Using ethnographic and historical approaches, this article examines unplanned, peri-urban settlements on Dar es Salaam's northern and western fringe, where urban farming is central to many residents’ household economy. Contrasting with conventional models of African urban migration, these new districts were established by a vanguard of educated urban professionals, utilizing farming as an economic diversification strategy. Despite disjunctures arising through decolonization and implementation of state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, this peri-urban vanguard not only engaged in agricultural activities reminiscent of regions on the borderlands of Tanzania, but also contributed to the reproduction of configurations of socio-economic inequality characteristic of other kinds of urban communities. With critical infrastructural improvements and a pool of urban labourers supporting their endeavours, these districts attracted additional, economically influential urban in-migrants following capitalist reforms following the implementation of the Zanzibar Declaration in 1991.
This article examines the precolonial history of the region surrounding Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, through oral traditions and memories about the Shomvi people, who lived in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Elite members of Shomvi settlements claimed “foreign” origins in the Middle East, Yemen, and Persia and viewed themselves as highly mobile, continually “founding” settlements throughout the region and moving back and forth between them. Traditions also suggest that the growth, maintenance, and reproduction of coastal communities were premised on a conceptual bifurcation of the community into the foreign and highly mobile Shomvi elite and others claiming to be “indigenous” residents of the region, who drew privilege and prestige from their role as first peoples and hosts to the Shomvi. A discussion of precolonial traditions and memories of the region supports what more and more scholars are recognizing: discourse concerning “globalization” and “indigenous” peoples, usually thought to be characteristic of the post-colonial period, may have had analogues that antecede the penetration of industrial capitalism and the entrenchment of European colonialism.
Today, a majority of citizens of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, participate in suburban and exurban growth and development much like urbanites throughout the world. Unlike the garden suburbs of North America or Europe, Dar es Salaam's suburban residents often engage in multiple income-generating activities, the most common and conspicuous of which are cultivation and animal husbandry. The presence of urban farming has suggested that Dar es Salaam's residents represent peasants incrementally transitioning to urban life. This article however, contends that everything from the varieties of cultivation, access to land and water, to the definition of what it means to be a farmer is shaped by decentralised private interests controlling access to land and resources in suburban neighbourhoods. The varieties of cultivation and animal husbandry instead reflect socioeconomic class distinctions emerging from a new suburban political economy, enabling a clearer perspective on the prospects of cultivators as these suburban districts transform.
This article describes and attempts to analyze an incident in which the author, an anthropologist conducting research on the Solar New Year's festival in Zanzibar, is suddenly and without warning ordered out of the country. Like all human beings meaningfully engaged with others, practicing anthropologists are politically positioned within the local and global contexts in which they live and work. But the consequences of such positioning, whether intentional or not, can be most keenly experienced in the context of polarizing political situations. And such situations can substantially influence the collaborative process that shapes an anthropologist's persona in the field. Linking personal narrative, Bourdieu's theory of habitus, and postcolonial studies, the author suggests that the events described and his response to them, which followed an election crisis in 1995, have important implications for anthropologists conducting fieldwork in the postcolonial milieu.
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