Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (review)

Like many other African cities, Dar es Salaam has experienced tremendous population and economic growth in recent decades. This work makes visible the historical processes that preceded and in some ways produced this recent growth. The eleven tightly organized essays in this edited volume elegantly illustrate the point that despite numerous grave challenges faced by the city's inhabitants, Dar es Salaam has persisted as a site of African creativity, resourcefulness, and cultural vibrancy. The city's "vicious cycle of environmental and infrastructural deterioration" (66) has at times brought people together to solve problems. Yet it has also shaped the conditions under which diverse groups of people have struggled among themselves and against each other to recreate and redefine their identities, to resist state control or impose social control, or to determine the best ways to use urban spaces.

Dar es Salaam's editors expertly organized the volume to trace the city's history from its precolonial origins to its postcolonial present. This is no small accomplishment, given the chapters' impressive range of approaches to Dar es Salaam's social, cultural, and environmental histories. The editors' goal for the volume is to emphasize "the culturally heterogeneous nature of Dar es Salaam, its role as the site where political practice and ideology of the nation meet, and finally the legacy of political, socio-cultural, and economic compromises between local, national, and cosmopolitan factors that structure this urban society" (7).

The book is divided into two major parts, entitled "Administering Urbanization: Regulation and Its Failures in Colonial Dar es Salaam" and "Competing Cultures in Colonial and Postcolonial Dar es Salaam." Both sections begin with dense but concise introductions that tie their constituent essays together. A short introduction by Brennan and Burton situates the book within Dar es Salaam historiography and African urban historiography generally. This "overview history" of the city provides a framework for the remaining shorter essays and highlights the recurring and intertwined themes to be addressed. In part 1, Thaddeus Sunseri, J. M. Lusugga Kironde, James R. Brennan, Andrew Burton, and Justin Willis contribute essays that examine, respectively, colonial forestry policy, land use, housing, policing, and alcohol consumption. From these different vantage points the chapters of part 1 deftly illustrate the point that "colonial attempts to regulate economic and social behavior, or to define urban space, were often contradictory and even counter-productive" (77). Part 1 also points up the "deeply racialized structure of colonial urban society" that prevented African city-dwellers from enjoying the "privileged access to resources and infrastructure" available to Europeans and Indians (77).

The essays in part 2 illustrate the editors' observation in the introduction that "culturally Dar es Salaam represents a modern reformulation of the Swahili city" (13). This claim is fruitfully explored in uniformly well-written and intriguing essays by Werner Graebner (on popular music), Tadasu Tsuruta (on football and urbanization), Andrew Ivaska (on gender, fashion, and social control), Stephen Hill (on "the urban experience of rural music"), and Alex Perullo (on hip hop in Dar es Salaam). In this way the book's structure mirrors the dynamic interplay between the socioeconomic features of urban life in Dar es Salaam (in part 1) and the cultural expressions that emerged from the city's local contexts in different eras (in part 2).

The volume includes numerous interesting photographs, and its maps help orient the reader to Dar es Salaam's geography in different historical phases. The individual chapters—concise historical treatments of African urbanization, leisure activities, and social policy—also lend themselves to use in undergraduate teaching. Scholars will appreciate the careful and thorough research done by the book's contributors, as well as their efforts to challenge past historiography. Dar es Salaam will, as the editors hope, certainly inspire future research...