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198 Chapter Eight Simba or Yanga? Football and urbanization in Dar es Salaam Tadasu Tsuruta Football has been by far the most popular sport throughout Africa from the colonial period up to the present. Tanzania is no exception, but its football scene has a rather distinctive aspect as compared to the other countries. What makes Tanzanian football unique is the existence of two longtime rivals, the most prominent clubs in the country: namely Simba and Yanga. Their popularity has spread nationwide over more than half a century, dividing millions of Tanzanian football enthusiasts into two groups. A journalist noted in the mid-1970s that the duopoly reached such a position of dominance that Tanzanians often identified themselves by team allegiance, asking one another, ‘Are you Simba or Yanga?’1 For many men in urban Tanzania over the past sixty years, football has been an integral part of their everyday life. It is not merely a spectator sport, but also an important social activity. Street football teams in Tanzania emerged as community-based social clubs, fostering rival relations within each urban centre and forming networks among other clubs in different towns. This phenomenon is best represented in the development of Simba and Yanga, which grew from small street teams in 1940s Dar es Salaam into teams with enthusiastic nationwide support by the 1970s. The purpose of this article is to trace a historical outline of the development of these two teams, with special reference to their relationship to processes of urbanization and social change. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first describes their emergence in the colonial era, when they established themselves as communal associations in what was then a significantly smaller town. The second analyses how these clubs were destabilized amid mass ruralurban immigration that occurred after independence. Existing studies of African football in the field of social history have focused mainly on its role in colonial settings, in which the colonizers and the colonized vied in trying to appropriate this popular cultural domain for their respective social and political purposes.2 By contrast, this study seeks to describe the development of these Tadasu Tsuruta 199 popular clubs as basically a spontaneous African grass roots movement, which spanned different social environments both before and after colonialism.3 Football in Dar es Salaam: the early years Over the past half century or more Dar es Salaam’s heterogeneous ethnic and racial communities have shared one important pastime: football. The game was first introduced to Tanganyika by English UMCA (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa) missionaries, and popularized in the 1920s by alumni of the UMCA school at Kiungani, Zanzibar.4 The first organised league in Dar es Salaam, the Dar es Salaam Association Football League, was established at this time.5 It managed regular games and other local tournaments.6 Alongside the racially exclusive European sports club, Gymkhana, teams from various governmental institutions, including the police and army, dominated the league in its early years. These workplace teams were established by British officials,thoughthemajorityoftheplayerswereAfrican.7 The sport’s popularity was also entrenched through its adoption as an extra-curricular activity at local schools; played at intermissions, after school, at festivities, and at interschool games from the 1920s. Dar es Salaam’s Government School, where the students were divided into several competing teams, was a noted source of local footballing talent.8 Alongside Gymkhana, the Government School’s ground was the principal venue for major competitions until the Ilala Stadium (now Karume Memorial Stadium) was built by the Tanganyika Football Association with government funds in 1946 or 1947.9 Alongside the first and second divisions of the league, the mid-1930s to early 1940s saw the appearance of annual tournament matches such as the Higginson, Pall Mall, Sunlight and Jan Mohammed Cups. The Pall Mall and Sunlight Cups were sponsored by tobacco and soap companies, while the Higginson and Jan Mohammed Cups were donated by an individual European and Indian, respectively. By the mid-1940s, the Sunlight Cup had developed into a nationwide tournament of teams from eight provinces.10 From 1945, Tanganyika also joined the annual inter-territorial Gossage Cup, in which representative teams from four British colonies (Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar) competed. The Sunlight and Gossage Cups captured nationwide attention and by then football’s status as the most popular sport in Tanganyika was well established.11 While official institutions certainly played their part in the development of the game, football in Dar es Salaam should also be...

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