African Underclass: Urbanisation, Class and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (review)

The history of Dar es Salaam is a sorely neglected topic, and Burton’s scholarship is a welcome contribution to a growing body of work published in recent years by scholars well-equipped to provide insightful analyses of this dynamic and vitally positioned coastal city. Carefully mining the available colonial archival collections, Burton makes a valuable contribution to the field. African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam is a thorough administrative history of colonial Dar es Salaam, exploring the themes of demographic growth over the first half of the twentieth century, crime and urbanization, the construction of deviance under colonial conditions, and British attempts to control such processes.

However, despite the author’s obvious mastery of archival sources, his analysis is surprisingly conservative. The exposition sticks closely to a recounting of incidents and observations recorded by colonial officials or appearing in the local press. For example, although the author has evidence of community responses to some crime figures, and of African hostility to Arab and Indian small businesses, the subject of social banditry is dealt with summarily (117). The author focuses on key categories—such as youth, migration, race, poverty, and the social dynamics underpinning an informal economy—and he traces colonial cultural phenomena—including colonial perceptions and concerns about unemployment and loitering, and colonialist categories such as “detribalized natives” and “undesirable natives.” Yet oddly, given the title, there is no discussion of Foucauldian ideas about the surveillance state, or of the discursive production and internalization of categories of the noncriminal and criminal.

The most interesting moments in the monograph come when Burton permits us to glimpse popular African experiences and perceptions; indeed, creativity and negotiation seem to float just beneath the surface of his narrative, especially in chapters 9 (“An Unwelcome Presence: African Mobility and Urban Order) and 12 (“Purging the Town: The Removal of Undesirables, 1941–61”). Yet even with such evocative material, and with tales of renowned criminals, intricate marketing networks for stolen bicycles, and mixed-ethnic riots during dockworker strikes, there is almost no commentary to illuminate their significance. Nor does the author explore reports of “undesirables” expelled for vagrancy, reputed TANU-inspired crowds attacking police to stop arrests, or even the many instances of African-Arab-Indian class-based tensions and violence that dot the landscape of this history.

To be sure, unveiling local experiences of urbanization in Africa and explicating criminals’ perspectives on the history of crime in Africa are difficult projects. Certainly, as the author points out, colonial officials did not know what was happening in the parts of Dar es Salaam where Europeans did not reside, and thus they often remained unaware of the effects of their own legislative efforts to control those sections of the city. Furthermore (and making the task of writing a history of criminality in Dar particularly challenging), colonial Dar es Salaam was a relatively peaceful city, at least in terms of the sorts of rebellions that colonial authorities would have been most interested in leaving extensive records about.

Still, though the written and official historical record is relatively sparse, other research techniques and a more ambitious research strategy might have revealed much regarding Burton’s subject. This topic cries out for oral histories of former jailers, policemen, shopkeepers, community leaders, and long-time residents, and for Dar family histories of employment, consumption, and migration. These might have led the author to missing topics such as social networking as forms of resistance to colonial order and protection from urban crime, or gender and gendered violence set within colonialist and masculinist contexts. At the very least, African Underclass would have benefited from a dialogue with some of the rich historiography on urban African history—by Frederick Cooper on labor, Charles Van Onselen on daily...