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Published: April 13th 2009
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It’s a gray, dreary, rain-soaked evening when we roll into Dar es Salaam. The commotion at the bus station - the porters grabbing at our bags, the hopeful cab drivers jangling their keys in our faces - is more, after six cramped hours, than me and Joost can stand. We overpay for a taxi, winding through the darkening streets while the city’s homeless - adjusting their blankets and boxes, propping against weathered storefronts - settle in for the night. It’s no sooner than I’ve noted that I’d “hate to be staying in this part of town” that we slow to a stop outside the Jambo Inn, a grim, gated compound on a dark and desolate street. Along with the Safari Inn nearby - Dar’s two budget mainstays - the Jambo has hiked its prices, evidence of the Lonely Planet Effect at work. But with neither time, daylight nor willpower on our side, we’re short on options. We take the last double left, then order curry and tandoori chicken downstairs, in a restaurant floodlit by bright fluorescent bulbs. We’re grim and exhausted, purposefully shoveling the food into our mouths in dejected silence. Our funds and spirits are low, and we’ve reached a
mutual compact, through shifting eyes and downturned faces, to ignore the fact that we’ll be sharing a queen-sized bed later in the night: the last of the day’s indignities.
After such an inauspicious start, I’m expecting little from a few days around Dar: a good cup of coffee, fast Internet, maybe a bit of shopping to beef up my musty wardrobe. In the morning, though, with a warm tropical breeze blowing through the streets, with the candy-colored façades catching the sunlight, I’m finding it a surprisingly agreeable place. The great wagging palms, the weather-stained colonials, the barebacked men pulling rickety donkey carts down the street: there’s something of the sultry clamor, the colorful bustle of Mombasa, that stirs so many fond memories.
Suddenly the prospect of passing a few days, a week, doesn’t seem so unsettling. We watch the clamor from our balcony, the colorful whorls of bougainvillea, the man straining behind a cartful of coconuts. Due south the soaring minarets of Mosque Street, trumpeting the call to prayer, the fervid soul-rocking blasts. One of these, compact and ornate, with green onion domes and elaborate Arabic script etched into the stone, has become my favorite sight in the
city. I’ll make a point to pass it once, twice daily in the week ahead, admiring the hysterical whiteness of its walls, the artful arrangement of domes and spires. In the afternoon the beggars sit in the slanted shadows: old men on crutches, colorfully swaddled women with infants crawling across their laps. After the Friday prayers they’ll line the sidewalk outside, hands extended, coins jangling, wrenching alms from the guilt-wracked faithful spilling into the hard daylight.
After the scruffy, shambling charms of the north, where whole towns and cities seem to have popped up overnight, there’s something appealing in how this city clings to its roots. It is history, on whatever small scale, that greets you in Dar es Salaam. Founded by the Zanzibari Sultan Majid, son of the great Seyyid Said, the “Haven of Peace” was built as a sort of pleasure palace on the shores of the Indian Ocean. But the early seeds failed to blossom; eclipsed by the more vital port of Bagamoyo to the north, the Sultan’s playground languished in its tropical torpor. It was the Germans who chose its protected harbor for the seat of their colonial government in the 1880s and, in typical
German fashion, transformed it into an efficient, modern port. Soon it grew into a busy trading community, a vital harbor. But the years haven’t always been so kind. In the weather stains that spread across the trading houses and dry-goods shops, the runnels and cracks of history, you see the slow, plodding passage of time. Still, there’s still a tangible presence here, a sense of past lives being lived. Today the dates carved into the city’s façades - 1952, 1931, 1917 - seem, by East African standards, prehistoric. And in a country where the dominant modes of construction - brick, thatch, mud, tin - are almost elemental, these buildings are a reminder of a purposefulness, a care, a modest artistry, that causes a funny little stir in my heart.
For many Tanzanians, of course, they are a different sort of reminder - not so much of the colonial past, but of the long, slow, slouching progress toward modernity. On a broad, stifling, sun-washed avenue, fighting through the heat, I meet a young musician, a reggae singer, who’s moved to Dar from the north. We walk past tall concrete towers - government buildings from the socialist ‘70s - and look
with quiet deference toward the Mövenpick, the Swiss-owned luxury hotel, standing stoic and ramparted with its Moorish archways and fluttering flags. It is, to Mass, a symbol of the great economic strides being taken around him, this impregnable, five-star fortress by the sea. Turning away from it, into a chaotic nettle of streets, he shakes his head with distaste at the crumbling colonials.
“For you, these buildings are beautiful,” he says. “But for us, they are old, they are ugly. We want to tear them down and build something new.”
For Mass, the blue-glass skyscrapers of the Nairobi skyline would be a bold leap forward from the colonial claustrophobia of downtown Dar es Salaam. The past, after all, has hardly been kind to most Tanzanians, and for the countless hustlers and strivers who come to Dar in search of better fortunes, the city gives their ambitions a physical shape. It’s grown quickly in recent years; today, the population is estimated at close to three million. But as Mass, smiling, slightly tilted forward, as if rushing toward some unfulfilled promise, tells me about his music and his family - about the private past he’s trying to escape - I get the sense that this city, for all its rapid growth, isn’t growing fast enough.
The road to Dar es Salaam has been long and bumpy for Mass. He left Tanga, a small coastal town in the north, to pursue a music career in the city. Selling bracelets and necklaces, sunglasses and t-shirts, he was able to put together enough money to buy some studio time. He recorded a few songs; later, after performing live around the city, after receiving favorable reviews in the local papers, after aggressively promoting himself to tourists on the streets of Dar, he befriended a German who wanted to support his fledgling career. The man paid for Mass to record a full-length album; he pulls a copy from his backpack, along with a binder filled with newspaper clippings. Now Mass is hoping to raise enough money to produce a short video. If he can show it on EATV, alongside videos from established Tanzanian artists like Professor Jay and T.K.O., it might give his career the big break he needs.
Still, despite his guarded optimism, Mass seems exhausted by his struggles. By day he walks the streets, promoting himself and selling CD’s; at night, spreading a blanket across the pavement near a popular tourist restaurant, he sells more of the hand-made jewelry that helped get him started. It has been an uphill climb; battling the music industry establishment here, dominated by the hip-hop acts that have made Dar the capital of East African music, he’s found it hard to sell his soulful, conscience-raising songs.
“They do not like messages,” he says of the local music executives. “They do not want what is right, they want what is wrong.”
And still he survives, hustles, soldiers on. He sells me two CD’s, and offers the hope that I can promote him through my writing abroad. He’d like to record his video, and another album; if he finds enough modest success, he hopes to visit his family in Tanga, too. It’s been two years since he last saw them; when he speaks to his mother on the phone, she asks when he’ll come home. But the ticket to Tanga is costly; and for a prodigal son returning from the city, it’s expected that he’ll come bearing gifts for his family, for his neighbors. Mass shakes his head, wondering where all the money will come from.
“Life is hard, brother,” he says. “Surviving in the world is hard.”
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