The post-Nyerere Tanzania is returning to a bustling capitalism, but there are signs of further colonialism
John Matshikiza
‘Many years ago,” says my friend Juma, “Mwalimu [Julius Nyerere] didn’t allow any of these kind of businesses. He only allowed state shops. Now you see small shops everywhere.”
It’s odd. I don’t feel that old. But travelling into Central and East Africa in the post-Kenneth Kaunda, post-Nyerere era makes me feel like a survivor of several cataclysmic upheavals, walking through a landscape where there are no survivors to tell of the previous way of living.
As I look around the former Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam (which is still very much its commercial and diplomatic capital) I see the same profusion of native capitalism that I was accustomed to in the 1960s and 1970s, the difference being that there is now much, much more of the same. The enterprise that made the Jamhuri Street area in downtown Dar so vibrant has now spilled over into dozens of the surrounding blocks, creating a perpetual traffic jam of cars, trucks and human bodies.
I feel like a sort of Rip van Winkle Africanus, because, in the 25 years that have elapsed since I was last abroad on these languid, rotting, tropical streets, the city has apparently dipped through into the kind of stony socialist profile Juma was describing for me, and then bounced back to resume its rambling, enterprising ways. I never experienced the austerity that the late Nyerere’s policies had supposedly imposed on the trade-crazy culture of the Swahili coast. I could not imagine rows of depressed but disciplined Tanzanians queuing outside the cavernous state warehouses. I only had Juma’s word for it.
Dar es Salaam today is more alive than it has ever been. The crumbling buildings are still there, with the same profusion of Swahili, Indian and Arab families leaning over the dilapidated balconies, and the vendors of colourful khanga cloth, fruit, vegetables, building supplies, bicycles and refrigerators tumbling out of the narrow shops on the ground floor, taking over the sidewalk in a friendly cascade.
But alongside the old faades, new buildings are springing up as well, raising the skyline to more soaring horizons. Foreigners are investing like they have never done before. Banks, insurance companies, elegant office malls and imposing (and priceless) hotels buzz with an imported neon intensity. And standing out among the throngs of investors who have brought the city back to life are economic interests from South Africa.
How things have changed. Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of its indigenous commercial round, the streets of Dar es Salaam buzzed with the traffic of liberation movements from Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and the two official movements from South Africa – the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. Leadership and rank-and-file roared to and fro in an assortment of East European 4x4s, trucks and motorcycles, most designed for military use, now just as often inspanned into the service of politics, love and basic survival.
Twenty-five years ago, white South Africa generally regarded Tanzania as the incorrigible communist front line of the Southern African liberation war. Today, South African business is buying big time into Tanzania’s post-ujamaa reconstruction. It’s noticeably a white business presence – the same white business that the front-line states, spurred on by the liberation movements, were trying to isolate from Africa’s markets all those years ago.
The black and brown faces of the liberation movement have long since left the streets of Dar es Salaam. Protea hotels, Steers, Debonair’s Pizza Parlour, even the obligatory Nando’s outlet on the corner, are the public face of this new colonisation. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.
Who knows what home-grown moguls of South African industry lurk in the boardrooms of those new neon edifices, where the final decisions are made regarding the inner economic life of Tanzania? Who is in there deciding on the future of its explosive tourist potential, and the quiet exploitation of its rich deposits of gold and other precious metals?
Driving in from the airport, I had already begun to muse on the changing face of Dar es Salaam, and the various influences that were shaping it. The road into town is now smooth and wide, a far cry from the slow, pot-holed surface that had come to be accepted as part of the city’s seedy charm in the old days.
The industrial area is alive with production. On the left, Tanzania Breweries is churning out beer and konyagi, the once illicit and lethal alcoholic drink that had been turned into a controlled and acceptable low-price spirit for the masses. The breweries are now owned and run by South African Breweries.
On the right, the austere, old-socialist faade of the terminus of the Tazara railroad. I had disembarked there on my last visit to Dar in 1976. It was gratifying to see the fading terminus was still working after all these years. It was a comforting icon from my youth, in the days when we thought that there were other kinds of colonialism working in Tanzania – psychological colonialisms, we dubbed them, however much we applauded their revolutionary ideals.
The brief era of Chinese colonialism was symbolised by a number of phenomenal building and infrastructural programmes, best symbolised by Tazara, the triumphant Tanzania-Zambia rail project which finally linked landlocked Zambia with the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam. The enterprise had been condemned as unfeasible by British and American engineering teams, who, at that time, seemed to be working to keep Zambia chained to the existing rail network through Rhodesia, Angola and South Africa – the unacceptable face of the white south, against whom the frontline states had imposed sanctions.
The Chinese saw both a political and an economic opportunity in the intransigent attitude of the West, and had surveyed, designed, built and put the Freedom Railway Line into operation by the mid- 1970s.
With this heavy investment in infrastructure came the collateral spin- off of trade in goods from Mao’s China.
The ordinary African was most formidably exposed to this through the agency of “Double-Happiness” matches, an essential ingredient in the mundane pursuits of lighting paraffin lamps, cooking fires and cigarettes.
The drawback with “Double-Happiness” matches was that they worked on a different technical principle from the colonial “Lion” matches that the average African had become used to.
On first striking the match against the side of the matchbox, nothing appeared to happen. African intellectuals and peasants alike concluded that “Double- Happiness” alluded to the fact that two matches had to be joined in the hand and struck simultaneously to achieve fire, and therefore happiness. This became the standard technique. There was still limited success in making the product ignite.
The Chinese had failed to issue warnings on each box that would alert the African user to the fact that these kinds of matches had a more leisurely ignition cycle than European colonial matches. So the unsuspecting housewife or social smoker would prepare to strike the doubled-up match a second time – only to find that the twinned matchsticks, smouldering quietly all this while, would explode into fiery life just as they were brought into contact with the side of the flimsy matchbox.
In the worst scenarios, this explosion would ignite the whole box of matches in the unsuspecting African civilian’s hands, sometimes causing serious injury. “Double-Happiness” was thereafter dubbed “Double-Trouble” in the homesteads and bars of Lusaka, Mpika and Dar es Salaam, to name but a few of the urban and rural areas where making fire was, and always has been, a life-giving necessity.
Juma was delving back into history again as we moved through the teeming streets of Dar es Salaam.
“A long time ago, before independence,” he said, “we had three colonialisms. The first colonialism was from the Arabs. The second colonialism was from the Germans, and the third colonialism was from the British.”
I was only half-listening to this familiar tirade of dead colonialisms, only half awake as I watched the endless ebb and flow of activity in the stupefying humidity of mid-morning.
“During the colonialism of the Arabs,” Juma went on, “the Arabs had a big market on Zanzibar Island where they were doing the silver trade.”
I was listening more attentively. The rich clove trade I had heard of, but this was the first time that I was being made aware of the importance of a trade in silver. But it turned out that it was my ears, unadjusted to his Swahili-English, that were deceiving me.
“During the silver trade,” he continued, “these Arabs bought and stole people here on the mainland, and took them to sell to foreigners in Zanzibar. Those people were taken to work in other countries. As a result, many of our people are now living in America.”
By “silver trade”, I now realised, he was actually referring to the “slave trade”. We were back in that harrowing zone, the unresolved trauma of Africa’s collective memory – a distant saga as close to the living heart as the day before yesterday.
You can fly to Zanzibar from Dar es Salaam in about half an hour. You don’t even have to land in Dar, if you are coming from Europe or South Africa. You can land directly on the island on a charter flight, go straight to your lodgings at a Protea hotel, and sink into paradise.
I set off for Zanzibar on a sturdy hydrofoil boat, operated by an enterprising Tanzanian of Indian extraction, from the old harbour of Dar es Salaam. The deep, natural harbour is breathing life again after years of stagnation, a stagnation attested to by the rusted skeletons of ships and trawlers drifting aimlessly in the placid bay, or lying abandoned on their broken sides on the white sands of the shore. Some of those shells from foreign lands now serve as homes for the homeless.
Life tumbles all over the port area, the same kind of bustling life that characterises the town. My access to the hydrofoil that would skim me over the waves to Zanzibar was negotiated semi- informally, between Juma, who wanted me to play it straight, and a bunch of friendly harbour desperadoes who wanted me to skip under the wire, as it were, and score them to a percentage on the way. In the end, I paid full price, and lost a little extra on the unearned percentage which I was made to part with anyway, much to Juma’s disgruntlement. It was all part of the adventure.
It took three hours to arrive at the legendary island of slaves and spices. The hydrofoil is capable of doing the trip in 90 minutes, but when the vessel first came into operation some three years ago, the passengers, most of them ordinary commuters from the mainland, had objected to the rough buffets this kind of speed entails on the ocean, so the boat operators had instructed their captains to ease back on the throttle. That’s probably why most tourists now opt to fly. You pay more, but you save an extra 90 minutes of hassle on the high seas, accompanied by a confusing cacophony of chickens, baskets, bales of cloth, and engaging Swahili conversation about life in general.
Zanzibar town wears its proud mongrel heritage on its sleeve. As the boat floats into the brilliantly turquoise harbour, the buildings that line the waterfront show the influence of their Arab, German and British progenitors.
A short walk from the harbour, you enter the narrow, winding streets of the old Stone Town, reminiscent of the souks of Tunis and Algiers.
Whatever the sins of the Arabs of the past, their descendants now live in easygoing proximity with their black neighbours, many of whom must be descendants of slaves from the mainland. In many instances the racial distinctions are blurred in any case, with the lingua franca of Swahili and the unifying religion of Islam, adhered to by more than 90% of the island’s population, binding former adversaries into a homogenous community.
It didn’t happen overnight. In 1964, just months after Zanzibar had been granted independence from Britain, and as it was entering into the union with mainland Tanganyika that would give birth to the United Republic of Tanzania, a group of leading black Zanzibaris, led by the formidable Sheikh Abeid Karume, overthrew the regime of the ruling Arab sultan in a bloody uprising, and entered into forced marriages with the princesses of the royal palace. The bitter past was dispensed with in an orgy of violence and sexual revenge, out of which the image of the new Zanzibar was conceived.
Voyagers from the Arabian Gulf had been engaging in the trade in human beings, among other commodities, since around 1400. The Portuguese started giving them stiff competition during the mid-16th century, and the Arab traders had to work harder to defend their commercial empire. By 1750, the trade was firmly in the hands of the dynasty of Omani Sultans. In 1832, round about the time the British were deciding that the human trade they too had been engaging in for a number of centuries was actually immoral, Sultan Seyyid Said, the reigning sultan of Oman, took the extraordinary step of transferring his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. The lucrative trade in slaves, cloves and ivory had made the Indian Ocean island a key centre of world commerce.
His successor held out against the persistent attempts of British missionaries to get him to cease slave trading until 1873, when he finally agreed to abolish the practise. But the sultans remained on Zanzibar, their trade routes still lucrative, and their lifestyles filled with indolent island pleasures.
In 1880, the incumbent sultan completed the construction of his graceful harem in a pleasant glade filled with coconut palms, a few miles outside the town. The sultan had one wife and 99 concubines.
His wife lived with him in the palace in Zanzibar town. The concubines occupied the harem, each with her private chamber, each chamber provided with an en suite bathroom and toilet, the baths sunk into the stone floors, the whole complex served by an elaborate subterranean sewage system.
Every day at dusk, the 99 concubines would walk out of the harem to bathe in one of the two circular pools that nestled among rows of tall stone columns. They would then return to the harem and drape themselves, naked, around the enclosed courtyard, to await the arrival of the sultan.
When the sultan arrived with his entourage, he would dismount, enter the building, and look over his female possessions. He would then take a dip in his own private, double-domed bath chamber, amply supplied with couches and alcoves, where more of his charges would display themselves for him.
Having refreshed his body in the hot and cold baths, after a long day of the taxing tasks of government and commerce, he would then follow his chosen companion for the evening into her chamber “to refresh his mind”, as my guide put it.
It was against this kind of lifestyle, and the subtle envy that it engendered, that Karume’s putsch was directed.
I had lunch at the Blues Restaurant – an off-shore branch of that fine establishment in Camps Bay, Cape Town. The Zanzibar version is an airy, tasteful wooden structure jutting into the translucent waters of the bay on stilts.
Two Australians sat down at an adjacent table. One of them was wearing a T-shirt adorned with the legend: “Beer – so much more than just a breakfast drink.” I wondered whether the turbulent history of this island had made any impression on them – or whether, stereotypically, they were “just here for the beer”.
I ran into them again in a tiny hole-in- the-wall bar near the harbour, as I was getting ready to make the return journey to Dar es Salaam. We struck up a conversation. It turned out that they were on Zanzibar for a spot of rest and recreation before heading back to the Antipodes on leave.
They were builders. They had been sent out by their construction company, along with many other Australians, to build offices and staff accommodation for Ashanti Goldfields (a division of Anglo American) who were setting up a massive mining operation near Mwanza in the northern part of mainland Tanzania. The operation would be exploiting one of the world’s richest gold seams – one that would give such a high yield of metal per ton of ore, my builder friends said, that it would make South Africa’s world-famous mines look positively anaemic.
Interesting, I thought. What would have happened if these amazing riches had been discovered 40 years ago, around the time of Tanzania’s independence, in the heydays of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere? Would history have worked out differently? Would Tanzania have been able to bankroll its way to a genuine economic independence, allowing it to set off on a proper road to development, rather than being brought to its knees by the International Monetary Fund and various other international agencies? Are these things planned, or are they coincidental? How will we ever know?
The most curious thing about the message I was receiving was the messenger. Builders? From Australia? Is Africa so backward that it cannot even supply labour for a major construction project on its own soil?
The image, once again, is of an African country being colonised from yet another direction. Tanzania will hardly see its own fabulous reserves of gold, since they will be leaving the country at high speed, while the country’s revenues from the transaction will disappear into servicing a painful and long-term debt.
The wheel spins through another revolution, and Africa is still far away from living its own dream.