Dar es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis

Introduction

Introduction James R. Brennan and Andrew Burton In the century and a half since its founding in the 1860s, Dar es Salaam has evolved from a minor mainland haven of Zanzibar’s Sultan Majid to become a sprawling, socially diverse city of major regional importance. The past hundred and forty years have witnessed the initially fitful, though seemingly inexorable, growth of a Tanzanian metropolis. By the end of the second millennium AD, Dar es Salaam had expanded to become East Africa’s largest urban centre.1 It is currently enjoying a period of particular vibrancy. Large swathes of the city centre are being transformed in a construction boom unprecedented since independence. Residential estates, catering for all classes, are extending the built-up area to the north, south and west. Liberalization from the late 1980s has seen the reinvigoration of a previously moribund urban economy. While the distribution of profits may be as unequal as ever, the commercial face of the city has changed dramatically—from machinga hawking the latest electronic gadgets at roadside junctions, to the emporiums of Kariakoo crammed with imported goods, to the more sedate malls of Msasani catering for Dar es Salaam’s old and new rich. The past decade or so has also witnessed something of a creative renaissance. Local media have flourished: electronic media such as radio and television stations, and the press in the shape of the plethora of conventional daily and evening papers, and a diverse array of magazines and other publications catering to local demands. Meanwhile, although the city has long been renowned for its vibrant local music scene, it has recently been at the heart of a regional phenomenon in bongo flava (deriving its name from the colloquial term for the city itself), an adaptation of western ‘urban contemporary’ music that has been exported with great success to other urban centres throughout East Africa and beyond. The socio-economic and cultural vibrancy of contemporary Dar es Salaam is also reflected by an upsurge in academic interest. While Dar es Salaam, considering its national and regional role, was for long curiously neglected, over the past decade or so it has been the subject of research in a variety of social science disciplines, and a published literature on the city is now gradually proliferating. As one of Africa’s fastest growing major cities in the second half of the twentieth century, it is an historical exemplar of socio-economic and cultural change associated with rapid urbanization. Moreover, both this historical context and dramatic political and (especially) economic liberalization 1 Dar es Salaam: Histories from an emerging African Metropolis 2 in the recent past makes the city equally representative of contemporary trends in urban Africa, notably those associated with ‘globalization’ and the indigenous response. The scholarly community that has been attracted by these conditions (alongside the relatively benign context for research) now focuses unprecedented attention on the city’s social, cultural and economic evolution. This book seeks to take advantage of this academic conjuncture by drawing together research, from scholars working in a number of social science disciplines, on Dar es Salaam’s twentieth century history. By so doing we seek to make a contribution not only to Tanzanian historiography, but also an emerging historiography of urban Africa, and to African urban studies more generally. Dar es Salaam and African urban history The study of urban Africa remains a rather disjointed field, despite efforts of scholars to impose theoretical priorities and typological order upon the subject.2 Looming over more recent studies has been the failure and abandonment of modernization paradigms, which temporarily united the expectations of scholars and African urban migrants alike concerning the progressive improvements that city life would bring to young African nations emerging from colonial rule—industrialization, higher living standards, abandonment of ‘tribal’ identities for national ones, and steady salaried lives centred on the nuclear family.3 By the turn of the twenty-first century, most of these promises of modernization lay irrevocably broken, yet Africa’s urban growth continues at a blistering pace. The shift in Africa’s population distribution from rural areas to cities since 1940 has been the most dramatic development of human geography in the continent’s modern history. In 1900, it is estimated that less than 2 percent of Africans lived in urban areas; by the early 1960s that figure had risen to 20 percent, in 1980 it was 29 percent, and by 1999 it stood at 37 percent. It is set to reach 50...