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97 Chapter Three Race, Class and Housing in Dar es Salaam: The colonial impact on land use structure 1891-1961 J.M. Lusugga Kironde The history of colonial land use in Dar es Salaam offers a clear vista into the city’s physical development, racial segregation, and class differentiation. The implementation of German and later British land laws provided the foundation upon which colonial governments, white settlers, Indian and Arab business investors, and African landowners, farmers and workers would struggle to shape the urban economy for their own ends. The shape of Dar es Salaam today is strongly influenced by the outcome of these struggles. The German and later British governments segregated Dar es Salaam by race through building codes and land laws. European and Indian investors seized economic opportunities by purchasing land from Africans for buildings or farms. As Dar es Salaam’s population expanded, government had to balance demands of non-African landowners, which they inclined to favour, with the needs of a growing African population seeking an urban home. The resulting compromises, and subsequent interventions by the late colonial government into Dar es Salaam’s land and housing markets, formed the basic outlines of Dar es Salaam’s major neighbourhoods, and still define much of the city’s physical shape today. The land use structure of any urban area is a result of the interaction of many factors. Governments through their regulatory powers have a major impact on how various uses and categories of users are located in a city. By and large, economists agree that government intervention in land markets to order land use is desirable. This is because the land market is considered to be imperfect and generally unable to live to the ideals of a perfect market. In the case of Africa, evolution of urban land policy can be divided into three phases as proposed by Mabogunje.1 Here, we are concerned with the first two of these phases. The first runs from the late 19th century to 1945. Urban land policy in the early colonial period was guided by the need to shape Dar es Salaam to serve the twin aims of colonialism, i.e. exploitation and domination. Policy was characterised by racial discrimination, partly justified by the concern Race, Class and Housing in Dar es Salaam 98 with ‘public’ (i.e. European) health – ‘the sanitation syndrome’2 – and partly in order to create a psychological atmosphere of African inferiority, to ease domination, and to privilege European and other non-native populations in land development. Investment in infrastructure and services varied according to the races occupying particular areas, on the pretext that different races had different requirements. Most legislation relating to land tenure and township administration was formulated during this phase, and has had a lasting influence on the character of the colonial (and postcolonial) city. The second phase, running from 1946 to 1961, was characterised by the Government taking greater responsibility for the provision of African housing and services, as well as asserting itself more forcefully into the management of Dar es Salaam’s land economy.3 Paradoxically, this post-war commitment to managing urban growth would mark the historic peak of the state’s relative investment in Dar es Salaam, just at the time when the late colonial Government was fast losing its legitimacy because of the continued racial inequities in its distribution of urban resources. Creating a colonial capital in German East Africa The German territorial government selected Dar es Salaam as the seat of power and as the chief port of the colony in January 1891, although Bagamoyo had been headquarters of the preceding German colonial administration, the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG, or ‘German East African Company’). The first Governor for German East Africa, Julius von Sodden, never stayed in Bagamoyo, moving directly to Dar es Salaam from Zanzibar in April 1891. The town was selected because of its natural sheltered harbour, which presented a cheaper option than that of transforming Bagamoyo into a modern port. Additionally, there were relatively fewer vested interests to stand in the way of government designs (e.g. land appropriation) at Dar es Salaam. Early German land acquisition reflected the motives of colonial rule. Land was required for government offices, officials’ residences, and the military, as well as for trading purposes. All land along the harbour was immediately acquired and soon put to uses such as defence, warehousing, customs, and general administration. Europeans, aware of the moderating influence of a sea breeze on the...

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