendors, private food shops, and the government. As mentioned earlier, the government vilified private food shops (dukwallahs) for raising prices and hoarding goods despite the wide unpopularity of Operation Maduka, which had ceased closing private shops two and a half months into the operation. By the early 1980s, the issue had taken on substantial political dimensions. The Prime Minister Rashidi Kawawa spoke out against traders who hoarded as “participating in economic sabotage to frustrate the country’s efforts to build and consolidate the principles of Ujamaa.”358 Emphasizing the important role of consumer cooperative shops, Kawawa beseeched Tanzanians to understand that there was “no shortcut to socialism except by living and working together in the spirit of Ujamaa for the common good.”359 Particularly Asian shop owners were targeted and suffered from the crackdown on dukwallahs. In 1983, a campaign was launched against economic saboteurs to arrest offending shop owners and take them immediately to jail. Government officials in an arrest of thirty-five ‘sabotuers’ in

Dodoma and Dar es Salaam described the hoards of goods to the media as looking “like

Aladdin’s Caves.”360 A central government figure in this campaign was the Prime

358 “Unscrupulous traders digging own graves-PM,” The Daily News, January 8, 1973. 359 Ibid. 360 Richard Hall, “Tanzania Hunts Hoarders of Cash, Goods,” The Globe and Mail (Canada) April 22, 1983.

145

Minister and likely presidential heir, Edward Sokoine, who was killed a year later in a car accident. In a bid to demonstrate the importance of the campaign, Sokoine, at a rally of

50,000 people presented 10,000 dollars (I would guess this amount was actually in

Tanzanian shillings) to a police officer who had refused to accept the same amount as a bribe from a “businessman” during the expulsion of racketeers.361 Sokoine was seen by many Tanzanians as a hero to everyday people for trying to preserve their access to goods such as food and building materials. Campaigns that shut down shops, however, also often severely exacerbated the scarcity of goods.

Small-scale street vendors faced their own challenges. Stall owners could be accused of any number of crimes from vagrancy to contributing to urban disorder or even evading their responsibility of cultivating in rural areas. Beyond legal questions, a number of debates surrounded the existence of vendors. While some contended they contributed to a healthy city, others claimed they created diseased environments. While some argued they represented struggling workers, the opposing argument portrayed them as waste of labor, stalling out Tanzania’s evolution into a socialist society. Seen differently Anders Sporrek, in his 1985 survey of food marketing in the city, argues that despite the small role food vendors played in the economy of urban food, they were very important contributors to the health of the city by distributing nutritious food to the far ends of a growing city.362 Examining the placement of food stands within the elastic boundaries of the city reveals patterns of personal and family consumption since these

361 Ibid. 362 Sporrek, Food Marketing and Urban Growth in Dar es Salaam, 108.

146 small food sources catered to individuals rather than hotels or restaurants.363

Markets and stands for food in Dar es Salaam generally specialized in unprepared food staples, especially perishable produce. According to a 1976 survey, the most common food items sold in order of amount were onions, tomatoes, oranges, coconuts, chilis, bananas, curry, dagaa [fish], fish, salt, limes, mangoes, lemons, ladies fingers, sweet potatoes, tangerines, cassava.364 In West African cities such as Ibadan, the poor and working classes tended to eat food prepared on the street, whereas in Dar the habit was to eat breakfast and the major evening meal at home and buying food for preparation when returning in the evening after work.365 Prepared food in Dar es Salaam tended to be sold in places called hoteli or, for an even cheaper, quicker meal, there were magenge, comprised of ad hoc tables and benches often clustered around businesses or construction sites.366 There are also some common prepared foods that are the exception to the rule such as maandazi [donuts] and chapati [Indian flatbread]. Many of the women I interviewed had a long history of selling these foods outside of their homes or by bus stops. Most produced and sold food in their neighborhoods in order to augment their husbands’ incomes or even sometimes as a sole means of support for the family if their husbands could not find work.

Such consumption patterns follow these women’s own trajectory through the city’s geography. Fatuma Abdallah recalled selling fresh fish in Tandika with her mother when she lived closer to downtown since people stopped there in the evening on their

363 Ibid., 127. 364 Ibid., 141. 365 Ibid., 127. 366 Ibid., 128.

147 way home from work.367 When Fatuma moved out to Mbagala though, much farther from the city center that is less densely populated, she was forced to change her approach. She soon realized there were not enough people who wanted to buy fish in the evening.

Busses stopped running too early and it was hard for her to transport fresh fish, so

Fatuma switched to selling maandazi in the morning. Now, she says, you can buy fish in

Mbagala since transportation has improved, but she has stuck with maandazi because the money is just supplementary. This anecdote suggests two general things. First, nutritional options in Dar es Salaam were primarily geographically contingent and generally most diverse at the center; second, despite this general distribution pattern, over time the reach and diversity of vendors adapted to the city’s continued growth. As high prices pushed new residents into peri-urban zones, food options eventually followed. Not to mention the growing production of food in the margins.

A study conducted by the Economic Research Bureau at the University of Dar es

Salaam in 1969 on the orange trade tells a brief story of the two general roles that petty traders fulfilled: they cheaply connected small rural producers with outlets for selling goods that bypassed the market, and they distributed food across neglected parts of Dar es Salaam. Farmers who sold oranges usually lived in a swath of land around the town extending from 20 to 70 miles around the city. It was incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive for farmers to move their produce to the road from their plots of land.

Once farmers got their oranges to the road, they were then transported by bicycle or bus

367 Interview with Fatumah Abdallah.

148 or carried as a headload.368 For the most part, these oranges went to Kariakoo where they were either bought by older vendors who worked in established locations by offices or areas with high pedestrian flow, or by young men and boys who “imperceptivity appear[ed] with the season and their numbers rapidly wane[d] with the end of the season.”369 These young vendors rarely had licenses, but they greatly expanded the reach of this cheap and nutritious snack out from the city center: “without them there would have to be major changes in the consumption of snacks among the low income group.”370

While it was traditionally the role of men to hawk oranges and other food items around town, as illustrated above, women also sold food for profit. In a survey of female wage earners in the city in the early 1970s, sixty-seven percent of the women surveyed sold fruits and vegetables that they had picked up at markets or in Ilala to supplement their income. Others also sold small amounts from their farms, avoiding the middleman and causing price competition with women who had to pay for their items at market.

Usually the money from these sales totaled little on a daily basis but provided a buffer against poverty. One women surveyed, however, proudly explained her business was flourishing selling beans, rice, maadazi, and tea, and her husband’s wage was much more modest: “whether he [her husband] is at home or with another woman outside, I don't care. I have my own money and the house is mine.”371 Her plan was to save money to

368 A.C. Mascarenhas, and S.M. Mbilinyi, “Rationalizing the Orange Trade of Dar es Salaam,” Collected E.R.B. Papers, Volume III Economic Research Bureau University of Dar es Salaam 1969, 304. 369 Ibid. 370 Ibid., 309. 371 Marja-Liisa Swantz and Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Women Workers in Dar Es Salaam: 1973/74 Survey of Female Minimum Wage Earners and Self-Employed, Research paper (Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam. Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning); no. 43. [Dar es Salaam]: Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning, University of Dar es Salaam, 1976, 22.

149 open a beer store in the future.

These survival strategies, in some ways, were the very essence of Nyerere’s self- help development rhetoric; yet they were also the by the late 1960s illegal, unless the vendors had been issued permits by the city council. The city also began issuing identity cards to all vendors and other workers suspected of lacking formal employment.372 As was the goal of all purges from Dar es Salaam, the government sought to send “idle” people back to the country to grow crops and remain in Ujamaa villages. President

Nyerere in the Daily News declared that it was “no longer a time for words. Lazy people roaming in towns should go to work on the land.”373 With this pronouncement, the government initiated a new wave of purges from Dar es Salaam beginning with

Operation Kupe [Parasite] in 1972, Operation Kila Mtu Anfanye Kazi [Every Person

Must Work] in 1976 and eventually Operation Nguvu Kazi [Hard Work] in 1983 aimed at these “idlers.”

Perhaps the campaign that left the most indelible mark on the public’s memory was the Human Resources Deployment Act of 1983, colloquially known as Nguvu Kazi.

The unemployed were rounded up, convicted of economic crimes and sent to work on farms in Dar es Salaam’s surrounding peri-urban zone. In terms of food supply,

Operation Nguvu Kazi was the culmination of repeated attempts since the colonial era to purge Dar es Salaam of street vending, hawking and informal urban work.374 The government justified the campaign by pointing to the country’s “need to increase

372 “Dar issues Identity Cards,” Daily News, July 7, 1967. 373 “Unemployed in Dar must go–Nyerere,” Daily News, July 17, 1967. 374 For more on these urban purges throughout the colonial era, see Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime & Colonial Orderin Dar Es Salaam (Oxford: British Institute in Eastern Africa and James Currey, 2005).

150 productivity and make the country self-sufficient in food.”375 One way to protect themselves from expulsion from the city, people cultivated small plots of land on its fringes as a way to avoid repatriation to rural areas. As one of my interviewees, Ally

Kinongo, explained, during Operation Nguvu Kazi

being caught was a normal thing, if you were caught and you knew how to

provide a good statement to the police it was not easy to be sent in Gezaulole [a

work farm in nearby Kigamboni]. For example, during that time I owned a

shamba in Kiparang’anda [an area close to Dar es Salaam and still part of the

regional Dar es Salaam district], so if I got caught I was showing my shamba

identity card, I told them that I’m just here to make a business but I have a

shamba and family in Kiparang’anda… They trusted my statements and I never

got caught again.376

Operation Nguvu Kazi demonstrated how detached the government was from the reality of poor people in Dar es Salaam. “In principle,” Aili Marie Tripp writes, “most people had no objection to farming and would have welcomed a viable scheme that gave them land and a means to cultivate.”377 For example, a cigarette vendor picked up during

Nguvu Kazi, told Tripp in an interview that despite being born and raised in the city, he wished for a more viable way to survive: “The government just collected us young men and dumped us in the forest to farm. They gave us plots but no capital, no houses, no food…We had no choice but to come back to the city and continue selling cigarettes. If I

375 Tripp, 141, quoting from African Business, December 1983. 376 Oral History interview with Ally Kinogo. 377 Tripp, 142.

151 had a place to live and the means I would have stayed to farm.”378 A major aim of

Operation Nguvu Kazi, the encouragement of self-reliance through cultivation, was something that people with any such opportunity was likely already doing in the outskirts of the city.

FARMING FOR LIFE ON THE FRINGES Urbanites increasingly turned to the fringes of Dar es Salaam for food production as the economic crisis wore on. The 1976/77 Household Budget Survey of Dar es Salaam notes that 49 percent of household food consumption came from farms unmediated by market exchange, and the poorer the family often the greater the percentage.379 Farming in the peri-urban zone or traveling between the city and the country in Dar es Salaam has ebbed and flowed since colonial times. As demonstrated earlier, in the beginning stages of urbanization in Dar es Salaam, many people relied on farming in the outskirts of town.

Yet in 1950, a survey of African workers found that only about 14 percent cultivated in addition to their employment.380

Then in 1959 Leslie’s survey in 1959 revealed a seven percent decline in urban cultivation.381 As urban conditions and food supply evened out and remained stable in the

1960s, the amount of peri-urban farming continued to decrease significantly. Tripp conducted her own survey in the late 1980s asking Dar es Salaam residents what year they first started farming. Of the 160 people she interviewed, 8 percent said between

378 Ibid., 143. 379 Bryceson, Food Insecurity, 214. 380 Tripp, 54 381 Ibid.

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1948 and 1967, 9 percent started between 1968 and 1972, 21 percent between 1973 and

1977, 13 percent between 1978 and 1982, and 49 percent between 1983 and 1987.382 This upward trend in urban agriculture suggests that growing one’s own food has little to do with the length of tenure in the city, nor that it solely persists as a transitional activity for new migrants. It also suggests that it is a survival strategy that ultimately cut across class lines and not some cultural refusal to urbanize on the part of rural migrants.

While the steady increase in peri-urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam may reveal a uniquely vigorous economic safety net for Tanzanians, many Africans remain financially as well as culturally tied to rural areas beyond their primary residence in cities. In Uganda and Kenya, for example, a 1965 survey demonstrated that about three-quarters of all respondents had their own shamba, and Ferguson’s work on the Zambian Copper Belt also suggests a re-entrenchment in the 1980s of connections with rural areas.383 A picture then begins emerging of a general regional—if not continental—trend of maintaining porous and flexible boundaries between rural and urban areas, even as urban populations are swelling. Short of going home to the countryside, rural transplants to a city like Dar es Salaam saw the peri-urban zone as an appealing middle ground for cultivation. This, however, was not lucrative cultivation. It usually, as Susan Friedberg writes, “might generate enough revenue for a young bachelor's second-hand wardrobe; it might help

382 Ibid., 55. 383 Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (University of California Press, 1980), 162 and James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Perspectives on Southern Africa 57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

153 keep a household fed, when cobbled together with odd jobs and petty commerce. But it does not generate much sense of security, or confidence in the future.”384

The Tanzanian state took an inconsistent position on the changing nature of Dar es Salaam’s periphery, but ultimately encouraged mixed use as an act of self-reliance.

The first official push to promote urban farming was a campaign in 1974-75 called

Kilimo Cha Kufa na Kupona, which in English translates to “Agriculture for Life and

Death.” In this campaign, “government offices, factories and other workplaces were issued land outside the city for cultivation.”385

Outside of official projects to promote urban workers farming, a survey conducted by Michaela von Freyhold in 1976 concluded that four out of five “casual workers, and low-wage blue- and white-collar workers” either have access to land or own land they can cultivate.386 Goran Hyden suggests that Ujamaa failed because peasants refused to turn away from the economy of affection (surviving throught family economics and safety nets) also writes that workers chose the “economy of affection” over the modern economy when it came to social security.387 Hyden concludes this analysis by looking at workers’ relative allegiance to jobs versus their families, measuring, for example, the amount of money remitted to rural areas from workers in several different economic groups to demonstrate that allegiance remained with family. Kerner also notes that the

Tanzanian government considered making farming a mandatory supplemental activity for

384 Susanne E. Freidberg, “Gardening on the Edge: The Social Conditions of Unsustainability on an African Urban Periphery,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91, no. 2 (2001): 349-369, 365. 385 Tripp, 54. 386 Michaela von Freyhold, “The Workers, the Nizers and the Peasants,” Department of Sociology, University of Dar es Salaam, n.d. 387 Hyden, 161.

154 all urban workers.388 This plan was eventually aborted because of complaints that factory workers and white-collar workers would become inefficient as a result. It is interesting to note though that Nyerere’s desire for workers to farm seems very much a retreat away from a modern economy to an economy of affection. It seems clear, though, that most workers were already employing this method of survival since so few could possibly make ends meet with official salaries alone. Virtually every class of urban worker utilized strategies of rural or peri-urban land ownership, extended family networks and subsistence cultivation.

The neighborhood of Mbagala illustrates this phenomenon. It is bisected by Kilwa road, one of the main arteries leaving Dar es Salaam going south to the coastal area and other regions. When asking my interviewees why they chose to settle in Mbagala (most of them having already moved around several times within Dar es Salaam), people often cited that its location gave them easy access to the Rufiji district, from which almost all of them hailed. Settling along Kilwa road meant these men and women could facilitate transfer of goods between their families in rural areas and the city more easily. It also allowed for procuring many goods for free. Hamada Ali Mnora, one of the men I interviewed, explained that

in Mburahati (a neighborhood in Dar) life started to be harder, you were required

to purchase everything, but here in Mbagala you can get firewood from coconut

trees and mango trees, free water from wells, so life in Mbagala was easier, even

to cultivate was possible.389

388 Kerner, Traders Versus the State, 44-45. 389 Interview with Hamada Ali Mnora, Mbagala, October 30, 2009.

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Hamada also explained how he and his wife began cultivating to supplement their income in the area about 30 kilometers from the city center called Kimbiji:

When I shifted here [Mbagala] after getting married, I was buying and cultivating

food. My wife was cultivating in Kimbiji a certain place called Luhanga, and also

she was going home to Rufiji [in the coastal area] to cultivate. She cultivated

about six years continuously, it was that time when food was given by cards

during the 1980s, during the time when the food was obtained by a list of names.

In Kimbiji there was a big farm…it was a fertile land because it is near to the

ocean and the harvest was big. The food that we cultivated, half we sold and half

kept for food. The money obtained from the sales is what helped me to buy a plot,

because in factory the salary was low to fulfill family needs, therefore to get

money for development was difficult.

The inhibiting obstacle for urban cultivation was land scarcity, not labor scarcity, a basic inverse of what inhibited rural cultivation. To tackle the problem, the result was to establish “agricultural frontiers” expanded further and further away from the center of town.390 By 1994, according to one statistic, after “petty trade and labor” urban agriculture was the second largest form of employment in the city, with seventy-four percent of these farmers also keeping livestock of some sort.391

390 Deborah Bryceson, Food insecurity, 215 lists articles in Daily News about the increase in peri-urban agriculture: “Daily News, Dar City Council decision dangerous” 2/19/80 ‘City to extend its borders, 1/9/82, peasants to win land case, 5/1/84, plot allocation system is faulty, 11/19/85, Mwanza acts on urushaji 311//80, Leaders warned on food permits 1/7/84 ilala bans food permits 2/23/84, farming bans “Keeping Mbeya clean of…maize’ 2/19/79, Bukoba 5/23/79, Moshi Council destroys crops, 5/4/84, Interview with Dr. K. Mustafa 6/22/85m Kibaha, 12/26/81, Mbilini clarifies on food movement 3/2/84 391 Mlozi, Urban Agriculture, 4.

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CONCLUSION The intention of this chapter has been to create a picture of the political ecology of urban food supply, charting the changing geography of consumption and production of food in the city within the larger context of Tanzania’s larger food crisis. Chronic problems of distribution and access to food shaped the growth and geography of the city.

I began by sketching out the nature of colonial food supply and then discussed the postcolonial transformation of food supply through centralization and state ownership of distribution. Nyerere ultimately ended up sending mixed messages about his expectations for urban citizenship, what was considered “work,” and what function a city played in a socialist state. Social commentary on food scarcity often intersected with dialogues about what was the spirit of Ujamaa and how average citizens could ensure they were acting in good faith of socialist ideals.

The task of examining the changing geography of the city due to food insecurity, cannot be uncoupled from considering how it also changed the lives of urban citizens.

Self-reliance in food production during the Nyerere years became more rather than less essential for urban Tanzanians. Continued ties to rural areas and small cultivation in peri- urban zones allowed many to hedge their bets on the outskirts of the city far better than they could either at its center or in rural areas. New urbanites carved out a sense of place in these interstitial spaces.

By way of conclusion, it is also worth speculating how food security fit into the other issues of livelihood that new urbanites faced. Just as this chapter must be seen contextually along with the other chapters as one of several drivers of change in Dar’s environment, food security for individuals and families must also be seen contextually.

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It is easy to assume food security eclipses all other concerns, but this may not be the case. To take an extreme example, Alex de Waal’s work on the dynamics of famine in

Darfur suggests otherwise. De Waal argues that in seeking an understanding of people’s reaction to famine it is not sufficient, de Waal argues, to just look at a community’s access to food (whether that access be physical or economic). One must also consider more generally how people felt and reacted to the state of being hungry. Interestingly, de

Waal found they did not always seek to avoid it or choose remedying it as their first priority. The answer came out of looking much more broadly at what famine itself causes or exacerbates, which is destitution. Thinking about destitution puts the threat of famine in context. Perhaps this has something in common with the men Leslie spoke to in the

1950s, who described hunger as a more pervasive and broad-spectrum type of deficiency than a growling stomach. Writing about Darfur, De Waal states: “People see famine primarily not as a threat to their lives but as a threat to their way of life. Their central aim during the famine was to preserve the base of their livelihood, so they could return to a normal or acceptable way of life after the famine.”392 Michael Watts, looking at famine in northern Nigeria, similarly points out that households choose to hold on to assets over increasing or maintaining their current levels of food consumption.393 This is not to suggest that people do not adapt their livelihood strategies in the face of famine. De Waal writes of seasonal migration and emigration from famine areas as common reactions to food shortages. People’s reactions to famine are thus more holistic than simply seeking

392 Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 141. 393 Mamadou Baro and Tara F. Deubel, “Persistent Hunger: Perspectives on Vulnerability, Famine, and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35, no. 1 (2006): 521–538, 529.

158 out ways to buy more grain. In Dar es Salaam by the mid 1980s, there was such a shortage of goods, including some food items that having money was often beside the point. There were scarce options for procuring goods. Perhaps the shift towards urban agriculture that becomes quite pronounced should not be seen as a desperate choice in the face of high food prices, but as a choice that allowed citizens at every level of income to preserve livelihoods in the face of a general crisis.

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Chapter Four: Cars, Buses, and the Energy Crisis: The Politics of Mobility in 1970s

Dar es Salaam

In Dar es Salaam during the 1970s, a lively debate over the snowballing crisis of transportation came to embody larger tensions regarding the future of socialist Tanzania.

Citizens’ growing frustration with waiting hours for broken down buses provoked a dialogue about who were the loyalists and betrayers of Tanzania’s ideal socialist society.

The 1970s also brought to the fore Tanzania’s precarious relationship with the rest of the world through the oil crisis, provoking bigger development questions about what was

Tanzania’s role in the global economy and conversely what was the global economy’s role in Tanzania’s economy. In reading through the newspapers, it became clear the issue of mobility was a window into the politics and protest that marked the city’s changing landscape and changing resource dilemmas.

The colonial history of transportation created a cat and mouse game between the state and citizens reflecting among other issues the conflicting natures of colonial economic growth and personal economic survival. The state desired geographically rooted populations while for an increasing segment of the population financial stability came out of mobility and the ability to exploit many different options for income generation. Nyerere’s policies ultimately continued the colonial legacy of limiting the mobility of populations.

In Dar, following World War II, the city’s geographic expansion and lack of roads constrained and dictated where people lived and how they moved around. These two factors of limited access to mobility and limited road infrastructure compounded with the

160 oil shocks and resource shortages in the 1970s to create a transportation crisis couched within class conflict. The worker and the bureaucrat represented different “sides” in a struggle over cohabitation in the city and over who would define Tanzania and Ujamaa.

Transportation infrastructure formed the contours of the city as well as who utilized the peri-urban area around the city limits. An insufficient infrastructure led to intense building along the arterial roads contributing to informal and dense urban development. Hence, expansion along the arterial roads has naturally been faster than in those areas not served by good roads.

The final part of this chapter looks at how the convergence of poor road infrastructure, limited access to transportation, and a crowded arterial roads created a public transportation crisis in the 1970s. In the wake of this crisis, buses and cars became a site for debate about conspicuous consumption. Cars represented not just wealth but the privilege of mobility in a city where people who struggled daily with broken down buses and inadequate public infrastructure. Thus, the use and presence of cars became a source of contention that was avidly debated in the newspapers. The conflict both represented a taking of “sides” in a struggle over who would define Ujamaa, and a negotiation for cohabitation in social spaces where resources were incredibly scarce.394

MOBILITY AND THE MIGRANT

For the colonial subject, the railway and the motorcar were multivalent symbols of freedom and restriction. Transportation followed the fault line of colonial subjecthood where particularly African males were forced into wage labor, yet when arriving in cities

394 This question arose out of participation on a panel at ASA 2011.

161 their movements and livelihoods were highly monitored and administrators feared that unmooring young men from their “tribes” would create transitory, lazy, and potentially unruly subjects.395 Colonial officials often discussed how best to keep tabs on these men, including an ongoing debate about the efficacy of dispensing travel permits and passes for ‘natives’ traveling outside their districts.396 The district officer for Dar es Salaam decided that monitoring the influx of Africans into the city could not be solved simply through issuing passes since people came and went too easily and quickly. In addition, he wrote, “each street, road, barabara” would need a headman in charge to “note the arrival of strangers” and “take the necessarily administrative action” to monitor their tenure in the city.397 Beginning in the late 1930s there was also talk of establishing a labor camp to house these men on the outskirts of the city, keeping them separate from the non-African population and allowing for easier surveillance and regulation of the population, a tactic used in other colonies as well.398 This facilitated the clearing of new lands and provided essential supplies for the city such as building materials and charcoal that were harvested and produced out of Dar’s forest hinterlands in the process of establishing camps.

Accessing transportation, as in many colonial states, was tied to demonstrating that one

395 As Mahmood Mamdani notes about South Africa, “Migrant labor was never just a source of cheap labor; it was at the same time semiservile and controlled. Every effort was made to turn urban hostels in which migrants lived into enclaves shut off socially and physically from surrounding townships, just as an effort was made to subordinate migrants inside hostels to a regime of indirect rule; but the more migrant links with the reserve were kept alive, the more effectively they functioned as conveyor belts between urban activism and rural discontent.” Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 220.

396 File No 443 Provincial Office Eastern Province Folder: Traveling Permits and Passes for Natives” 1938 TNA 397 TNA File No 443 Provincial Office Eastern Province Folder: Traveling Permits and Passes for Natives” 1938 Letter to the Acting District Officer 17 January 1939 TNA 398 “Labour Camps in Dar es Salaam,” Folder Provincial Office Eastern Province, File No 311 TNA.

162 had a job and was employed, which also ensured that access to transportation was highly gendered. Throughout the colonial period and into the independence era, any African who lacked employment in the city faced the prospect of being rounded up and sent back to his or her ‘home’ district or relocated in the rural farming schemes on the outskirts of the city. In arranging and enforcing these rules, the government would cover the transportation for the trip out of the city but leave Africans to find their way by foot or generate train fare should they choose to leave the rural scheme. They would also have a tough time finding employment if they arrived back in the city without a permit, which, if they were caught, would then lead to their deportment again back to a rural area, continuing this important and ineffective cycle.399

Free transportation to the rural hinterlands was often taken advantage of by

Africans to travel between the city and the country. The administration was aware of this potential abuse, yet could not necessarily guard against it. In Tanga, authorities warned that

wholesale repatriation will be expensive, besides involving the most

careful scrutiny and supervision. Once it became known that free passage

home were to be had, one can picture the Tanga authorities being

inundated with a crowd of applicants, each one of whom could produce

evidence of having originated from an up-country district. There is no

more enthusiastic “joy-rider” than the African native…400

399 “Settlement Policy-General,” “Statement of Government Policy on Settlement Ministry Circular No. 4 of 1963 8 March 1963 File No. 257/AN20/019 TNA. 400 File No 21616 Tanganyika Secretariat “Repatriation of unemployed natives in Townships” 14.6.1933, p 16.

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In another example from 1956, a man named Issa Namna from the Rufiji region went to his District Commissioner to request permission to return to Dar es Salaam. He had been repatriated to Rufiji to cultivate and was told he could not return to Dar unless he first secured a new job. Upon learning this, he “very foolishly” replied that he would return to

Dar es Salaam “in any case whether legally or illegally.” The district commissioner then suggested that, “if he wishes to practice his trade,” of which the document was not clear,

“he does so in some town other than Dar es Salaam.”401 It was clear that Namna would not be granted transport back to the city. Men like Namna were not rare nor were their struggles to return to the city. Continuing this legacy, Nyerere also revoked access to transportation or forcibly moved people during periods of food insecurity in order to ensure agricultural production in rural areas.

The campaign known as Kilimo cha Kufa na Kupona [Farm for Life or Death], launched in 1974, ordered citizens to return to their farms. In some parts of the country during the campaign, traveling by bus or train became virtually impossible unless one had a permit from the local political headquarters certifying they had planted a minimum number of acres. Even in urban areas, citizens were made to grow food.402 Transportation became further tied to issues of civic freedom during the 1983 campaign Nguvu Kazi.

During this campaign, if people were found on the street during working hours, the policy assumed they lacked formal employment and consequently could be rounded up and

401 Letter to the Secretary General of TANU from District Commissioner of Rufiji 24th February 1956 ACC 1274 File No. 2/22 Vol. II. 402 Zaki Ergas, “Why Did the Ujamaa Village Policy Fail?—Towards a Global Analysis,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no. 3 (1980): 387-410, 392-3.

164 deported to agricultural camps on the outskirts of town. As one letter to the editor pointed out, these assumptions (as well as the campaign itself) were troubling:

I would like to question those in authority of their indiscriminate arrests of

pedestrians and cyclists in the streets between 10:00AM and 2PM is legal

and constitutional…People using cars and trucks during the so-called

work hours are not harassed. Why? Can’t someone loiter with his car for

petty personal business during work hours? Are we creating two classes of

citizens in this country—the oppressed and the privileged?403

Mobility marked a dividing line in Tanzanian society that was rapidly growing.

Established urban citizens also supported purging the city of the jobless and feared their encroachment into neighborhoods. Andrew Burton writes that after benefitting from late colonial urban policy, citizens often pulled “up the drawbridge” on their neighborhoods, sometimes even creating people’s “party cadres and peoples’ militias” to keep unemployed people out of their neighborhoods.404

The flipside of growing transportation options was that, despite efforts of the state, Tanzanians found ways to relocate or migrate seasonally between locations, or to create networks for selling goods outside of formal economic institutions. Some examples of the essential role of transportation came out of my oral history interviews.

Since Mbagala rests on the outer edge of Dar es Salaam on the way south to the coastal region, virtually all of my informants were from the coastal region and their continued

403 Letter to the Editor, Daily News, November 10, 1983. 404 Andrew Burton, “The Haven of Peace Purged: Tackling the Undesirable and Unproductive Poor in Dar es Salaam, ca.1950s-1980s,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2007): 119- 151, 129.

165 ability to travel home played a large role in their choice to settle in Mbagala. Hamada Ali

Mnora recalled taking transportation to and from where he and his wife cultivated food to supplement his job at the Urafiki textile mill. When he had two days off in a row, he would go out to Kimbiji where his wife cultivated and sleep in a small lookout in the fields, working for those two days.405 Kimbiji was around 20 miles away from his neighborhood of Mburahati, but it required a bus for 15 cents and a boat for 10 cents to get there. Due to the cost and time it took to get there, he could only help his wife occasionally.

Fatuma, who moved to Dar es Salaam after she married, made a living selling mangoes and coconuts with her husband. They often brought mangoes in from the rural areas and picked coconuts in the peri-urban groves surrounding town.406 Her husband would gather the fruit together and transport it to the city center where they would use a machine to turn the coconuts into oil.

Transportation was also key to middle- and upper-class urbanites as well. Beyond daily commutes, those with access to personal cars brought goods to hoard and sell into the city that parastatal trading companies constantly ran out of. Former Minister of

Finance Edwin Mtei recalled how government officials participated in the black market when goods became scarce:

If an official travelled to Mbeya, he would return to Dar es Salaam with two bags

of rice in his official vehicle. If he saw a transistor radio in a shop, he would buy

it even though he might possess several already at home. Similarly with furniture:

405 Hamada Ali Mnora Oral History Interview 406 Fatuma (no last name given), Oral History Interview.

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houses occupied by well-to-do individuals were congested with items of furniture

acquired simply to avoid the escalating inflation.407

It is clear that throughout the colonial and postcolonial period transportation and mobility has remained a key survival strategy. When they could change their lives to skirt transportation problems, they did. But many times they simply had to deal with them.

TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN ARTERIAL CITY

Before the Second World War, the entire colony of Tanganyika had scant road infrastructure. The “prevailing opinion” was that railways were the best way to facilitate development and consequently it was unnecessary to build any roads parallel to the 1905

German rail routes. Consequently, in all of Tanzania until 1946 there was only one major long distance road. Named the Great Road, it stretched north to south from the Kenyan border through Arusha, Dodoma, Iringa, and Mbeya to the border with Northern

Rhodesia. There was no direct road inland from Dar es Salaam.408 When roads were built during this period, they were generally utilized only to create a feeder system for connection to the railway.409

The Second World War prompted a dramatic growth in both Dar es Salaam and the colonial economy triggering the expansion of road infrastructure. By the end of the war, Tanganyika had 16,400 miles of roads, whereas in 1921 it had only 2,650.410 The

407 Edwin Mtei, From Goatherd to Governor: The Autobiography of Edwin Mtei (African Books Collective, 2009), 165. 408 Rolf Hofmeier, Transport and Economic Development in Tanzania: With Particular Reference to Roads and Road Transport (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1973), 64. 409 Ibid., 67. 410 Ibid., 66.

167 need for local roads was treated as a separate issue and quite less essential.411 The first master plan in 1948 treated the city predominantly as a design problem for which an answer needed to be found in isolated physical solutions.412 As a result, fixing localized transportation around Dar es Salaam was deemed a task of simply making better technical roads, creating parking, or designing traffic roundabouts. Planners failed to treat transportation problems in dynamic relation to other problems of the city such as land use.413

In the postwar period, the area around the port of Dar es Salaam and south of Ilala had become a growing industrial area leading to the builder replacing “the domestic servant as Dar es Salaam’s typical worker.”414 Land use westward from the harbor was dictated by the presence of the railway, and soon after the land was full of industrial estates following the railroad out of town. These industrial clusters led to the spread of informal neighborhoods for workers in surrounding communities.415 With this movement outward, laborers traveled further distances to work and moved into neighborhoods that were unplanned and lacking in roads. Beyond inconvenience, this constant shift to the hinterlands created huge obstacles to accessing city services such as waste removal or cesspit emptying services, electricity, and piped water. Diseases such as malaria and

411 Ibid., 67. 412 Armstrong, Allen. “Colonial and Neocolonial Urban Planning: Three Generations of Master Plans for Dar es Salaam.” Utafiti: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences VIII, no. 1 (1986): 43-66. 413 Ibid., 46. 414 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 387. 415 Adolfo Mascarehnhas, “Land Use in Dar es Salaam,” in Tanzania in Maps, edited by L. Berry (London: University of London Press, 1971), 136.

168 tuberculosis also had geographical tendencies to hit hardest where there were the fewest roads and sanitary infrastructure.416

City bus service began in 1949, promoting the city to grow outward and spurring more construction and heavier extraction of raw materials from the hinterlands. With increased need for vehicles with the city’s geographical expansion, a motor vehicle assembly was established along Pugu Road.417 Following the introduction of the city bus, the first major macadamized road was built in the 1950s to connect Dar es Salaam to

Morogoro, 120 miles to the west. To connect the road to the city center, they constructed a bridge across Msimbazi creek, encouraging the settlement of Mangomeni, which would later become a middle-class neighborhood. With the introduction of a road into a new area, the density of residencies automatically shifted to areas accessible by the road. In their 1952 annual report, the Department of Town Planning warned that planning was not simply a matter of open space; it was severely limited by the amount of infrastructure in any given area:

The popular fallacy that “there is all Africa to go at” is slowly being disproved.

Building land in Tanganyika is scarce when we consider that building land is land

lying within reach of public services or within reach of a sound economic

expansion of public services. By this standard there is probably less building land

in Tanganyika, at the present time, than there is in any small county in Britain.418

416 Iliffe, Modern History of Tanganyika, 385. 417 “Tanzanie and Idara ya Upimaji na Ramani,” Atlas of Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: The Division, 1967). 418 1952 Annual Report of the Department of Town Planning, (Dar Es Salaam: Government Printer, 1953) , 3. Tanzanian National Library.

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The predominance of a few radial roads persisted throughout the postcolonial period and it is quite evident on a map of Dar es Salaam even today. By the end of colonial rule Dar was comprised of four major roads: Bagamoyo, Mororgoro, Kilwa and Pugu Roads radiating across the city in what on a map almost looks like perfectly spaced increments.

This geography of transportation meant those living farther out from the center of the city could access the city center more easily than land closer in that was not along an arterial road. Armstrong notes though that this development patter placed “undue pressure on the inadequate public transport system.”419 Of course, the ideal, imagined future of Dar es

Salaam was far more orderly and systematic. The first master plan after independence promoted the main elements of city design as “open space, land use and traffic movement,” would be central to creating “a city center that would convey the dignity and stature of the capital of a country which is playing a leading role in the development of

Africa.”420

Even ten years later the architects of the 1979 Master Plan noted that “growth has primarily taken place along major roads leading to the Central Area of the city with further growth radiating from the city centre between these major roads.”421 The planners noted that the consequence of this effect would continue to dictate growth unless transportation was improved, since “the daily work trip represents a major influencing

419Allen Armstrong, “Colonial and Neocolonial Urban Planning: Three Generations of Master Plans for Dar es Salaam,” Utafiti: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 8, no. 1 (University of Dar es Salaam 1986): 43-66. 420 National Capital Master Plan, Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania, (Toronto, CA: The Associates, 1968), 67. 421 Macklin Marshall and Tanzania, Dar Es Salaam Master Plan (Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Marshall Macklin Monoghan Ltd., 1979) master plan supplement, 7.

170 factor on the nature of the future urban structure.”422 Simply put, the everyday presence and use of areas by citizens often shaped infrastructure where it was absent. As one letter to the editor points out, many of the neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam have no official paved roads at all. The roads of Ubungo, Ilala, Kijitonyama, and Mburahati are “paved by the tyres of the tenants who are to go and inhabit them; that is if they have a car.”423

In the early 1970s government decentralization paralyzed the progress of road improvement as it did with most urban infrastructure and management. The effects of decentralization on Dar’s roads became something that the public rallied around as an example of failing public services. As Felix Kaiza points out in a 1976 Daily News article, the move to decentralization was “effected to give the people closer touch of their affairs.” But in reality it had only led to the dissolution of city councils and the services they oversaw. The alternative governing bodies that were supposed to take the lead on development had failed: “The quality of roads and some other public utilities has been growing bad. And Dar es Salaam Region poses a good example of cases in which directorates have on the whole failed to keep the roads at the same standard.”424

The former city council before decentralization had 7 million Tsh allocated for roads while the money at the disposal of regional directorates was as little as 700,000/-

Tsh. Thus as little as ten per cent of previous road improvements could be afforded.

Kaiza also points out that roads could not even be built in parts of town where proper

422 Ibid., “Dar es Salaam Master Plan Summary.” 423 “It’s time we had some proper planning,” Daily News, February 17, 1973. 424 Felix Kaiza, “Rebuilding Dar’s Roads,” Daily News, September 16, 1976.

171 drainage systems were not in place: “We would be wasting public funds if we tarmac roads in an area that has no proper drainage system.”425

As these projects stalled out, they also became increasingly expensive to finish.

One example of this phenomenon was the construction of a 13-kilometer highway from the city center to the airport, which was estimated at the time of its proposal in 1973 to cost twenty-three million shillings, yet by the end of that year the estimate had risen to seventy million, and by 1976 the costs were close to 100 million shillings.426 Often this gap between cost and economic means was bridged by foreign investment and gifts to

Tanzania. Ronald Seavoy notes that between 1963 and 1986, 65 to 80 percent of all investments in infrastructure and factories came from abroad.427

Intense conglomerations of neighborhoods and businesses clustered along the arterial roads propelled Dar’s perimeter into the surrounding rural areas in “finger-like projections.”428 This strategy of settlement was practical on an individual level, but incredibly debilitating when writ large. These jumbled, densely populated neighborhoods with narrow, unfinished roads were in stark juxtaposition to the “straight roads, square houses and block farms” that represented the Ujamaa ideal, further implicating the suspect nature of cities as both morally and physically in opposition to Tanzania’s development ethos.429

425 Ibid. 426 Ibid. 427 Ronald E. Seavoy, Famine in East Africa: Food Production and Food Policies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 186. 428 John Briggs and Davis Mwamfupe, “Peri-urban Development in an Era of Structural Adjustment in Africa: The City of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” Urban Studies 37, no. 4 (April 1, 2000): 797 –809, 802. 429 W. M. Freund, “Class Conflict, Political Economy and the Struggle for Socialism in Tanzania,” African Affairs 80, no. 321 (October 1, 1981): 483-499, 493.

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The end result of this perennial lack of funding for improving infrastructure was, quite predictably, a chronic lack of roads. There were by the end of the 1980s only about

1,200 kilometers of roads in Dar es Salaam, 200 of which were arterial and only 450 kilometers of which were paved. This totaled about 0.5 percent of the city’s total area, which, when one took into account land used as a road (but not actually engineered as such), the total rose to 2.3 percent.430 The normal average area of a city designated for roads is around 15 percent. Ideally each plot of land, both residential and commercial, would have been adjacent to a road. Without this access, people sought out plots as close to existing roads as possible. It also discouraged people who have been allocated land away from roads from investing in building.431 The geography of the city, and of parallel but unconnected roads, meant that residents faced potentially changing buses three times, always going through the clogged city center to make a journey that was much shorter

“as the crow flies.” Sometimes worker’s transportation consumed more than twice the basic wage.432 Thus, mobility in Dar es Salaam was less a factor of distance than an equation made up of paved roads and number of buses.

ROADS AND THE HINTERLAND ECONOMY

The notion that ‘modern’ cities are a result of their ability to harness the ecological resources of their hinterlands through manpower and transportation infrastructure is a

430 Ahmad Kanyama, Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, Anna-Lisa Linden, and John Lupala, Public Transport in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania-institutional Challenges and Opportunities for a Sustainable Transportation System (Stockholm: Institutionen för miljöstrategiska studier, 2004). http://www.foi.se/upload/framsyn/05/foi-memo-1123-tanzania.pdf, 13. 431 JM Lusugga Kironde, “Land Policy Options for Urban Tanzania,” Land Use Policy 14, no. 2 (1997): 99-117, 109. 432 Ibid., 90.

173 topic that environmental historians have turned with very interesting results in the past twenty years. These works have reconnected metropolises with their watersheds, waste dumps, and timberlands after they have been conceptually severed from them or often simply rendered invisible to urban citizens that inhabit these cities. This reconnection has revealed stories of the emergence of regional commodity chains and the reciprocal nature of this transformation of both hinterlands and city.433 Many colonial cities demonstrate a much weaker or more diffuse relationship with their hinterlands. Colonial hubs were cities designed to act simply as weigh stations for the transportation of goods overseas, short-circuiting the growth of manufacturing and processing infrastructure. Neither the

Germans nor British designed Dar es Salaam to do such things effectively as drawing water from far-off watersheds or disposing of its waste with forethought to growing populations, for they never supposed the city would grow to be that big. These practices in wealthy nations have led to cities with increasingly vast, distant “ecological hinterlands.” As Mitlin and Satterthwaite point out, motorized transport and roads cheapened the cost for modern cities more effectively to “disassociate” their hinterlands from this process. Wealthy cities after initially capitalizing on (and often exhausting) nearby resources were able to reach farther and farther afield with effective transportation. In turn, they would recapture and protect their resources closer in to improve the livability of their city as it expanded.

433 The most obvious example of this work is William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992). Another example is Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005).

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First in colonial metropoles and later in global cities across the developed world, going farther afield has increasingly meant traveling beyond the borders of nations and creating transnational ecological footprints, and accordingly very mixed environmental legacies.434 The absence of this reach meant that Dar es Salaam’s hinterlands were intensively and sometimes exhaustively used by individuals gathering their own resources. The accumulation of people and farms along arterial roads had, as mentioned earlier, begun in the 1950s when the first asphalt roads were finished. A UN regional planning study in 1968 found that the most “important changes in respect to land use” were noted along roads that had been upgraded. Similarly, the most intensive peri-urban agriculture around Dar es Salaam was located closest to the four major roads.435 Rolf

Hofmeier appraised this new trend as particularly stark because of the paltry amount of feeder roads in the region surrounding Dar es Salaam. Despite the obvious pattern, he cautioned against prematurely seeing anything “new” in the behavior of farmers in their new locale. Farmers and settlers tended to move in the vicinity of major roads and give up their old plots rather than accumulate any additional land, continuing to practice similar farming techniques in the new location. The increase in settlement next to major roads was particularly noticeable along Kilwa Road, between Dar es Salaam and Kibiti in the coastal region. The neighborhood of Mbagala is along this road. In 1962, the traffic volume on Kilwa road was around 80 vehicles per day. In macadamizing the road, officials estimated that traffic would increase to around 146 vehicles per day by 1968. In actuality, by 1968, the number of vehicles per day was around 269 during the dry season

434 Mitlin and Satterthwaite, in Cedric Pugh, Sustainability the Environment and Urbanisation (London: Routledge, 1996), 40. 435 Hofmeier, 257.

175 and 228 in the wet season. At the time there were no other significant development projects undertaken in this region that would otherwise explain the new activity on the roads. These statistics demonstrate how badly needed improved roads were at the time, how fast people came to take advantage of travel on new roads, and the general increase in the amount of cars and mobility in Tanzania at the time.

A study done by the Economic Research Bureau at Dar es Salaam in 1969 looking at the cooking banana trade in Dar es Salaam offers a good example of how roads affected the ability of peasants to get their products to market.436 Dar’s banana supply was grown from a strip of land about one to three miles wide along Morogoro Road from

Dar es Salaam for 45 miles outside of town. Along the road, there were two rural markets, Turiani and Mkuyuni, where farmers would bring their bananas a few times a week, usually carrying between one to five bunches as headloads. If farmers could afford to they recruited neighbors to carry also headloads to market.

Every step of bringing bananas from the field into Dar was contingent on road conditions. Consequently, when smaller feeder roads were washed away in the rainy season or transport was scarce, Dar es Salaam could be cut off from supply since the city’s stock of perishable fruits and vegetables only lasted a day or two. Thus the price of these goods for urbanites would skyrocket whenever roads became impassable.437

Furthermore, during harvests staple food crops were often in competition with each other for access to buses and lorries. For example, banana sellers were forsaken for orange

436 S.M. Mbilinyi and A.C. Mascarenhas, The Sources and Marketing of Cooking Bananas in Tanzania, E.R.B. Paper 69.14 Economic Research Bureau, Dar es Salaam, Volume III 1969. 437 Ibid., 279.

176 sellers during the orange season if drivers could negotiate better rates with them.438

Shortages of roads and vehicles gave the upper hand to transporters, wholesalers and retailers, leaving producers without any recourse for regulating prices and city dwellers vulnerable to high prices for fresh goods.

Further afield, high transportation costs and poor infrastructure created a growing reliance on foreign aid and foreign goods. As aid worker Richard Podol recalled,

“Believe it or not, it was cheaper to import corn from the United States than to bring it from Western Tanzania to Dar es Salaam.”439 This bifurcated economy (a shared legacy among many new African nations), left Tanzanians reliant on resources both intensely local and impossibly distant. The illogic of this resource dilemma led aid donors to see road building a popular and positive form of foreign assistance. The popularity of road building projects was also bolstered because they required a significant amount of foreign expertise.440 Road building was carried out by the relevant ministries, while analysis of the projects and feasibility studies were then usually executed by foreign firms. This division of duties was often written into agreements with foreign donors for loans, requiring studies to be prepared by independent and inevitably foreign firms.441

Additionally, much of the design work was also carried out by international consultants

438 Ibid. 439 Richard Podol, Oral History Interview, Sept. 12, 1996 The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, no permanent URL available. Can be linked to from list of interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/ Accessed on October 10, 2011. 440 Charles M. Becker, Andrew M. Hamer, and Andrew R. Morrison, Beyond Urban Bias in Africa: Urbanization in an Era of Structural Adjustment (Heinemann, 1994), 128. 441 Hofmeier, Transport and economic development in Tanzania: with particular reference to roads and road transport, 227.

177 and the construction itself often supervised by a foreign firm. China, Japan, and the

World Bank have all invested in Dar’s and Tanzania’s road infrastructure.

Local Tanzanian funds often financed the construction of smaller roads. There was an assumption that better roads in urban areas would lessen urban bias by lowering the costs of urban production. It was also assumed that improving the national road system would lessen urban migration by increasing the incomes of farmers in rural areas who would have an easier time getting their goods to market. Improving the surface of roads also dramatically lowered the price of operating vehicles. The cost of driving cars on non-improved earth roads doubled the costs of vehicle maintenance over driving on bitumen (asphalt) roads while gravel roads and improved earth roads fell somewhere in between.442 The potential savings of upgrading to asphalt on highly trafficked roads was therefore quite significant in many different ways. Not only were Tanzanian roads unpleasant and expensive to drive on, they were also unsafe. The rate of lethal car accidents in Dar es Salaam (57.5 per 10,000 vehicles) in 1966 was ten times higher than the US rate and became a topic of concern in newspapers.443 In the face of no funds, one

TANU elder in the newspaper suggested that drivers should apply the policy of self- reliance to traffic problems, dismissing “the idea that increased traffic patrols and road improvements were the only answer.”444

442 Hofmeier, 233. Also, by 1971 “In recent years the tonnage of imports handled through Dar es Salaam has been nearly twice that of exports. Petroleum in bulk is the principal import.” Adolfo Mascarehnhas ‘land use in Dar es Salaam’ in Tanzania in Maps ed by L. Berry 1971 University of London Press, 139 443 Hofmeier, 236. 444 “Be Self-Reliant,” Daily News, October 25, 1967.

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These considerations of the cost and benefit of well maintained and improved roads ignore perhaps the most paralyzing effect of poor road maintenance on the economy: time wasted dealing with poor roads and a poor road system.

BUSES AND WORKERS

Up until the Arusha Declaration, Dar es Salaam’s bus system was managed by the

Dar es Salaam Bus Company, a quarter of which was owned by the city council. In the early years, the company was modestly profitable. After Arusha, the company was nationalized; then in 1974, following the oil crisis, countrywide transportation was all brought under control of a single parastatal. Usafiri Dar es Salaam (UDA), the only official public transporter in Dar, was “starved of investment, badly managed and typified by low staff morale.”445 This shift also corresponded to Decentralization in 1973. During

Decentralization, the number of city buses barely increased while the population of Dar grew steadily by around 8 to 10 percent per year. In fact, the number of usable buses in

1976 was less than three years earlier due to their chronic state of disrepair coupled with severely limited access to spare parts. Confounding the already dire issue of spare parts, a variety of countries had aided in funding the purchase of UDA buses and as a result the fleet was composed of different from Hungary, the Federal Republic of Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.446 Overcrowded and late, “it was not unusual for a journey from a home in Ubungo to a workplace in the city centre (a distance of 12km) to take up

445 John Briggs and Davis Mwamfupe, “Peri-urban Development in an Era of Structural Adjustment in Africa: The City of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,” Urban Studies 37, no. 4 (April 1, 2000): 797 –809, 804. 446 Matteo Rizzo, “Being Taken for a Ride: Privatisation of the Dar Es Salaam Transport System 1983- 1998,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 155.

179 to three hours.”447 A survey of women workers conducted by Marje-Liisa Swantz and

Deborah Bryceson in 1976 suggests how crucial debilitating transportation issues could be to an entire work force. About 60 percent of workers at the two surveyed plants relied on buses to get to work while the rest walked. The average commute distance was less than three miles and took over an hour. One woman also described how her way of getting to work shifted throughout the month as her money dwindled. By the end of every month after running out of bus fare, she would rise at 4 a.m. in order to walk the distance.

The Daily News ran several stories and published letters to the editor about the state of public transportation, detailing the obstacles workers faced in getting to and from work. One article told the story of Ramadhani Sefu who traveled daily from Manseze where he lived to his job as a government clerk at the waterfront:

He wakes up at 5 am and by 5.30 am he is at the nearest bus stop waiting for

transport to take him to the city centre. Several people are already there. A bus

approaches from town heading towards Ubungo. Ramadhani and his colleagues

watch it as it passes them. They now wait for it after picking people at Ubungo

The sun rises from the East and a bus approaches from Ubungo towards the town.

It is fully loaded and does not stop at Manzese. The second and third bus pass by

too. Some waiting passengers decide to walk – some towards Ubungo to catch the

bus there and others towards Magomeni, hoping to get one there or walk to their

destinations. Sefu remains at his Manzese bus-stop. It is 6:30 am and there are

many people there. And the buses just pass by. At last, one stops but it is almost

full. A few people manage to squeeze in, mostly teenagers. Sefu cannot even get

447 John Briggs and Davis Mwamfupe, “Peri-urban Development,” 797-809.

180

near the door. Somehow a bus comes along at 745 and he bets in but is 15 minutes

late for work. He thinks of what to tell the man in charge for his section who

comes to office in a car. Sefu reaches the office at 8:30 am. An hour late. Some of

his colleagues have not turned up. They are still going through the same transport

problems. At midday, Sefu starts in imagining the troubles waiting for him at the

bus stop on his way home. Five minutes before the office is closed he rushes to

the bus stop and finds several people waiting. It is 4:00 pm, and there is little hope

of getting a bus. At 5 pm Sefu gets a bus but all the seats are occupied. After an

hour’s drive he gets to his house –tired and hungry.448

The article is as arduous as Sefu’s daily commute. Many of these articles concluded by arguing for the necessity of privately owned transportation if there was no expansion of

UDA. Dar’s commuters were angry at the state’s refusal to legalize this incredibly necessary alternative to city buses. As one commuter who had resorted to walking to work bemoaned, “Those officers who banned private buses do not use public transport.

They have personal or official cars and have no idea of the sufferings of UDA passengers.”449 Even more dramatically, a letter to the editor in 1979 comments on the agony of Dar commuters and how the workers of Dar es Salaam could not be “reasonably expected to smile at this persistent evil in their very midst. This is an evil which much be eradicated root and branch.”450 Rehema Shabani, one of my interviewees recalls vividly waiting for the bus sometimes for up to three hours, and when the bus came, those not

448 Salim Said Salim, “Special Sunday Interview On UDA Services,” Daily News, June 5, 1977. 449 Ibid. 450 A. G. Goodwill Kororsso, “Agony of Dar Commuters,” Daily News, May 6, 1979.

181 willing to fight their way onto the bus would often be left behind. Some people would even climb through the windows of the bus to get a spot.” 451

Beginning in the early 1970s, illegal private sector vehicles began showing up on the streets of Dar es Salaam. These were usually cheap, rebodied Korean trucks that had been turned into passenger vehicles. From 1970 to 1974, they were referred to as Thumni

Thumni in reference to the 50 cent coin it took to ride one; that name changed to Sanya

Sanya in 1974, which means “to collect, gather or steal from any source available.”452 By the early 1980s, only about half of UDA’s buses were operable on a day-to-day basis and each year the number of kilometers covered and the number of passengers transported continued to drop.453

From the 1980s onward these private buses were known as Dala Dalas as they are still known today, referring to the five-shilling note it took to ride them, which was colloquially called a dala. Dala Dalas remained illegal until 1986 and both drivers and passengers were culpable if they were caught.454 Political scientist Aili Marie Tripp begins her book about Dar es Salaam’s informal economy with an anecdote about these buses. She tells a story of forty passengers all going to work on a privately owned, illegal

Dala Dala in the early 1980s. When the police pulled them over, the “perfect strangers, spontaneously transformed themselves into one big, happy family on its way to a

451 Rhema Shabani, Oral History Interview. 452 Lugalla, 113. 453 Lourdes Diaz Olvera, Didier Plat, and Pascal Pochet, “Transportation conditions and access to services in a context of urban sprawl and deregulation. The case of Dar es Salaam,” Transport Policy 10, no. 4 (October 2003): 287-298, 291. 454 Richard Stren, Mohamed Halfani, and Joyce Malombe, “Coping with Urbanization and Urban Policy” in Beyond capitalism vs. socialism in Kenya and Tanzania, edited by Joel D. Barkan (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), 195.

182 wedding and started singing and clapping, and making shrill, ululating sounds, as is the custom for people on their way to celebrations.”455 As a result, the police could not charge the driver for running a commercial bus and the bus was allowed to proceed on its journey. By the middle of the 1980s, the number of Dala Dalas on the streets of Dar was equal to the number of UDA buses. Individuals with cars also sometimes took on passengers going in the same direction for a small fee. These cars were called taxibubus, and both the passengers and drivers of these taxibubus were liable if caught.456

In June 1983, the state lifted their ban on the importation of foreign cars, yet regardless of the new proliferation of private vehicles, transportation still remained a palpable problem and a significant cost in the early 1980s. In 1978, 9 percent of average daily wage went to transport, but by 1985 it was 16 percent, and 22 percent in 1998. It is hard to speculate though precisely what this price inflation means. Upon immediate consideration it seems to suggest that prices for transportation had gone up relative to income. But it could also signify that people were living in places that made transportation more essential and more expensive for work than it was before. It could also mean that the transportation system was so bad before that people were forced to ride bikes or walk to work even at great personal inconvenience, costing them less out of pocket.457 Certainly, however, it does not indicate a large increase in personal car ownership. In a 1992 survey of household expenditures, only one in thirty families reported expenditure on gasoline.458

455 Tripp, “Changing the Rules,” 1. 456 Ibid, 161. 457 Olvera, et al., 294. 458 Ibid.

183

The failure of public transportation also provoked changes in the way citizens used different city spaces. A Daily News article describes people walking to work in the ditches along the road rather than waiting in vain for the city buses.459 Another article describe residents of Mabibo, Mburahati, Luhanga and Kigogo taking up “walking-cum- jogging exercises” every morning “not out of the need to keep their bodies in good physical condition but out of transport difficulties.”460 This parade of joggers went from their homes to the next bus stop, creating “lengthy human chains” of commuters along the roads. These commuters had turned the Kigogo bus stop into a “white elephant,” since it was abandoned due to the infrequency of buses passing by. Quickly, hawkers converted the area into a weigh station for goods for commuters walking to the next bus stop. Commuters had to further improvise when the roads themselves washed away in seasonal rains where UDA buses refused to go. Citizens found ways to adapt the city’s infrastructure to their own needs when possible in compensation for the state’s lack of adaptability.

CARS

On the flipside of the public transportation crisis in Dar were the politics of who could drive a car and when. Cars became a site for debate about conspicuous consumption in a socialist society. They represented the privilege of mobility in a city where people struggled daily simply to get to work.461 March 1973 article demonstrates how transportation issues had become critical and politically charged in urban areas even

459 Felix Kaiza, “Rebuilding Dar’s Roads,” Daily News, Sept. 16, 1976. 460 Attillio Tagalile, “Jogging to get on a bus,” Daily News, May 10, 1983.

184 before the first oil shock that October. The author describes waiting two hours for a city bus that never arrives and beginning to walk home. His friend picks him up along the way only to then have his car break down. When a third man comes to help them, they get into a conversation about cars and socialism:

This other man who I will call Mr. Analyst, began his long lecture by saying that

it was only the cars of the big men that did not break down, most of these men

had reasonably new cars after all. They were the ones mostly favoured when it

came to giving permits for new cars. Not only that, he went on, they were also

favoured in almost every aspect and by almost every institution. … Sensing the

danger of this man misleading, I jumped in and said it was not true that some

people were being favoured that much. For after all, I added, in socialist aspiring

Tanzania, we were all equal and had the same rights, privileges and chances.” Mr.

Analyst went on the propose that there were three groups of socialists now in

Tanzania…the “comfortable socialists” who were senior public officials there

were “surviving socialists” who were mid level bureaucrats and young aspiring

intellectuals” who served as the “punching bags” of the comfortable socialists and

the last group, the “non-hoping” socialists [most people].462

While representing himself as uncomfortable with Mr. Analyst’s accusation that

Tanzania was not a classless society, the author nonetheless remains curious enough about the allegation to retell the story at length in the newspaper. In the 1960s, before the crisis, car importers ordered cars on a monthly basis from suppliers overseas with no

462 Kaboko Musoke, “Report on the views of a Mr. Analyst,” Daily News, March 3, 1973.

185 restriction on type, quantity or quality, and no shortage of spare parts. By the 1970s,

Tanzania’s foreign exchange position led to the restriction of money spent on cars and spare parts and the State Motor Corporation (SMC) was established to control imports and reduce the 600 million shillings spent on cars semi-annually and 100 to 200 million spent on spare parts to a ceiling of 200 cars and limits on the number of “saloon car” imports especially.463 In 1978, as the war with Uganda began, virtually no “saloon cars” were imported unless they were part of a foreign aid deal.464 Thus cars increasingly became an expensive and elite commodity.

One particular event that prompted cars to become sites of debate was the release of the Mwongozo wa Tanu (guidelines of TANU) in 1970. Goran Hyden describes

Mwongozo as affecting the lives of workers the way the Arusha Declaration did the lives of peasants.465 Mwongozo, written in the wake of the overthrow of Obote’s government in Uganda and the invasion of Guinea by Portuguese mercenaries, was a call to stay the course of socialism in Tanzania and protect the country from unwelcome imperial impositions as well as counterrevolution within the country. It also outlined the rights of workers in an attempt to steel them against any foreign penetration and to warn against the “oppressive habits” of some “leaders.”466 With this statement came the ostensible promise from the government that workers’ rights would be protected as equal to those of

463 Ngila Mwase, “The Supply of Road Vehicles in Tanzania: The Problem of Suppressed Demand,” Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 17, no. 1 (January 1, 1983): 77–89, 78. 464 Ibid. According to the Minister for Water, Energy and Minerals, Al Noor Kassum, oil was also used as a weapon to try and curb the war with Uganda: “At one stage during the war, we found out that Uganda was about to obtain 25 MT of crude oil through Mombasa, and I used my contacts with the suppliers to stop the consignment. The oil was critical to Uganda, and had it got through it could have prolonged aggression against Tanzania,” 124. 465 Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 160. 466 Issa G. Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (Heinemann, 1976), 126.

186 bosses and bureaucrats. Hyden writes that “workers were not slow to respond” and begin pointing out and protesting what they saw as acts of bourgeois selfishness that were outside of the social contract of Ujamaa. In an apt metaphor, Shivji writes that

Mwongozo “acted like a vehicle to carry the contradiction between the workers and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie to the fore.”467 A tangible example that workers immediately latched on to was complaining about official cars being used for personal reasons, a debate that the newspapers also picked up and discussed often. Workers took note and complained when managers had access to company cars, using them to go to and from work, to run personal errands, even in some cases to go back and forth to plots of land outside of town or travel to rural areas. The purchase of private cars was also seen as directly affecting the amount of public transportation available. One worker writes into the newspaper professing in 1973:

I am greatly concerned with those who are provided with transport amenities in

that they are people who earn eight to fifteen times the MINIMUM WAGES.

Sometimes they have their own cars – and yet we give them more to make them

more productive!!468

While workers were also invested in limiting capitalism’s influence in the economy,

Hyden notes, they were also concerned with how much they personally would be made to sacrifice while others found sly ways to leverage relative positions of power. These conflicts were not just borne out in issues over the use of government cars for private use; they were predominantly expressed through a series of workers strikes. Three of these

467 Ibid., 127. 468 Luchiba Ngayile, “Too Much Noise against DMT,” Daily News, February 24, 1973

187 workers strikes in particular had to do with transportation and bear mentioning here. One was a strike at the Tanganyika Motors Ltd., which was a privately owned company where workers locked out the top four officials to protest their lack of attention to workers’ complaints and generally not paying them respect.469 They saw Peugeots as bourgeois cultural items and their protest was directed in part against privileging their production over workers’ livelihoods. In response, the manager shut down the company. In an attempt to get everyone back to work, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers explained to the strikers that Peugeot motor vehicles “were very much used by individuals and Government institutions.”470 To which the workers representative responded that “human dignity was more important than the economy of the country.”

In another instance, in the early 1970s, the city bus company, Dar es Salaam

Motor Transport, went on strike twice. To shut down the second strike in January 1973, all 676 drivers and 452 conductors were fired, while most of them were eventually rehired after it ended. Lastly, the personnel manager Mr. Kashaija of the British

American Tobacco Co. of Tanzania arrived at the factory in May 1973 to face a workers strike, where they forced him off the premises and were met with police and tear gas. The incident eventually came before the Permanent Labour Tribunal and one of the major grievances the workers cited was that he had driven the company’s Range Rover to attend his father’s burial in Bukoba, costing the company 5,820 shillings.”471 Pointing out the the abuse of cars became a way for workers to vent frustrations about their own hardships as well as test the sincerity of the government in terms of Mwongozo.

469 Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania, 138. 470 Ibid., 138. 471 Ibid., 141.

188

CONSERVING OIL

This crisis over cars, gas and mobility for Tanzanian workers was couched within a more general debate about Tanzania’s position as a socialist state in the larger context of the oil crisis. The oil crisis led to several government measures to limit the consumption of oil, affecting both car driving and the operation of buses. The first measure to limit consumption was to raise the price of petrol products in Dar es Salaam while not raising them elsewhere in the country, such that city drivers were implicitly subsidizing rural car drivers and tractor users.472 There were also restrictions on the hours that citizens could purchase petrol, and a 1974 law was passed (Motor Vehicles

Restriction of User Order) banning all “non-essential” driving on Sundays.473 In the case of this ban, the Minister for Water, Energy and Minerals Al Noor Kassum recalls that the ban perhaps ultimately cost the government more money than it saved.474 He wrote in his memoirs that while there had been an overall decrease in the consumption of petroleum products by about 7.5 percent from 1973 to 1976, Kassum admitted that the driving ban on Sunday was likely not part of the resulting conservation. To evade the ban, private car owners would register their cars as taxis while others found ways to procure permits.

Additionally, there were costs associated with enforcing the ban such as processing

472 “Petrol Prices Up” Daily News April 14 1977. It should go without saying that the spiking price of oil hit Africa in other direct ways beyond just cars and transportation. The price of petroleum-based fertilizer for example skyrocketed after the first oil crisis. “The price of urea, the main fertilizer in underdeveloped countries, rose 560% in 21 months, from $50 in June 1972, to $280 in March 1974.” Another example is W.R. Grace a leading figure in nitrogen fertilizer saw its profits increase in the agricultural products division from 7.6 million in 1971 to 24.4 million in 1973. From Ernest J. Wilson The Energy Crisis and African Underdevelopment, Africa Today, Vol. 22, No. 4 African and Energy (Oct-Dec 1975) 13-14.

473 Al Noor Kassum, Africa’s Winds of Change: Memoirs of an International Tanzanian (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 121-122. 474 Ibid.

189 applications for permits and patrolling for unpermitted cars. Lastly, the time and money spent prosecuting those who violated the ban was a burden on the budget and on courts.475 Thus the fuel crisis drew attention to the already volatile issues of individuals using public resources and the inefficiency and ineptitude of public transportation.

The public and the government also were at odds as to who was to blame for fuel wastage. The state blamed excesses on misused vehicles serviced by poorly trained workers while the public pointed fingers at private individuals. In August 1979 the state appointed transport officers in every government ministry to enforce a list of pronouncements regarding proper car and fuel use. These new rules prohibited “public vehicles from being serviced or repaired in back yard garages where they get poor maintenance at high charges”; the government also made a list of “bad drivers so that once one was sacked from a public institution he would not be re-employed by another state organization.”476 Since almost 65 percent of all fuel in the country was being used by parastatal and government organizations, the government was also keen to ensure that all of that fuel was going toward official uses. Officers would be responsible for ensuring that cars were only used for official duties, requiring weekly reports to verify vehicle

475 Other tactics for conserving oil: Letter to Johannes Witteveen Managing Director IMF From CM Nyirabu Feb 24 1976. Central Files Series: Country Files Subseries: Tanzania Box 6 File 3 C/Tanzania/1782 Oil Facility Purchases File Title 1760 (1985-87)-1794, IMF Archives “As the Fund already knows Tanzania has taken several measures to economise the use of mineral oil and related products. These include periodic and steep increases in the wholesale and retail prices of motor spirit, ban on the sale of motor spirit during the weekends and, ban on driving of private motorcars and motorcycles during certain hours during the weekend. The coming into operation of the Kidatu Hydro- electric project last year will reduce consumption of industrial fuels. In addition we have reduced very considerably the import of vehicles of private and government use and also are allowing as far as possible only imports of vehicles which have low fuel consumption such as small cars and motorcycles. In spite of all, these measures our oil continues to increase mainly because of oil priced increases and the growth in fuel consumption required to sustain industrial growth,” 3.

476 “Next Move to Save Fuel,” Daily News, August 29, 1979

190 mileage.477 Citizens, on the other hand, wrote to the newspapers complaining about rich people cruising around the city at “odd hours in obscure corners” wasting fuel, or lazy bus drivers who would leave their engines idling at bus stops. Fuel was very much seen as a finite, communal resource, putting individual use under intense community scrutiny.

The city itself also came into the crosshairs of government blame because it required such dramatically higher energy consumption than rural areas during the oil crisis. Nyerere lamented urban growth as following in the footsteps of the west and consolidating the inequality between urban areas and rural areas. However, Tanzanian energy production reproduced this problem. Kidatu Hydroelectric project west of

Mororgoro was not even equipped to provide power to the surrounding village communities. The village, the central unit of development to Nyerere, remained in the dark, and to many that darkness was explicitly the shadow of the city.

A 1977 article in the Daily News contemplating the choices that Tanzania faced with the energy crisis demonstrates how charged the issue was, beyond simply a question of supply and demand.478 The author discusses different routes for Tanzania in dealing with the energy crisis, in particular stressing that Tanzania does not have to follow in the footsteps of the west. This route that he called the “growth choice” would be “based on the continuation of current trends of energy consumption,” where Tanzanians become more reliant on technology in trying to keep up with the West. This path would consolidate the inequalities and injustices between urban areas and rural areas, whereas he felt that “Energy must flow towards the agricultural and agro-related sector. A Third

477 Ibid. 478 “Can Tanzania go Solar?: In Search of Third World Energy,” Daily News, May 7, 1977.

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World village must no longer remain ‘an area of darkness.’” Cutting off foreign reliance for fule, just like concrete and fertilizer became couched in deeply ideological arguments.

Despite this rhetoric, Tanzania remained dependent on foreign refined and crude oil even as its consumption declined. Oil-based thermal generation, which relies on the conversion of fossil fuels into electricity, was responsible at the time of the first oil shock in 1974 for 44 percent of electricity generation, whereas by 1982, it produced around 11 percent.479 Throughout the seventies oil importation was the purview of private oil companies, but as barrel prices rose again in 1979 the government created a Tanzanian

Petroleum Development Corporation to import oil directly. Kassum, the energy minister, described how his most daunting task was to find creative ways to buy as much oil as possible on credit. Because Tanzania had such poor foreign exchange, it could not purchase oil on the world market directly; rather, it had to negotiate with oil producing countries. Often, this situation created obstacles because not all of this oil was suitable for

Tanzania. As an example, Kassum points out that Angolan oil was useless to Tanzania because they did not have the necessary heating facilities in their refinery:

Therefore, we had to use ingenuity in obtaining the oil. For instance. After

negotiating 100,000 MT of Cabinda Crude form Angola in 1983, we

exchanged it and 40,000 MT of residual fuel oil for 80,000 MT of Iranian

Light Crude (which was more suited to our refinery) and 24,000 MT white

products (refined products). I also led Ministry teams to Libya, Iran,

Algerian and other countries to negotiate supplies. My basic message as:

479 M. J. Mwandosya and M. L. P. Luhanga, “Energy Use Patterns in Tanzania,” Ambio 14, no. 4/5 (1985): 237-241, 237.

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‘We are having temporary problems and so cannot pay immediately for

the oil we need. However, we do have natural resources so can pay you in

the longer term. Could you please let us have oil on credit?’ And they did

so.480

Thus Tanzania’s decline in petroleum-based energy does not signify the evolution of a viable alternative but the country’s dwindling assets.

Almost all sectors of the modern economy were dependent on oil. In 1978 the food and textile industries employed about 50 percent of the formal workforce in Tanzania was also responsible for about 40 percent of industrial energy use in

Tanzania. Transportation accounted for 55 percent of all petroleum used in the country, and within that road transportation in particular accounted for 70 percent.481 The cost of all of this petroleum in total made up for about 50 percent of export earnings.482 To cope with the cost of oil as it skyrocketed, Tanzania reluctantly turned to the IMF and its oil facility, as did many other developing countries. IMF loans had stipulations attached requiring Tanzania to open its market to more international goods, while Nyerere felt it was an imperative of national sovereignty that Tanzania (or rather he himself) should be able to make these choices independently.

Choice, however, was not what the IMF was looking to preserve at this point. Tanzania had first borrowed money from the IMF under the 1974 oil facility, a special fund for loans to developing nations injured economically by the

480 Kassum, Africa’s winds of change: memoirs of an international Tanzanian, 123. 481 Ibid., 238. 482 Ibid., 241.

193 oil crisis. They then again in 1976 opened up a trust fund for developing countries to help with their ailing economies by selling off gold reserves. In 1977, the IMF was not thrilled when the Tanzanian government began limiting the amount and type of cars they imported, claiming that it was in conflict with the agreement

Tanzania had signed in borrowing money.483 In 1980, in a speech Nyerere gave to a roomful of diplomats, including IMF officials at the Kilimanjaro Hotel, he passionately denied the ability of such organizations and foreign firms to dictate what Tanzania prioritized to import. Tanzania, Nyerere insisted, “is not prepared to surrender its right to restrict imports by measures designed to ensure that we import quinine rather than cosmetics, or buses rather than cars for the elite.”484

It is an important dimension to this story to acknowledge that Nyerere was presenting to the international community the same sort of socialist argument for buses and against cars that workers were putting forward in the newspapers. On both levels as a state and as urban citizens, there was a struggle to navigate the dramatic problem of resources, to retain the ability to choose, and to be a part of defining Tanzanian socialism, what sort of sacrifices were appropriate to expect, and whom would be asked to make them. Both city dwellers and Nyerere were placed in the same double bind. Dar’s citizens were told they had to be productive, hard-working members of society, yet they were often thwarted at

483 African Department Fonds Immediate Office Sous-fonds Series: AFRAI Country Files Box 124 File Title: Tanzania—Correspondence, 1968-1979 Folder 5 Tanzania Correspondence -1976 “Office Memorandum to Acting Managing Director from K. Kwateng Subject Tanzania-use of Fund resources December 20, 1976 IMF Archives. 484 1980 Series: country Files Subseries: Country Files Box: 3 File 1 Title C/Tanzania/701 Fund Assistance to and Relations with Members transcript of “President Nyerere’s Speech at the Dinner Given for Diplomats Accredited to Tanzania, 1st January 1980 At the Kilimanjaro Hotel, Dar es Salaam

194 every turn. Nyerere himself was praised in the global economy for seeking out an independent and pragmatic plan for development, for being a politician who was portrayed as intelligent, straightforward and incorruptible, yet he was badgered into giving up control.

The main way in which urban families directly confronted the oil crisis remained transportation. Most urban families did not have houses equipped with electricity and thus most of their household activities and informal economic activities relied on charcoal and fuelwood rather than petroleum-based energy.

Outside of transportation, urban families were far more reliant on charcoal energy, which is not to say they were isolated from the vagaries of oil prices since its collection and distribution was also dependent on road infrastructure and transportation that was vulnerable to the price of fuel, spare parts and imported cars.

By the mid 1980s, virtually all of rural Tanzania remained reliant on wood-based fuels while 80 percent of urban populations were reliant on wood fuel

(particularly charcoal) or a mixture of charcoal and kerosene.485 Kerosene remained unpopular because its price also went up steeply with the cost of imported oil from Tsh 53 to Tsh 4.6 per liter from 1968 to 1982.486 Clearly, industry and transportation were the most highly affected by the oil crisis, which is central to explaining the rise of the informal economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Citizens relied on industries that minimally engaged with the formal

485 Per Nilsson, “Wood: the Other Energy Crisis,” in Boesen, Jannik, and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Tanzania: crisis and struggle for survival, (Nordic Africa Institute, 1986), 159-172, 159. 486 Ibid.

195 sector by selling food like chapatis and donuts cooked on charcoal stoves, hawking oranges, or cooking bananas from Dar’s hinterlands, or selling mchicha that grew within the city limits and did not require expensive and unreliable transport. They found alternative forms of transport or ways to share valuable goods by doing things such as renting time on a tractor during the harvest on their fields in the peri-urban area.

Since both the colonial and postcolonial governments encouraged settlement and resource extraction on family levels in the Dar hinterlands charcoal production had remained a crucial peri-urban industry. Thaddeus Sunseri, who has written on Tanzanian forestry in the colonial and postcolonial periods, notes that “especially after World War II the British actively recruited peasants to live and farm in forest reserves and do forest work that included tending tree plantations and producing charcoal and building poles for the urban market.”487

Forest reserves in the outskirts of Dar were sometimes exclusively created for the purpose of supplying urban residents with necessary building materials and wood fuel. Sunseri writes that this “state-sponsored exploitation” of forests led to the severe degradation of coastal forests and the shift to a rhetoric of conservation of forest land beginning in the 1980s came as quite a shock to the system for peasants who had previously been encouraged to exploit them for resources.488

The cycle of reliance on charcoal is an interesting part to this story. It demonstrated an alternative fuel source that navigated shortages in the city and

487 Thaddeus Sunseri, “‘Something Else to Burn’: Forest Squatters, Conservationists, and the State in Modern Tanzania,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 4 (2005): 609-640, 611. 488 Ibid., 613.

196 was part of the self-help ethos espoused by the state, yet it also soon came under fire.

Conservationist forest policy emerged at the same time that Tanzania finally agreed to IMF structural adjustment policies and the consequences of energy policy, economic policy, and environmental policy collided in the forests outside Dar es Salaam. These SAPs, which generally increased poverty and the price of commodities from abroad, led to further reliance on charcoal production for poor people, and, as Sunseri writes, “forced poor people further into the forests” while they also dictated that economic diversification was essential, in particular a new movement to promote tourism and forest preservation.489 This movement ultimately had the effect of causing people who had limited access to forest resources to leave for the peri-urban zone of the city, in turn driving up demand for charcoal resources.490 These two energy sources were very much bound up in a single fate.

489 Ibid., 631. 490 Ibid., 637. More technical discussions about charcoal including how it is made can be found in Hofstad Ole, “Woodland Deforestation by Charcoal Supply to Dar es Salaam,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 33, no. 1 (May 1997): 17-32, and in Gerald C. Monela,, Aku O’Kting’ati, and P.M. Kiwele, “Socio-economic aspects of charcoal consumption and environmental consequences along the Dar es Salaam-Morogoro highway, Tanzania,” Forest Ecology and Management 58, no. 3-4 (May 1993): 249-258.

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Chapter Five: Seeing Dirt in Dar es Salaam: Sanitation, Waste and Citizenship in the Post-Colonial City

To consider dirt and sanitation in Dar es Salaam, this chapter examines postcolonial depictions and discussions about infrastructural neglect and environmental change in the city. In addition to actual geographies of dirt, I am interested the emergence of discourses on waste and cleanliness that created an exclusionary notion of urbanization and an ethos of urban discipline aimed at citizens and ultimately also at the government.

These discourses form the metaphorical livelihood of dirt, beyond its biological one. In

Dar during this period, as in many urban settings, discussions of dirt and displacement often went hand in hand.491 Within this context, calls to protect public health and urban environments provided a convenient excuse for government regulation of populations and creating specific geographies of the city. Echoing colonial narratives of sanitation and urban control, waste in the initial postcolonial period was utilized as an excuse for ridding the city of people and urban spaces. With continued urban growth and economic collapse, however, Nyerere’s anti-waste rhetoric transformed. While it remained a tool for purging urban areas, waste and wasted spaces reflected a larger narrative of the failure of citizens to embrace the national call for self-reliance and self-help. Some habits of the urban population that were formerly seen as disorderly and dirty were embraced as examples of Ujamaa development while others remained symbols of urban decay.

491 Andrew Burton’s 2007 article “Haven of Peace Purged: tackling the undesirable and unproductive poor in Dar es Salaam ca. 1950s-19800s,” (IJAHS 40, no. 1: 119-51) outlines the series of purges during the postcolonial era. He also touches on the metaphors of cleanliness and order at play in these purges of people from the city.

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The history of sanitation and disease in colonial African cities is a weighty one, inextricably tied to the racial partitioning of urban neighborhoods. Maynard Swanson in

“The Sanitation Syndrome” writes that racist ideas about Africans were reinforced at the turn of the 20th century by theories about the spread of infectious diseases.492 At a time of growing African populations in colonial cities, theories about infectious disease functioned to segregate and isolate populations along racial lines. One indelible example

Swanson cites is the South African bubonic plague outbreak of the 1920s that drove the implementation of the Urban Native policy. Yet the South African government’s framing of burgeoning Indian and African neighborhoods at the center of cities as the nexus of social ills and disease had surfaced decades before the outbreak.493 But when the bubonic plague appeared in the Cape Colony, arriving on ships in the harbor, it was the Chinese,

African and Indian dockworkers who contracted it first, confirming colonial fears that non-white populations in the Cape were particularly volatile disease vectors. Cape

Town’s Medical Officer Barnard Fuller wrote later, “these uncontrolled Kaffir hordes were at the root of the aggravation of Cape Town slumdom brought to light when the plague broke out…[Because of them] it was absolutely impossible to keep the slums of the city in satisfactory condition.”494 The general municipal reaction to intractable dirt was to isolate communities. This racism set the stage for a perfect storm of contagion.

Europeans rationalized their frequent failure to set up waste management systems in colonial cities by portraying Africans as terminally dirty and incapable of maintaining

492 Maynard Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909,” The Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 387-410. 493 Swanson, 390. 494 Ibid., 392.

199 clean neighborhoods. With poor sanitation, including waste management, diseases passed around neighborhoods, lending, along the way, “scientific” credence to racist assumptions about African hygiene.

Swanson’s essay also offers a good historiography of colonial urban planning embodying European fears of infection and disease. Some other major works in the field are Aidan Southall and Peter Gutkind’s 1957 description of the “septic fringe” in Kibuga,

Uganda, DH Reader’s look at hygiene anxieties in East London (SA), and J. S. La

Fontaine’s work on the “cordon sanitaire of uninhabited ground” in Leopoldville separating the European and Congolese populations.495 In an article on sanitation in

Johannesburg, John Maude notes that city officials burned the African neighborhood of

Klipspruit to the ground “within a few hours” of discovering the bubonic plague there in

1904.496 The spread of disease was both genuinely feared by colonial administrators and became a pretext for the segregation of races in South Africa and other colonial cities.

Colonial Dar es Salaam was no exception. Planners used racial segregation as their core- organizing principal for the city, later disguised in city planning documents under the euphemisms of low, medium and high density housing zones (European, Indian and

African respectively).

The desire to preserve racial segregation and the sanitary “purity” of European populations also fostered intense neglect of services in the “native” areas of colonial towns. This segregation in itself fed a new fear for colonial governments, as these

495 Aidan W. Southall and Peter C.W. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making, Kampala and its Suburbs (Kampala 1957); D.H. Reader, The Black Man’s Portion: Xhosa in Town (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); and J. S. La Fontaine, City Politics: A Study of Leopoldville,1962-63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 496 John Maude, City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment (Oxford, 1938), 70.

200 neighborhoods came to represent places of potential anarchy and unrest. The colonized as well saw this potential. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth suggests that neglected, overcrowded neighborhoods could be incubators for transforming anti-colonial sentiment into outright revolution, where “the insurrection will find its urban spearhead.”497

Both the colonial impulse to segregate and the anti-colonial characterization of these forgotten, neglected neighborhoods embody Mary Douglas’s anthropological definition of dirt as “matter out of place.”498 Douglas’s definition also speaks to the idea that “seeing” dirt is often the real issue of dirt itself; having the authority to designate what is dirty and what is clean is far more politically salient and rhetorically powerful than actually dealing with it. This definition is also apt for considering the theme of place and displacement in urban space, integrating the biological and metaphorical. Douglas’s definition in particular invites us to think about dirt and disorder as it manifests itself in the displacement of people through state sanctioned projects to enforce where citizens larger “ought” to be or not be.499

PLANNING FOR THE CITY

Examining three generations of master plans for Dar es Salaam allows us to trace how colonial fears about contamination and race shaped the physical geography of the

497 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1964) (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 81. 498 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 1st ed. (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2002).

499 Sarah Lincoln’s dissertation “Expensive Shit: Aesthetic Economies of Waste in Postcolonial Africa” (Duke University 2008) utilizes Douglas’s definition to talk about people and neighborhoods as out of place and disposable in African fiction.

201 city. In the postcolonial era, the geography of the city transforms, as does the rhetoric of what these “dirty” and chaotic places within the city symbolize. The postwar plan for Dar es Salaam, put together by Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners Consulting Engineers Town

Planning, was the first of the three plans in the span of four decades (1949, 1968, 1979).

Gibb’s plans highlighted two outstanding shortcomings in the town’s development. The first shortcoming was that, despite the planning efforts of first the German and later the

British, a “labyrinthine triangle where Indian dukas [shops] and dwellings, mingling with the African and Arab huts defied all efforts of municipal administration and sanitation” had survived at the center of the town. The second failing was the “almost entire lack of efficient drainage and sewage system.”500 These concerns reflect the preoccupations of

British planning of the period, which was concerned primarily with “health and aesthetics,” protecting open spaces and intervening against sprawl. The plan, Allen

Armstrong writes, did not have as its primary motive to solve issues of housing for a growing African presence in the city, but rather to minimize potential outbreak of diseases and populations.501 And thus, as was true across East Africa, “the government medical service was given almost a stranglehold over urban planning”502 leading to suggestions for “breeze lanes” to improve the city’s air and utilizing Malaria control

500 Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, A Plan for Dar Es Salaam: Report (London: 1949), 14. 501 Allen Armstrong, “Colonial and Neocolonial Urban Planning: Three Generations of Master Plans for Dar es Salaam,” Utafiti: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 8, no. 1 (University of Dar es Salaam 1986): 43-66, 45. There were three master plans for Dar. The first one was published in 1948 with one following twenty years later 1968 and a third in 1979. The first two master plans also represent the “only strategic and comprehensive urban planning exercise undertaken by in Tanzania, until the 1970’s ushered in a program of foreign aided and executed master planning for many regional towns”(43). 502 A. Southall, “The Growth of Urban Society” in The Transformation of East Africa, edited by S. Diamond and F. Burke (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 486.

202 maps to justify the depopulation of high density areas of town (African areas).503 Sir

Alexander Gibb and Partners’ plan for Dar es Salaam also proposed the construction of

“boy’s towns” located proximally to low-density (white) areas for Africans who would be working in European neighborhoods. “With proper control,” they write, “we are sure that these ‘towns’ or ‘villages’ could be made most attractive and be free from any criticism which might be leveled from the health aspect.”504 The growing city demanded access to laborers, necessitating their presence in the city. Yet their growing presence was severely controlled both geographically and demographically.

City planners also realized they could utilize the natural contours of the city to create boundaries between neighborhoods. Full of creeks and waterways that served as natural barriers, these “no man’s lands” were imagined as extended cordons sanitaires.505

Thus the very nature upon which Dar es Salaam imposed itself and the British propensity at the time for sprawling towns created a host of future problems that were first seen from the colonial perspective to be distinct advantages for creating a healthy cityscape. The most intractable legacy of colonial planning is that Dar became a very spread out city and, as a result, faced increasing problems of site serviceability as it grew. Furthermore, land designated as undisturbed sanitary corridors later became contested places for ad hoc farming and grazing as urban Africans, unable to live on their wages and overcrowded in their prescribed areas of town, sought out alternatives. With little success, colonial governments generally tried to prevent these rural encroachments, citing concerns of malaria and water pollution.

503 Armstrong, 45. 504 Gibb, 35. 505 Armstrong, 46.

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In prescribing future use on the city, these planners failed to come to terms with how people actually used their own city. An important example of this was the planning for municipal services. Wilbard Jackson Kombe writes that planners short-sightedly assumed that, if infrastructural services promoted urban growth, then the absence of infrastructure “can restrain growth.”506 Writ larger, these initial planners sometimes foolishly hoped that ascribing ways of use, even against the grain of how general populations used the city, would be enough to dictate future use. In fairness, it would have been hard for even the most accommodating planner to calculate how dramatically

Dar’s population would grow in the next decades, leading many to exploit the city and its environment and confounding the sanitized borders of the colonial city as a tool for survival.

Twenty years later, the 1968 plan continued to emphasize beautification and the environment. The concept of “breeze lanes” was resurrected as “landscape corridors,” swaths of open land running from the hills to the sea. These peninsulas of open space created buffers across town between neighborhoods or different use zones and proposed

“enforcement officers” would keep these areas free from unplanned development, and housing or communities that sprung up would be torn down with no compensation, which had previously been the government’s policy.507

While urban planners imagined a sanitized and segregated future for Dar, the reality differed dramatically. JAK Leslie’s Survey of Dar es Salaam, published in 1964,

506 Wilbard Jackson Kombe, “Land Use Dynamics in Peri-Urban Areas and their Implications on the Urban Growth and Form: the Case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” Habitat International 29 (2005): 113-135. 507 Armstrong, 57.

204 paints a much livelier and more chaotic version of the city in the era of decolonization.

This particular excerpt describes the neighborhood of Keko Magurumbasi:

Even in the morning Magurumbasi is a-humming with life, with enough young

men sitting around to make six or seven good football teams. The truth of the

saying that houses here are only used for sleeping or sheltering from the rain is

shown by the number of people, young men, women, couples presumed to be

married, old men and women, and children, who are reclining outside the houses

in the sandy soil, playing bao, playing cards, eating, drinking tea, playing with the

hobby-wheels which small children make (decorated with balloons, bells,

‘wireless aerials’, bits of silver paper or what not) or just talking lazily in the

warmth of the early morning sun. The ‘main street’, which is full of Arab shops,

is blocked with hawkers selling oranges, vegetables, charcoal, firewood, anything

that one can get in the Kariakoo market; and throughout the morning, particularly

towards noon, this street is thronged with shoppers. In the compounds there are

yet more people, of all ages and of both sexes, clothes being washed and hung on

the ubiquitous clothes-line of heavy gauge railway wire (which also goes to make

the hobby-wheels’ hands). …Much in evidence are the municipal sanitary

labourers, many of whom live right here in Magurumbasi, who go round the

houses collecting rubbish into baskets and burying it in the ground in little pits all

over the place, an effective and sensibly simple way of doing it which obviates

the need for motor transport. All these villages suffer from paper litter rather than

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vegetable waste, so that there is no great danger to health, particularly here where

the sandy soil dries out quickly and there is almost no grass or bushes.508

Leslie’s description of the neighborhood is quite literally “littered” with references to the abundance of waste and methods of reuse in the everyday: the toys children made from repurposed objects such as railway wires and bits of paper, the crush of hawkers and streets sellers that Nyerere and the municipal government implicated as the cause of disorderly and polluted streets, and finally Leslie’s description of how order and cleanliness was undertaken and enforced within the community by sanitary laborers.

Settlements that sprung up closer to the creeks that extended across the city from the ocean inwards were some of the most complex places to parse in terms of dirt and sanitation. Inhabitants in the Vingunguti and Hananasif settlements used the river basin for growing vegetables, particularly mchicha (spinach), which was sold by street vendors.

Creeks served as a crucial source of water since inhabitants lacked access to piped water, while the Pugu Road Industrial area discharged their waste into these same creeks.

Vingunguti and Hananasif were also affected by being located close to the city dump.509

Interspersed among all this activity, houses “built of simple and impermanent materials like mud, sticks, poles, mangrove trees, thatched grass and recycled metals” dotted the hillsides of the basin.510 Issues of sanitation and pollution in these areas were enmeshed in urban economies as much as they were the result of unregulated informal housing.

508 J.A.K Leslie, A Survey of Dar es Salaam (Oxford: East African Institute of Social Research, Oxford University Press, 1963) 208-9. 509 Joe L.P. Lugalla, “Economic Reforms and Health Conditions of the Urban Poor in Tanzania,” http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/2/2.htm 510 Ibid., also “Council Plans Clean-Up of the City DSM City council,” Daily News, August 10, 1967: “starting on a campaign to clean up administration of city markets, and to seek Government backing in a move to force owners or occupiers of houses to whitewash or paint those in need of decoration.” http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/2/2.htm

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People would migrate to the city hoping to find work at the same factories that were discharging waste into their neighborhood creeks, and then cultivate on small plots by the river to supplement their incomes.

A 1973 Daily News reporter’s account of going into the “squatter neighborhood” of Kisutu is perhaps one of the more complex descriptions of these informal neighborhoods. The reporter’s description portrays these communities as politically potent symbols both for those calling for their destruction and for city dwellers who lived in them and understood both their illegality and sense of community.511 The reporter introduces Kisutu as an infamous “kupe’s [parasite] paradise,” yet also mentions that residents playfully call the neighborhood Dar’s “Ujamaa village” and “Dodoma,” subverting the notion that their community undermined national development goals:

I had walked only a few yards when I bumped into two women—wives of key

men in the public service. I asked them in all sincerity where they were coming

from. They replied with confidence: ‘we’re coming from Dar’s Ujamaa village.

Don’t you know this village?’ They asked as I looked bemused. … And lo and

behold, I was in Kisutu, a brave new world and a brave new life. I was in a hive of

activity.512

The reporter seems torn about whether Kisutu is a “unique village within a metropolis” or

“a conglomeration of old poles, sticks, coconut leaves, oil-drums, cardboards. And all types of scrap metal placed together incongruously to provide for human habitation.” “In short,” he writes, “in ‘Dodoma’ you find the ugliest, messiest and shoddiest compound

511 Robert Rweyemamu, “Hive of Activity Where Night is Hell,” Daily News, February 11, 1973. 512 Ibid.

207 you could think of right in the heart of a thriving fast-developing modern city.”513 In June

1974, a year after this article, Kisutu was marked for demolition, a move that many citizens endorsed. In a letter to the Daily News, Lucas Maziku wrote of Kisutu’s inhabitants: they “live in terribly dirty huts beyond human habitation which spoil the good view of the city. Hence the fall of Kisutu is exclusively welcome.”514

As Maziku’s dismissal of Kisutu points out, these informal neighborhoods were condemned as sanitation hazards not just due to their tenuous relationship to systems of proper sewage and disposal, but because of the very materials from which they were constructed. Gerard Grohs, writing in the early seventies on the housing problem and the

National Housing Corporation’s slum clearance program, associated traditional makuti houses (mud and pole houses with palm thatched roofs) with the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, dysentery and malaria.515 While many diseases certainly originated in crowded, unclean environments, correlating squatter housing with poor public health allowed officials to discount and destroy neighborhoods as an act of public good. Yet the nature of this relationship between informality and health shifted dramatically in 1972 when Nyerere changed his policy towards informal settlements from one of eradication to upgrading. Furthermore, in a 1977 speech celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Ujamaa, he encouraged the acceptance of traditional building materials in house construction, citing a reliance on concrete houses with tin roofs as representing an unhealthy colonial mindset.516

513 Ibid. 514 Burton, 148. 515 Gerard Grohs, Urban Challenge in East Africa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1970), 167. 516 As discussed previously in Chapter Two

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Realizing he could no longer fight the tide of informal communities, nor could they afford to build housing at the appropriate scale, officials appeared ready to embrace a “self-help” approach to home building. This was a dramatic reversal of rhetoric on the

“health” of informal housing: whereas previously correlated with disease, now mud, pole, and makuti were signs of a healthy, decolonized national pride.

With all these changes at hand, the last master plan in 1979 represented a city

(and its contracted foreign planners) beginning to come to terms with its own nature. A large part of this reckoning was recognizing that the informal settlements exploding across the city in the past decade had changed Dar fundamentally. There was no longer any “clearly defined structured growth pattern in evidence in Dar es Salaam.”517 In regard to squatting, the planners wrote, “controlling this growth of illegal housing on unallocated plots will be very difficult. Not only because many of these houses are built very quickly, but also because legal plots will need to be made available and allocated if there is to be any realistic attempt at stopping the growth areas.”518 The plan proposed gradated levels of service across the city based on people’s needs and financial capability.

While this gradation accommodated the reality of poor urban populations more than past plans, it also likely perpetuated the same lack of services in poor neighborhoods that were neglected in the past due to racial segregation.519

Beyond housing, the new master plan highlighted persistent infrastructural problems the municipality had failed to address, reaching back to the German administration. The city’s decrepit sewage system, which had been slated for

517 Marshal Macklin Monaghan, Ltd., “Dar es Salaam Master Plan Technical Supplement, 7. 518 Ibid., 23. 519 Ibid., 9.

209 improvement in the last master plan, had yet to be upgraded, leaving the system constantly vulnerable to “the rapid expansion of residential and industrial areas” and creating “serious potential health hazards for the population of Dar es Salaam.”520 The sewage and drainage system updates had been delayed since the Germans had stopped their improvement plans due to the war. Despite commissioning a drainage scheme from the London Consulting Engineers in 1930, the British had also never completed an upgrade.521 Officials in 1948 had again sought to fix the ailing system, when the colonial secretary warned against any more delays since “the built-up areas of the Township have become progressively more cesspit-riddled and sewage-sick.”522 The community was in danger of contracting water-borne diseases, noted the secretary, “from which the only satisfactory safeguard is the installation of a system of water-borne sewerage and storm- water drainage. The contentions of the Chamber of Commerce are not unexaggerated.”523

By 1979 parts of the city still relied on the small pipes from decades ago, but most residential, industrial, and commercial areas had switched to private, on-site septic tanks or pit latrines in the absence of municipal developments.524 By the 1980s, the dire situation had attracted the World Bank’s attention. In a report initiating an improvement project, the Bank noted that only one waste stabilization pond was in working order and only one of seventeen sewage pumping stations was in operation, adding that “a number

520 Marshal Macklin Monaghan, Ltd., “Dar es Salaam Master Plan Summary,” October 1979, 6. 521 “Dar es Salaam Drainage,” 41 in “Sewerage Scheme for Dar es Salaam” Box 10 168 File #39 / 15 Acc: 450 Ministry of Health, Tanzanian National Archives. 522 Letter from Colonial Secretary 22/4/48 “Sewerage Scheme for Dar es Salaam” Box 10 168 File #39 / 15 Acc: 450 Ministry of Health, Tanzanian National Archives. 523 Ibid. 524 Marshall Macklin Monaghan, 7-8.

210 of the major sewers are blocked completely.”525 The report noted that the abject state of

Dar’s sewage maintenance was exacerbated by the four-year absence of any municipal government from 1974 to 1978, due to a national policy of decentralization.526 The chronic disrepair of the system led to an estimated 22,000 m3 of sewage a day being sent out to sea, with peak flows around 56,000 m3 a day.527

In concert with persistent sewage disposal issues, the main waste dump for the city in the neighborhood of Tabata had reached its maximum capacity by the sixties and the 1968 master plan suggested the construction of a new site in Kimara. Development on this site began in 1976 until local residents protested the presence of a dump in their neighborhood, partly because Tabata’s dump had attracted a squatter community.528

In reality, the little waste that did make it to the dump was a small fraction of the overall waste generated by the city in any given day or week, and over time the state of waste removal from neighborhoods worsened rather than improved. At the time of the

1968 master plan there were reportedly 21 lorries for waste removal.529 Yet in a 1974

Daily News article on the waste removal problem, the regional TANU secretary mentioned that while the fleet had grown to 33, only 9 were functioning: “The rest are broken down and could not be repaired” due to “shortage of spare parts or because of the cost of repairing some of them would be almost equivalent to the cost of buying new

525 Staff Appraisal Report Tanzania Dar es Salaam Sewerage and Sanitation Project (Washington, DC, World Bank Archives November 29, 1982) Water Supply and Urban Development Division Eastern Africa Regional Office, pp91, 8-9. 526 Decentralization called for the disbanding of all municipal governments in Tanzania, among other major shifts in national governance. 527 Staff Appraisal Report Tanzania Dar es Salaam Sewerage and Sanitation Project (Washington, DC, World Bank Archives November 29, 1982) Water Supply and Urban Development Division Eastern Africa Regional Office, pp91, 8-9.

529 Marshal, Macklin and Monaghan, “Technical Supplements,” 158.

211 ones.”530 With a dearth of functioning trucks, the amount of waste picked up in the growing city decreased from around 175 tons of waste per day to around 100 tons per day between the 1968 and 1979 master plans.531 Yet despite the abject situation of garbage and sewage trucks in the city, the regional secretary blamed the proliferation of waste in the city on “people who littered streets freely, hawkers and other people who carried out trading activities in areas other than markets” and “the mushrooming of squatter areas.”532 Thus, while poor, crowded neighborhoods shouldered the blame for the city’s state of sanitary disrepair, the most fundamental flaws in sanitation came from structural municipal neglect.

The waste footprint of informal settlements was in actuality far less than planned residential neighborhoods that contributed about double Tabata’s amount of waste per day.533 This likely represented a convergence of many factors including less inorganic waste generation, lack of accessible roads for garbage trucks in squatter areas, and alternative disposal methods such as burning waste and engaging in more conscientious reuse. Unplanned neighborhoods also posed challenges for waste removal due to their construction and constant transformation. As with water delivery, when neighborhoods

530 “Dar Hit By Shortage of Refuse Trucks,” Daily News, March 15, 1974. 531 Marshal Macklin Monaghan, 168. Dar es Salaam was also a port city and the major sight for industry in Tanzania, yet these industrial waste streams are hard to track down and are rarely discussed in newspapers or much in the three generations of master plans. However, in a World Bank Report from 1982, it addressed industrial wastes briefly mentioning that, “Industrial and trade wastes in Dar es Salaam are substantially uncontrolled and untreated. Of about 700 industries in the area, about 30 should be considered serious sources of pollution. The Msimbazi River, north of the city center, is highly polluted with industrial wastewater. Existing legislation converging the discharge of pollutants to watercourses is not enforced at present.” From Staff Appraisal Report Tanzania Dar es Salaam Sewerage and Sanitation Project Water Supply and Urban Development Division Eastern Africa Regional Office, 9 November 29, 1982 Washington, DC: World Bank Archives. 532 Ibid. 533(.17 kg/cap/day while other residential areas produced .33 kg/cap/day) Marshall Macklin Monaghan, “Refuse Generation,” Technical Supplements, 157.

212 grew to be a “mass of twisty lanes with no control over where each house is built” city trucks could not access them, which in turn encouraged the development of informal industries such as water carriers, kerosene and charcoal sellers, and “extra-municipal garbage men.”534

Examining the city in contrast to its three master plans creates an interesting composite view of its changing personality and landscape. These crucial documents reveal how calls for preserving public health were often a thin veneer disguising desires for a segregated city. Continuing into the independence era, sanitation remained a frequent and blunt instrument of urban control, but it was control of a different kind.

Rather than preserving the internal borders of a segregated city, sanitation and slum removal projects functioned as means for controlling the size of a growing city the government was reluctant to let expand. Yet as funds for urban development dried up,

Nyerere advocated for a brand of self-help urbanism that began to blur the sanitary lines of the city, particularly as the failure of waste removal and sewage systems pushed the responsibility for maintaining a clean city environment almost solely onto the backs of its residents.

DISCIPLINE AND WASTE: DISCURSIVE URBANIZATION

Calls for a cleaner city in the postcolonial era also intermingled with other campaigns of urban governance and control in provocative ways. During Ujamaa,

Nyerere’s main mode of address to cajole a lazy or messy public was to employ a rhetoric of discipline. This rhetoric encouraged self-reliant sanitation and the purging of dirt and

534 Leslie, 208-9.

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“dirty” people from the cities. This rhetoric filtered into campaigns to control the black market in food and consumer goods as well as calls for reuse in the face of shortages.

In 1965, for example, the Dar Medical Officer of Health had pointed out the health and hygiene burden of food vendors, not to mention the “amount of litter left lying in the streets.”535 In the following decades there were a handful of campaigns to rid the city of traders and hawkers in the name of sanitation and urban order. As Andrew Burton points out in reference to urban purges in the sixties, the government and press cultivated a correlation “between parasitism and sloth” in an effort to thin out urban populations.536

Andrew Brennan also writes about political cartoons in Swahili newspapers that admonished readers to “not fear the hoe.”537 It was not just shanty communities but their economic equivalent as well, itinerant traders, that contaminated official visions of a modern city. An explicit example of this view was that a 1973 campaign to rid the city of its itinerant residents was called Operation Kupe (the Swahili word for tick or parasite).

To attack physical signs of poverty was to purge and purify the city of dirty, parasitic elements.538 Burton also briefly remarks (but it bears further emphasis) that these officials closing down small businesses were often fighting against citizens’ ingenious methods of providing resources the government failed to deliver, quintessential forms of self-help.

People’s “indiscipline” was a direct compensation for the undisciplined nature of a failing

535 “Hawkers,” Daily News, August 16, 1967. 536 Burton, “Haven of Peace Purged,” 131. 537 James R. Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania 1958-75,” The Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 41. 538 Tanzania is not alone in employing these sorts of metaphors for public campaigns. President Mugabe as recently as 2005 deployed a program called Operation Murambatsvinia (Operation Drive Out Trash) in Bulawayo and Harare where police and soldiers destroyed the homes of over 700,000 squatters, as cited in Robert Neuwirth’s Squatter Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2005), xii.

214 municipal government. A 1967 roundup of water sellers captures this ultimate irony as their livelihood derived from the municipality’s failure to construct a viable system of piped water for the city’s residents.539

Nyerere associated good practice in an almost nostalgic way with a time when less wastefulness and disorder abounded. He also worried that if people succumbed to laziness, Tanzania’s future would be one of continued economic collapse and ruin:

There was a time, for example, when Agricultural Officers used to walk from

village to village on duty, spending the nights in people’s houses or in tents. Now

we even scorn bicycles! And paper is wasted in our offices; the simplest letters

are marked “Secret” and put in two envelopes, circulars are duplicated on one side

of the paper only, and so on. Such economies seem petty, and the amounts saved

appear so small as to be unimportant in a single office; but they do mount up

when 20 Regions and 72 Districts—to say nothing of the Ministries—are added

together! Serious attention must be given to every detail of expenditure, and the

question asked “How can the job be done more cheaply.540

As discussed in a previous chapter, one of the most notorious roundups of informal workers was the Human Resources Deployment Act in 1983. Colloquially known as Nguvu Kazi [Hard Work], the act required the registration of all workers along with the issuance of labor-identification cards. The goal was to repatriate those who were unemployed in the city back into the country to work on large farm projects.541 But loiterers had been in Nyerere’s crosshairs for decades by the time of Nguvu Kazi. In his

539 Burton, 142. 540 Nyerere, “The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After,” 38.

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1962 pamphlet promoting Ujamaa and describing his new philosophy of African socialism, he clarified that by using the term ‘worker’ he was not just making the distinction between worker and employer clear, but also using the term in opposition to

“loiterer” and “idler.”542 In 1976 Nyerere gave a speech announcing another campaing to purge Dar of its “drunkards, lazy people and other parasites” highlighting his own personal stake in the matter: “I would feel ashamed of myself if I failed to confront a lazy man, a loiterer and a drunkard because I stand for the policies of TANU. I will turn myself into a laughing stock if I tolerated these people.”543

These campaigns against the city’s informal workers sought to purge the city of those who perpetuated disorder and indiscipline, which by these definitions were an increasing margin of the city’s population. From 1974 to 1988 real incomes had decreased 83 percent, yet the numbers seeking life in urban areas had unyieldingly increased.544 These marginal urban forms were now clearly mainstream. Interestingly,

Nyerere conducted these purges despite publicly bemoaning their ineffectiveness five years before initiating the campaign. He had done so in a speech commemorating the ten- year anniversary of the Arusha Declaration in 1977:

It has been announced more times than it is easy to count that every able-bodied

person in Tanzania must work, either on the land, in the factories and offices, or

in some useful capacity in what is called the ‘informal sector’ (that is, as a

carpenter, blacksmith, full-time trader, etc. etc.) I myself have been leading

542 Brennan, “Blood Enemies,” 403. 543 “Idlers Are Enemies,” Daily News, July 4, 1976. 544 Aili Marie Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3.

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advocate of the principle that every person must work. Then, on every occasion

there is a great drive to ‘round up’ the unemployed in towns and repatriate them.

For a week or so the criminals and idle parasites hide in their houses while

respectable workers and peasants on legitimate business are harassed, and the

people in paid employment otherwise carry on working hard or not as they did

previously. Then the whole campaign dies away until it is realized that the

problem of criminals in towns, and of people not doing a hard day’s work, is still

with us – and the process is repeated! The fault in such cases is not the decision

itself; the Arusha Declaration says that in a socialist state ‘everyone who is

physically able to work does so; every worker obtains a just return for the labour

he performs The fault was in trying to carry out the policy by a temporary ‘drive’

instead of a well-thought out and planned scheme which has the active support of

the people. These hasty campaigns are becoming a disease.545

Perhaps the zenith of deploying this rhetorical language of urban discipline occurred in

1983 along with Nguvu Kazi, when the Tanzanian government launched a campaign to fight “indiscipline” (the black market) in the economic sector against those conducting what was known as economic “sabotage” in order “bring out the brilliant performance of the civil service.”546 As discussed in previous chapters, the black market had become essential for procuring even the most common goods such as soap and cloth. Virtually everyone used the black market in some way, whether they were buying maize meal or a car. The purpose of the campaign was to control the amount of goods being diverted to

545 Julius Nyerere, “The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After,” 46-47. 546 “Government to Fight Indiscipline,” Daily News, May 8, 1983.

217 the black market by catching and punishing sellers who were hoarding goods, waiting to sell them at higher prices.

At its inception this campaign was popular and perceived as an attempt to help make goods more affordable for everyone. Nyerere and the press described the campaign as a triumph over chaos, lawlessness, and a polluted, diluted state. Nyerere sought to

“carry out a thorough re-examination” of party members and the government “with a view to cleansing themselves by identifying all those who are corrupt and reporting them to the appropriate authorities for appropriate disciplinary action.” He also remarked that

“cleansing those organs was considered a necessary preliminary step towards waging an all-out war against corruption on a national basis.”547 Over time though, the campaign against these economic “fifth columnists” became increasingly problematic for poor people.548 The fight against economic sabotage lost general popularity, Tripp writes, when the state began prosecuting ordinary people who relied on the black market in some form or another and left some of the largest operators who gouged prices for huge profits untouched.549

Ironically, in the aftermath of Nyerere’s crackdown on economic saboteurs, an unanticipated problem of disposal arose.550 While attacking the waste caused by these saboteurs on government resources, raids on saboteurs led to a pile up of perishable commodities without the means for distribution. Trying to avoid waste, Prime Minister

Sokoine ordered “soap and perishable items still lying in go-downs” to be sold to

547 “War That Must Be Won,” Daily News, May 11, 1983. 548 “War Must be Won Part Two,” Daily News, May 12, 1983. 549 Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 185. 550 “Sokoine urges speedy disposal of perishable,” Daily News, June 7, 1983.

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“prisons, the National Service, schools, armed forces, cooperative and village shops.”

Containers of “condemned and expired milk” were destroyed by the city council and regional authorities “were tasked with turning food that was no longer fit for human consumption into animal feed.”551

The following year, the government commenced yet another campaign for cleanliness. When calling for the campaign, Nyerere described the city as “rotting and stinking”: “City roads are gradually deteriorating and there is no effort by Dar es Salaam leaders to repair them. It appears that the city leaders have failed to improve sanitation despite constant annual allocation of government subvention.”552 Cleanliness was a matter of “habit,” Nyerere said, rebuking the idea that the city’s dirt had anything to do with economic hardships, education, or wealth. Shaming the city’s residents, he announced, “We have a bad habit of taking filth for granted. This is very embarrassing….

The city is rotting.”553

Citizens of Dar also readily spoke of being ashamed of their city and its state of filth in the newspapers. Complaining about how seldom the trash was picked up on his street, Juma Ali wrote a letter to the Daily News blaming the proliferation of waste on sanitation workers who are only concerned with getting overtime: “this just shows the amount of liking they have for work! One would almost think that their motto is "work only when there is money in sight.”554 Juma ended his letter with a sentiment many shared about the sanitary state of Dar es Salaam: “On top of all this I must say that during

551 Ibid. 552 “Mwalimu Alerts City Fathers Over Filth,” Daily News, June 14, 1984. 553 Ibid. 554 Readers’ Forum, “Dirty Dar Derided,” Daily News, July 14, 1967.

219 colonial times Dar es Salaam was much cleaner city[sic] than what it is today.”555 In a similar letter bemoaning the city’s descent into trash during the yearly Saba Saba festival, the writer sarcastically noted that, “the scintillating smell, of decay and rotten goods, is indeed the highlight of our celebrations. Market Street, for example, looks quite picturesque: large drums filled with fly infested rubbish, standing outside the big shops, give them a really majestic bearing.”556 The writer ends his letter remarking that he can no longer be proud of Dar es Salaam and that it is hardly “the Dar es Salaam we once knew.”557 Frustrated citizens writing into newspapers wove together a dialogue of cleanliness and discipline to examine the efficacy of the state while also trying to rid the city of its burgeoning class of semi-employed hawkers and sellers. It seems that sometimes in attacking illegal but efficient means of distribution, waste also abounded.

REUSE AND SELF-RELIANCE The flipside of the dual growing proliferation of squatters and waste that went less noticed by the public was that the proliferation of waste led to clever forms of reuse among the urban poor. In The African Poor, John Iliffe briefly discusses the flipside to this growing relationship between the urban poor and the pollution of cities. If the urban poor were polluting health risks and wasted rural labor, they were also the stewards of objects, developing ingenious methods of repair and reinvention, extending the life of consumables, or creating new objects entirely. They did, in effect, stem the tide of a growing waste stream. This stewardship of waste occurred across colonial Africa.

Navigating through the strange new territory of both consumer objects and urban poverty,

555 Ibid. 556 “Filthy City,” Daily News, March 14, 1974. 557 Ibid.

220 townsmen, Iliffe writes, created charcoal stoves from car doors, lamps from oil tins and tambourines from bottles. Beyond reuse at the individual and household level, men and boys also found employment in recovering waste:

Boys at Hargeisa in Somaliland have organised themselves into an engineering

firm on a rubbish dump. … In this way from twenty-five to thirty boys support

themselves. They live, rent free, in a disused shed, and grew four sacks of millet

on a piece of land lent them for the purpose. Whereas the very poor of Yoruba

towns had scoured the bush, the very poor of colonial towns scavenged industrial

wastelands. Sanitary workers in Lourenco Marques reworked collected trash and

resold bottles, plastic bags, rope, metal, old clothes, and a host of other articles.

Ibadan had an Association of Worn Out Tyre Traders. In Abidjan men toured the

streets with bathroom scales offering to weigh people for two pence a time.558

Recovering these organizations and networks in African cities can be hard to do in any systematic manner, and Dar es Salaam is no exception. When and if such practices do make it into the records, it tends to be in the criminalization of scavenging.

Anthropologist Mark Livengood conducted fieldwork in the 1990s in Dar es Salaam looking at the folk recycling cooperative Dar es Salaam Small Industries Cooperative

Society (DASICO). While his study includes little historical information about the coop’s origins, he dates the organization back at least until the 1960s.559 These men, known as mafundi chuma, forged objects out of used materials such as wire, steel rods, old car

558 John Iliffe and American Council of Learned Societies, The African Poor a History (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1987), 175. 559 Robert Mark Livengood, “Mafundi Chuma and Folk Recycling in Dar es Salaam: Case Studies of Material Behavior in Urban Tanzania,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.

221 doors, empty vegetable oil tins, and oil drums from BP and the soap factory. The mafundi chuma bought their materials from men called skrapas (scrappers) who scavenged across the city, bringing items to DASICO.560

Michael Yhdego also mentions that scavengers at the dump provided recovered goods to organizations such as DASICO who received about 60 percent of its raw materials from the site.561 By 1987 when Yhdego first conducted his survey, Tabata dump was home to a long-term community of scavengers. The oldest scavenger Yhdego talked to, Mr. Takataka (Mr. Garbage), had been scavenging for twenty years when

Yhdego interviewed him in 1990. Mr. Takataka noted a shift over the years from collecting at the dump to scavengers moving into the center of town for more valuable materials.562 Yhdego also reported that the city council was mostly ambivalent to the practice of scavengers: “At first the council fenced off the dumping area, but as the fill grew higher the fence was buried in the waste. Since then the attitude of the city council has apparently been neither in favour of nor against scavenging.”563

Without being too reductive, this account seems to encapsulate the evolution of the government’s general approach to issues about waste and disorder in the city. At first the city approached the problems with the goal of control and containment. Yet citizens, often out of sheer desperation, continued to seek ways to exploit their local environments and resources as adequate city services failed to materialize. State rhetoric then redefined the scope and understanding of self-help and self-reliance within urban environments. A

560Ibid., 87. 561 Ibid., 263. 562 Michael Yhdego, “Scavenging Solid Wastes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” Waste Management & Research 9, no. 4 (August 1991): 259-265, 262. 563 Ibid., 262.

222 brief example is Nyerere promoting peasant’s use of compost in 1983, claiming that this could increase yield “without becoming dependent upon an unreliable supply of expensive fertilizers from outside the village.” He added, “we have to do this economically on the basis of self-reliance and in a sustainable manner.”564 While just a few years earlier fertilizers were considered a key aspect of modernizing agricultural production, in the face of economic instability and skyrocketing import costs for petroleum-based products, they now fell under the category of unhealthy dependencies, just as concrete and tin roofs had come to represent a “mental paralysis.”

CONCLUSION This chapter has observed how, writ on the landscape and in public discourse, the government and citizens negotiated different notions of urban “discipline,” sanitation, and waste. From the municipal perspective, there was a shift from conceptualizing sanitation as an issue of personal health and disease to eventually accepting certain elements of the chaotic city through a changing rhetoric about the health and wellness of the nation and in the hope of doing the job more “cheaply” as the economy collapsed.

The health of the nation was on the shoulders of self-reliant, disciplined citizens. While

Nyerere’s rhetoric remained generally intolerant of informal or “idle” urban populations, particularly ones contributing to disorder, he also saw an intrinsic discipline in some of the self-reliance that surfaced as a result of municipal neglect. He came to reluctantly accept and ultimately encourage those who blurred the sanitary borders of the city’s outer edges through acts of survival such as cultivating food next to their homes or keeping chickens and livestock.

564 “Nyerere Promoted Compost,” Daily News, May 17, 1983.

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While the history of sanitation and waste in Dar es Salaam is its own particular history, it shares many characteristics with other African cities that were being discussed at the time in both academic circles and popular culture. Academic discussions of urban

Africa in the 1980s tended to dwell on dystopian futures, characterizing the periphery of cities as black holes, swallowing up African livelihoods, a place not only composed of waste, but full of wasted potential. Daniel Lerner in 1967 described migrants in the urban peripheries as a “suffering mass of humanity, displaced from the rural areas to the filthy peripheries of the great cities.”565 Left to languish on the edge of cities, experiencing no transition into an urban industrial labor force, Lerner writes, “these are the ‘displaced persons,’ the DPs, of the development process as it now typically occurs in most of the world, a human flotsam and jetsam that has been displaced from traditional agricultural life without being incorporated into modern industrial life.”566 While sympathetic, the depiction is still troublesome for the wretchedness it conveys. Many academics in the seventies revisited and in the end revised this view of shantytowns as repositories of waste with no redeeming features. Lerner’s characterization of the periphery is indicative of an era of scholarship where academics were stumped that rural Africans were staying

“displaced” in these peripheries rather than going home when they could not afford the city.

Postcolonial African fiction has also grappled with and employed a political rhetoric of waste and wasted people as “matter out of place.” Writers such as Wole

565 Daniel Lerner, “Comparative Analysis of Processes of Modernisation,” Conference on Methods and Objectives of Urban Research in Africa. The City in Modern Africa; [papers]. (New York: Praeger, 1967), 24-5. 566 Ibid.

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Soyinka subverted the rhetoric of blame and victimhood to point out the failures of governance and the proliferation of corruption. Joshua Etsy in his article on “excremental postcolonialism” notes the prevalence of excrement and shit as a “governing trope” in postcolonial African fiction for a generation stuck between the jubilation at the end of colonialism and the disillusionment of nationalist sentiment in the independence era.567

“Shit has a political vocation,” Etsy writes, “it draws attention to the failures of development, to the unkept promises not only of colonial modernizing regimes but of postindependence economic policy.”568 Writers employ it to tell narratives and serve figuratively as a “a material sign of underdevelopment; as a symbol of excessive consumption; as an image of wasted political energies.”569

Reflecting on ten years of Ujamaa, Nyerere emphasized to Tanzanians, “We must increase our discipline, our efficiency, and our self-reliance. In particular we must put more effort into looking always to see what we can do for ourselves out of our own resources—and then doing it.”570 This seems to be the dilemma of waste as Nyerere rhetorically employed it. On the one hand it symbolized what was agonizing about the growth of the city in all its forms: physical waste, disorderly spaces, polluted, dirty neighborhoods and businesses abounding while Tanzania was becoming less food independent and suffering huge trade imbalances. On the other hand, waste also symbolized ingenuity and conservation of resources.

567 Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 22-59, 23. 568 Ibid., 32. 569 Ibid., 14. 570 Ibid., 55.

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The habits or reactions of the average urban dweller to waste are far harder to recover than political rhetoric. In 1968, Michaela von Freyhold conducted a survey that eventually was turned into a book called The Workers and the Nizers. The goal of this survey was to examine the proletarianization and class formation of new migrants in Dar es Salaam. Von Freyhold and her team surveyed a wide range of residents cutting across the economic and social swath of the city. One question the team asked participants was how should the government improve living conditions in Dar es Salaam. Two thirds of those surveyed responded that improvements should take the form of economic investments and measures, while more than half of those suggestions addressed the disparity between wages and the price of goods, with particular attention given to food prices. Secondly, residents wanted the creation and expansion of industry and employment. Only after noting significant economic challenges did respondents turn to social problems. These social problems included more and improved housing, schools, hospitals, water supplies, improving streets and roads, public transportation and lastly,

“increased efforts to keep the town clean.”571 Having read this survey after scanning years of microfilmed daily newspapers, I found the results contradictory to the amount of space dedicated in public discourse to issues of waste and cleanliness. Even if one disregards articles about dirty streets, markets, houses and roads, a language of dirt and cleanliness pervaded discussions of proper and improper urbanism, creating exclusionary definitions of citizenship in the city. Despite this attention to waste in public discourse,

Freyhold’s survey reveals a different and logical set of priorities for people whose

571 Michaela von Freyhold, “The Workers and the Nizers: A Study in Class Relations,” (Department of Sociology, Dar es Salaam, 197?), 86.

226 economic choices were becoming ever more narrow and desperate. Also, due to a legacy of colonial urban neglect, many citizens may never have registered that the failure of basic municipal services fell under the purview of the state. Von Freyhold’s survey results are a word of caution when parsing debates on waste to fully consider first who actually sees the dirt, where and why they see it, and for whom does it remain invisible among problems of a greater magnitude. Freyhold’s survey suggests that perhaps for many the proliferation of waste was not seen as a pressing problem. People and communities navigated trash and sanitation woes as best they could, reclaiming waste for new uses when possible, whereas having no money or job posed a far more crushing obstacle.

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Epilogue

Over the course of Nyerere’s presidency, Dar es Salaam transformed in myriad ways that historians are just now beginning to write about. This work, most fundamentally, suggests that environmental history along with cultural and social history has a crucial place in rendering the postcolonial city. To perceive Dar es Salaam’s environment by the

1980s as simply the result of infrastructural collapse and economic crisis is an impoverished point of entry into a complex place. The city’s landscape was a bricolage; the product of a Swahili, German, Arabic and British past, and in the post colonial moment, a place formed by communities of new migrants seeking a life outside of

Nyerere’s Ujamaa villages, a site of international aid and planning and a place that fell into the gap between intensive state control over urban citizenship and alarming state neglect for cityscapes. I argue that the “collapse” of infrastructure in the seventies and eighties was not just the absence of government (while that was a key part) but was also an articulation of a particular planning vision and an exclusive definition of urban citizenship that has left an imposing and weighty legacy on the city.

This legacy most palpably is a massive peri-urban zone, something that Dar es

Salaam shares with many developing world cities. This work has concentrated on this geographical zone in the city to flesh out how the hinterlands have grown and what connections and dependencies have evolved between the postcolonial city and its urbanizing border. Lastly and most importantly, this work moves beyond a focus on the state’s vision of the city to shed light on how citizens debated over and fought for their

228 livelihoods in the city both in the public sphere of newspapers and by simply remaining in Dar and developing their lives despite monumental environmental obstacles.

229

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Vita

Emily Brownell was born and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She attended Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Social Change. She then received a Master’s degree in History from the University of Delaware before attending the University of Texas for her doctorate. She is now headed to the University of Northern Colorado as an assistant professor of African History.

Permanent address (or email): [email protected] This dissertation was typed by Emily Brownell.

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