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213 Chapter Nine In the ‘Age of Minis’: Women, work and masculinity downtown Andrew M. Ivaska Tanzania’s first postcolonial decade has recently come into its own as an object of study in historians’ work on the country. Urban history – and particularly the history of Dar es Salaam – has been a key part of the move toward exploring this period.1 This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature by examining gendered tensions and struggles over women’s work and movement in downtown Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Long an issue in Dar es Salaam, women’s dress and comportment grew to become a matter of unprecedented political charge in the 1960s. This was in large part due to the confluence of a number of different phenomena, initiatives and crises during that decade: a highly-touted state project of ‘national culture’, rising unemployment amidst booming migration to the capital, a steady and significant increase in the number and proportion of new migrants who were women, and new opportunities for women in particular kinds of urban formal sector work in Dar es Salaam. The charged nature of women’s dress as the focus for increasingly intense public debate and struggle was showcased by ‘Operation Vijana’, the first of what would become a series of official bans in Dar es Salaam on ‘indecent’ fashion, and more specifically, mini-skirts. The campaign generated extraordinary debate after its launch by the TANU Youth League (TYL) in late 1968 – debate that spilled out far beyond the ostensible justification for the ban in terms of ‘national culture’.2 It was also accompanied – indeed enforced – by a series of often violent attacks on, and harassment of, women wearing mini-skirts by crowds of young men including both TYL members In the modern world … men and women are in a crucial tug-of-war in which each side is claiming for superiority. – Peter Claver F. Temba, letter to Tanzania Standard, Oct. 16th , 1970. In the “Age of Minis”: Women, work and masculinity downtown 214 and others. These physical attacks were concentrated at particular sites associated by anxious young men with female accumulation, mobility and autonomy – bus stations, commuter routes, downtown streets and offices – and the debate over the ban featured the powerful association of ‘indecent’ dress not only with prostitution, but just as closely with female office-workers, who were becoming much-discussed figures on the city’s cultural landscape. Indeed, in the public discourse around Operation Vijana the oft-professed link between the mini-skirt, working women downtown, and prostitution was nearly unassailable. Although Operation Vijana failed to eradicate the mini-skirt, it by no means marked the last of the campaigns, which continued to be launched periodically. But the mini-skirt was a contested sign, and by the early 1970s the ideological field had shifted somewhat, facilitating the emergence of some successful challenges by women seeking to disentangle the mini-skirt, work and movement downtown, from the suspicion of illegitimate gain through sex. After briefly considering the history of women and work in postwar Dar es Salaam, this chapter explores these shifts by focusing on a 1970-71 dress campaign – one that sought to broaden and further institutionalize the battle against ‘indecency’ – and on the trial of one woman who successfully challenged her arrest for indecency in court. I argue that the movement of campaigns against particular items of clothing from vigilante3 to more institutionalized forms opened the door for more robust challenges to both the dress codes and the ideological underpinning of the campaigns. Gender, migration and work in post-war Dar es Salaam Beginning shortly after WWII and continuing for decades, Tanzania saw an upsurge in rural-urban migration. With Dar es Salaam receiving a disproportionate number of those heading for town, its population nearly quadrupled in less than twenty years, from 69,200 in 1948 to 272,821 in 1967.4 The gender dynamics of this influx are important. In the colonial period, those migrating to town in Tanzania, as across colonial Africa, were predominantly male (approximately two thirds of migrants in the 1950s). Compared with many other African cities of the time, however, the number of women in colonial Dar es Salaam was by most accounts relatively high. Rising and falling through the colonial period, the male:female ratio in the capital ranged from 140:100 in 1928 and 206:100 in 1931, to an apparent low of 110:100 in 1940, and back up to...

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