What if Dar es Salaam was not meant to grow into this city?
Harbour and city centre skyline of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Dar es Salaam is home to roughly 10 percent of the country’s population, at least on paper. The very definition of a Primate City.
Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
What is it like to live in one of the fastest growing cities in the world, you ask? Well, it is many things, one of which is ‘unexpected.’ Nobody would have predicted this for Tanzania in the past.
I like to imagine that for newcomers from the hinterlands, Dar es Salaam is an exhilarating adventure. For us long term residents, it is a perpetual surprise at how big it has become, how expensive everything is, and how we can’t find anywhere because the landscape keeps changing with fewer trees, more asphalt and new buildings.
The statistic that I remember is that Tanganyika had roughly 10 million people or so at the time of independence in the 1960s. I do not dare to guess how many people were in Zanzibar at the time.
Now, six decades later, the country is 60 million strong and growing rapidly. And Dar es Salaam is home to roughly 10 percent of the country’s population, at least on paper. The very definition of a Primate City.
Sometimes I wonder about the serendipity of it all. It has rather humble beginnings if I remember correctly. The back story involves a prince or some potentate deciding to restart life in Mzizima.
Issues of noble heredity in the city-states of the coast were complicated in a fratricidal kinda way. There was also lots of competition on the Swahili Coast in the 1800s, man.
With Zanzibar right next door, the port cities of Tanga and Lindi, Mombasa and Bagamoyo up north and Quelimane down south, Mzizima was just a backwater.
Did it ever know it would grow into a major contender in the region? Did it know how sprawling it would become, absorbing six million and more people with ease?
Seeing the city through the eyes of surprised foreigners helps my own understanding. I particularly like the ones who tell me that they have been to Lagos/Nairobi/Johannesburg and didn’t expect what they encountered here.
We apparently feel more like the Caribbean than another major African city. I figure it is because Tanzania is comfortable with its role as a backwater, confidently shy.
Maybe that is why the modernity that we are inventing is so idiosyncratic. We have crafted a city of people who move slowly while everything happens fast.
There are no handbooks for African development per se, on paper the future is mapped by last century’s successes in Europe or America and sometimes Asia.
These ‘development roadmaps’ are laughable here, rendered ridiculous by our patent inability to be anything other than African.
Complexity and contradiction are the stuff of life itself here, and it is nice to see that academic disciplines like Complexity Studies and the concept of Emergence are catching up to us.
These approaches can explain how Tanzania is — quietly — exploding into raw capitalism that has to negotiate a core of Utu flavoured by the ghost of Ujamaa.
It is my inclination to lament the loss of our gorgeous past because our story is delicate, complex and intricate, and still largely undiscovered.
But when I look up from nostalgia and try to capture what it is like to live in one of the fastest growing cities in the world, I find myself underserved by language.
It feels a bit like sitting in the delivery room of an African modernity that is emerging screaming into the world. What does the future hold?
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; E-mail: [email protected]
