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136 Chapter Five ‘Brothers by Day’: Policing the urban public in colonial Dar es Salaam, 1919-61* Andrew Burton Along with the administration and judiciary, the Tanganyika police force formed the third branch of the urban state at the heart of the imposition and maintenance of colonial order in Dar es Salaam.1 Indeed, of all three, it was perhaps the most essential. While the British regime, in its administrative and judicial initiatives in the town, attempted to establish structures of governance that retained the broad acceptance of the African urban population, their legitimacy was always to some degree reliant upon the coercive potential of the colonial state. Police enforcement of laws and by-laws was integral to the implementation of colonial urban policy. Through their presence or absence, actions or inactions, the police exercised an enduring influence on how urban space was conceived and utilised, helping shape a town that reflected prevailing social, economic and political contexts. The urban order in force was a racially discriminatory one. Not only were substantially more resources devoted to the policing of Dar es Salaam’s European community than to its Indian or, especially, African communities, but the town was often policed through the enforcement of legislation that nakedly discriminated against the African majority. Most obviously, the police enforced laws restricting African mobility within the town; moreover, various laws prohibiting social, cultural and/or economic pursuits, such as ngoma, the consumption of ‘traditional’ brews, or informal trade, also led to the arrest and prosecution of countless ‘offenders’.2 The prejudicial nature of much colonial legislation was transparent to urban Africans, and resulted in great resentment towards the police who acted as the principal agents of enforcement. Police actions not only reflected racial prejudices inherent in the colonial situation; they also arose from, and reinforced, an evolving urban socioeconomic stratification. A growing class of unemployed, under-employed and informally-employed Africans, who were blamed for spiralling crime as the town underwent unprecedented growth from the late-1930s, formed the Andrew Burton 137 principal target of colonial policing. Heightened crime rates can in fact be attributed in part to intensified action against this class, as increasing numbers were apprehended and charged for a diverse array of (often victimless) offences from loitering to street trading. These occupants of the town not only contradicted European and Indian notions of orderly urban space, but also affronted the peace of mind of a respectable urban African elite. Such action against the ‘residuum’ helped mollify the town’s propertied classes. However, in the face of rapid urbanization in the late-colonial period its effect was largely symbolic. Even with the deployment of a police force whose reputation for coercion was high, the degree of influence exercised by the colonial administration over the African population was substantially less than that aspired to by both European officials and police officers, and that desired by European and Indian settlers and an African elite. The Dar es Salaam police were also situated at the forefront of the most prominent socio-cultural cleavage in the town: that dividing the urban majority of Swahili-influenced Muslims, originating from Dar es Salaam’s coastal hinterland, from upcountry, often Christian, Africans whose relative affluence and social success in the colonial town were resented by coastal indigenes who viewed them as interlopers. Thanks in part to an official policy of stationing police officers outside their home districts, the African constabulary in Dar es Salaam was made up overwhelmingly of upcountry recruits. This intensified resentment towards the police among the capital’s coastal African majority, who viewed the Dar es Salaam force less as a neutral keeper of the peace than as an occupying force.3 The formation of a colonial constabulary In 1919, when the British colonial administration formally took over German East Africa, it was faced with a high incidence of urban lawlessness in the territorial capital. This disorder had its roots in the collapse of authority which occurred in Dar es Salaam during the transition from German to British rule in the First World War. After more than two decades of strict German rule elements among the town’s inhabitants responded to opportunities arising from a British administration unfamiliar with local conditions.4 The military authorities responded by enlisting twenty-eight European officers, noncommissioned officers, and troopers of the South African Mounted Rifles to form the nucleus of a territorial Police Force, who set about recruiting and training an African rank and file.5 At the end...

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