Resist tribal and religious division, let’s live by Utu

I read on some important rag or website recently that Dar es Salaam is the second-fastest growing city in Africa.

For those who are hypnotised by the consecutive use of the words “fast” and “growing,” I suppose this is wonderful news.

I am ambivalent; while I dread the thought of squeezing even more cars onto our narrow roads, I am excited about what this means for our cultural diversity and globalism, among other things.

The arts, innovation, all kinds of good things tend to come out of the interactive clash of people that congested cities excel at, and it is about time that Dar provided Tanzania with the creative entrepreneurial impetus that we need.

And if the city must grow, let it at least become a souped-up modern urban space with too much character to be pigeonholed easily.

As it is, there are various Dar es Salaams to keep things interesting, much to the chagrin of the one-size-should-fit-all thinkers.

For the most part, we seem to be doing fine, but there is a maggot in the ointment that’s threatening to develop into a full-blown fly.

We’re regressing into tribalism again, though not necessarily the kind that attracts international journalists like circling buzzards.

It is hard to tell yet whether the causes are economic stratification, congestion, frustration, or lack of education — by which I mean the double-whammy of the death of traditional knowledge systems and the inability of the public system to compensate meaningfully.

Perhaps it is a combination of several factors. Either way, I am getting the creeping feeling that we are losing some of our cultural flexibility with time, which is counter-productive in the age of globalisation.

Arguably, Tanzania never did integrate culturally so much as grow a superstructure; part of the nation-building process was the superimposition of Kiswahili and a largely administrative, non-ethnic definition of “Tanzanian-ness” on whatever other identities people had going on.

I have always thought there was something healthy about this pragmatic approach, because melting-pot politics can be quite frightening in practice.

What should it matter how different we are if we can make ourselves understood in a common creole trading language?

Although that muscular giant Nairobi is by far the most developed city in the region — complete with six-lane highways — I have always believed with nationalistic stubbornness and visceral evidence that we are the most cosmopolitan capital in East Africa.

Mostly this is because we have so far failed to define ourselves with any particular exactitude. Even Zanzibaris start to fall apart into “Zanzibaras” and various other shadings of negotiable authenticity at the slightest query.

There is in fact nothing romantic at all about the general Tanzanian attitude towards cultural diversity — we’re not so much colour-blind as we are resigned to live and let live for the most part. That sums it up and has worked well enough until recently.

We’re struggling with a touch of xenophobia as immigration picks up in ways we didn’t necessarily anticipate: It’s one thing to talk about affinities with neighbouring countries, another thing entirely to share our cities and lives with, say, a visibly growing Chinese population. We’re having to learn how.

A lot more worrying is the creeping religious intolerance that’s beginning to show itself here and there. This is quite specifically a Christian-Muslim encounter, tediously enough, as if the world needs another Crusade.

I blame the War on Terror, by which I mean the Americans of course, for this. Not so long ago, in Dar at least, one could hardly throw a coconut in any direction without hitting at a minimum two religious converts and six or seven mixed marriages.

Even in the older generation that is wont to make such a Big Deal out of Everything, mixed marriages were as common as children born out of wedlock.

But now that so much of the world has decided that “Islamism” is an acceptable word to throw around — a decidedly cretinous and racist move — we seem to be following suit somehow.

That’s just un-Tanzanian of us, and I want to raise the alarm. For what it is worth, our national religion has been and should continue to be Utu.

At the risk of sounding superior: Yes, a little humanism actually does make us better. Better people, better in our religions, better in our lives, better practitioners of the universal golden rule of do unto others.

If the future is here, and it is, may I offer a startling notion to my fellow East Africans and the world? What Tanzania can contribute, with a little help from her friends, might just work if we work at it.

Not just land, or minerals, or whatever. It boils down to Utu, and we had best remember that’s the foundation our vaunted peace is built upon.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]