Oct 6th – Oct 13th : Dar es Salaam

Outside the air conditioned airport buildings the humidity and heat of the bright light pouring from incandescent sky above Dar warns new arrivals of what is expected: discomfort. Local heat and humidity is nothing new to me; I was born and raised here. What was to follow in the days ahead disalarmed me—and ushered me out of my comfort zones of where I have lived for the last three decades and of the Dar I had left behind: simple, easy-going, open, accessible.

Progress is an inevitable force of change, often for the better and not worse, even though ideologues and romantics would want to cling onto the old. History accounts for such inevitable changes: the end of the cold war; the liberalization of communist China; decolonization; and end of apartheid, etc.

At the party, held at Trinity the day arrived, I failed to explain to inquiries of “so how do you find Dar after all these years? ….what do you think of Dar...are you surprised..?”

I am not sure, I replied to most inquiries, as I had not seen much of Dar yet, from the street level, or held conversations with people from various backgrounds. But the drive from the airport along the new two-lane divided Pugu Road, merging into Nkrumah Road, past the clock tower and into Samora Ave and along the scenic Ocean Rd, with the turquoise Indian Ocean to the right, assaulting you with its salty smell, past the Salendar Bridge on Bagamoyo Road towards the Oyster Bay and Msasani, was an introduction: a glimpse of its teeming inhabitants, of traffic congestion, of an abundance of four-wheel-drives and SUVs, of reckless driving, of the new glass skyscrapers replacing the old (historically precious) dusty, blackened buildings with steel grills and clothing lines, of the old street names accommodating new, was not enough I said.

The party, held at Trinity, a lavish backyard house converted every first Saturday of the month into a club, was an exclusively expatriate affair, with paltry locals of returned Asians with dual citizenship or children of well-to-do Africans and African women, some escorted with their Mzungu lover or friend, others associated with the NGOs, a cottage industry here, in every capacity dealing with social and economic policies funding donor projects.

“I don’t feel I have left the States,” I declared as I looked around.

A local patron at the bar said, “This is the NGO and the UN crowd.” Then he added, with slight derision, “The South African crowd is absent. Their watering holes are Sea Cliff and Yacht Club.”

All around me I heard English spoken with various accents: British, American, and European (German, Dutch, and Scandinavian).

Later, at the party, I learned from another local resident who said to me: “The NGO and UN crowd is rather exclusive. In the old days the expats would mingle with the local, go out of the way to learn the language. Now, everything is available for them. They live in Africa, work in Africa, but live as if they are at home—among themselves.”

“Is that your perception or general perception,” I asked.

“Both he replied,” confidently, and turned to his good looking African female partner and led her to the dance floor to join among the sea of white faces, dancing to Fifty Cents: Candy Shop.

Over the week, from conversing with local business people, I learned that South Africans are heavily invested in mining, banking, tourism, food chains, hospitality services, and telecommunications sectors of the liberalized economy. There is an undercurrent of resentment among the Tanzanians (both Asians and Africans) towards them, just like, almost thirty years ago, when similar industry sectors were controlled by Asians, before massive nationalization then by the government of Mwalimu.

“South Africans [white] have their own identity. They stick to themselves. No matter how sophisticated they may be at the jobs. They come home, put on their shorts, bring their castle beers to the pub, get drunk, show their true colors, and often treat the locals with disrespect.”

How often does that happen?

“I have seen it many times at pubs,” said my companion.

Does the government or local authorities intervene in such incidents?

I was told that a few have been deported on charges of racism.

A Walk in the Day in Dar

This week, during the day, I walked aimlessly around Dar town center in a surreal daze, with the heat and humidity draining me. I trotted from end of the town to the other, wading through its congested center—cars, pick-up trucks and suvs parked boisterously and recklessly along the curb and on it; by the little Bombay (Odeon Cinema and Naaz Mansion); along the Azizikwe St that emerges from the Askari monument roundabout and meets Upanga Road at the other end; up and down the Mosque St where the Darkhana is still an imposing landscape, along with other nearby newly erected Shia and Sunni mosques; along the Kuvokoni front with the harbor to the left, equally congested with rusty container ships harbored at the ports, the majestic newly renovated St Cathedral Church on the right, the salty-oiled stench filling the air; around the Libya Street, with decrepitude post office, showing its decay and neglect; up and down the Jamhuri St and Morogoro Road: all manifest ungoverned growth, exasperating human and car traffic, darkened and unkempt buildings.

The Indian names and the dates (mostly 1900s) that adorn the cornices and terraces of the storied buildings with shop downstairs and leaving quarters upstairs are fading and chipping away with time and neglect as if that history is not worth preservation. A few of these mansions that hold old charm of Indian character of Dar, I am told, are being razed to the ground, and in its place new high-rises apartments and skyscrapers are erected.

What about preserving the old character and charm of Dar? Is not the ministry of land reform or ministry of culture interested to maintain the old character and history of this city?

An old architect friend of mine explained: “An average building in town life span is 50 years. And the average rent income it generates from tenants is very low. It does not make economic sense for the government to hold and preserve the building for additional years, when it can tear it down, raise a skyscraper, and house 200 tenants. We tend to attach emotional and sentimental value to these buildings because they were built by us [Asians]—some of the original owners still live in them.

“So if I am the government and I have several or dozen of these short four story buildings in town, I would rather tear it down or sell it to the developer from whom it [government] can garner more money. It does make economic sense.”

These old street names were once open, accessible, and simple; now they’re narrow and crowded with makeshift small shops, street vendors, hastily built skyscrapers, some still under construction, and ugly painted half blue and white buildings, Vodacom colors of the South African mobile company that employs buildings owned by government as billboards!

It is a disheartening and aesthetically displeasing image of this old and new. Worse are exhaust fumes from the abundance of diesel propelled SUVs and the dala dalas, a replacement for the public transport. These shabby multi-colored minibuses transport packed masses of workers from the neighboring townships of Temeke, Magomeni, Ilala, Kariako, Mzimbazi, Kinondoni, Namanga, Mwenge, and Mbezi into town, and their drivers are reckless. Countless road accidents and fatalities have been attributed to them: they are public road hazard with no traffic governance. And the police recently have been cracking down on them.

“The government abandoned the public transport because it was too expensive to maintain the fleet of buses,” said one businessman to me.

So all round town, at the old bus stops, now dala dalas reign and rule the right of way on the Dar roads with their breathtaking speeds and reckless driving and unpredictable turnings and overtaking.

Kariako always has had a reputation of a bustling and hustling district of Dar. It is not any different today, except the scale is tenfold. A walk up along Uhuru St, the setting of M.G. Vassanji’s short story collection, Uhuru St, is far from it. Of course, the old fading buildings are there that provided the writer its setting; its occupants long gone or dead. Only memory lingers among those who come to it. The dirt roads off it teem with stores flowing with wares into the street. Street hawkers, dressed in kanzus and kofias, infest these narrow streets. And on Swahili St farther up, Chinese dukawallas peer at you from their enterprising caves. They are the new comers, new dukawallas. Where once these stores were manned by Arabs and Asians, now they are run and owned by Chinese.

Not too far up the road, past Mzimbazi St is Tandamti St. I have fond memories of that bustling district. My grandparents lived in a two story building, Gulamhussein Nathoo Mansion, 1959, directly across the grand old sokoni (market). The first formative years of my life I spent here, before moving to Upanga in a house on the bending Upanga Road.

I am confident and optimistic that Dar, and Tanzania in general, is heading in the right direction. Well come to the new and progressive Dar, the burgeoning and booming capital of East Africa. For a new comer from the western world Dar can be trying; for a long time absent returnee like me, it just grows with you, day after day—and eventually absorbs you as part of it.