Missing History in Dar es Salaam

From Thailand, I was headed to Tanzania, ostensibly for a research trip. The flight on Ethiopian Airlines provided an early taste of Africa, with chaotic queues and flight attendants in habesha kemis, the beautiful white robes traditionally worn by Ethiopian women. The chilly predawn air on the apron in Addis Ababa was amazingly refreshing, as was the in-flight meal with the first cheese I had seen in three weeks. Judging by my previous experience in East Africa, it would probably be a while before I would see it again.

Entering Tanzania was straightforward enough, if rather expensive. My host organization was insistent that I get a business visa, so on top of the $50 I had already spent on a tourist visa, I had to shell out another $250 of my precious research grant. I tried to pay $250 total since the Tanzanian government had performed zero services for me in return for my initial payment, but suddenly nobody could speak English beyond “two-fifty” while tapping the credit card terminal. It was very quiet outside the airport terminal, with a few hawkers trying to offer me a ride, but I managed to book a car on the rideshare app Bolt. The driver Fred was eager to welcome me: “Welcome Tanzania bro. Kiss people, love people, it's a beautiful country.” A promising start, and entirely in line with my memories of Kenya.

Speaking of Kenyan memories, Dar es Salaam initially struck me as a dustier, less-developed Nairobi. There were the same bare-bones Indian motorcycles, the same brightly-colored minivans (albeit without the Obama portraits), and a lot of brown dirt. The roads were clogged with trucks hauling containers and fuel from the port – the largest in East Africa – all over the country and the region, and back. It was hot, and Fred bought us both ice cream from one of the many people on the roadside selling water and snacks at the long red lights.

We turned off the main road and the pavement abruptly ended, sending us over a rough dirt path with deep ruts and big rocks strewn about. Fred didn’t seem to mind and continued yapping away on his phone in the way taxi drivers everywhere do. After three weeks of the harsh, nasal tones of Thai, hearing Swahili again was like music to my ears. I checked into an Airbnb and took a short walk to a nearby mall that looked like it was copied and pasted from a Florida suburb. I needed a local SIM card, and promptly underwent the initiation ritual of being in Africa – things being painfully slow for no reason. Getting the SIM card was a nearly 40-minute-long process involving copying every detail from my passport (had Airtel heard of taking photos?) and waiting for approval from a nebulous function.

Perhaps the greatest thing about being back in an African city was the motorcycle taxis – called piki piki here in addition to the name boda boda I knew from Kenya. 2 or 3 dollars will take you halfway across the city in about half the time it would take a taxi. The price you pay, of course, is the danger of sitting on a hunk of metal usually piloted by a kid with a death wish. Red lights are merely suggestions to briefly slow down, as are speed bumps. In the day and a half that I spent in the city, I had drivers take me down bike lanes and sidewalks, jump curbs, and squeeze between concrete pylons not much wider than the mirrors.

I didn’t know a single soul in the whole country, and I figured a popular-looking hostel would be a good place to start making friends. The hostel was on a peninsula, which had the same look as the wealthy neighborhoods in Kenya – lots of sand-colored buildings, fences, and floodlights, but the dust remained. The hostel had a nice outdoor bar, with live music and a crowd that was about equal parts black and white. I met two boys from Westchester County who were interning at a farm, their host – a white local with a South African accent, and two Irish girls working at a Dar hospital.

The group invited me to go out with them, but I had somehow made plans with a local who had chatted me up on the street earlier. His name was Alex, and he seemed to know every bouncer in town. It was a Thursday night, but Alex told me that people in Dar party from Thursday to Sunday and gave his shirt to a food vendor to hold on to. The boda driver he had used joined us and intermittently disappeared into the swelling crowd at a place called Kitambaa Cheupe (“white cloth”). You know it’s an African club when there’s both a DJ and a grill station, and everybody knows the words to every song – even if it’s in Yoruba. Alex turned out to be 40 and the father of three children with a white woman from Chicago, who was raising them there. I was going to dive deeper, but we were joined by Ernest, a tax collector (you can’t make this up) who bought me a beer and kept telling me to be happy. Hailing from Arusha in the north, he then embarked on a rant against the “uncivilized and illiterate” Maasai tribal people, who will feature prominently in a future post.

A Fish Market in a Food Desert

Finding breakfast the next morning was a more challenging task than it might seem – indeed, restaurants in African cities seem to always be difficult to find. I finally found a cafe that would make me an “Arabic breakfast” – oddly consisting of shakshuka and chapati – but wasted so much time that I was going to be late to the walking tour I had booked. Fortunately, I was the only customer, and the guide Derick was happy to join me for coffee.

We walked through town and he told me how he had traveled to Nigeria to visit a “prophet” who had died of COVID – almost as ironic as the former president of Tanzania John Magufuli who was basically a COVID denier and died last March from “heart problems” nobody believes. Our first stop was the Askari Monument, commemorating the East Africans who died for the British crown in WWI. With a relief of barefoot and robed porters carrying supplies on their heads, it certainly was not your typical WWI memorial, and the plaque honoring the men who “served and died for their king and country in Eastern Africa” was downright weird considering it was only during the war that the people of Tanganyika and Kenya became British colonial subjects.

We walked towards the waterfront and could smell the fish market from hundreds of meters away. It was a lively and bustling place, but conditions were somehow even more appalling than in Mumbai, with streams of gray water running everywhere and not a single block of ice in sight very late in the morning. Just outside the market itself is an enormous open-air kitchen operating as assembly line to feed the entire place, and shops selling enormous colorful shell and dried pufferfish skins. The best clients, they told me, are the Chinese, who sometimes pay tens of thousands of dollars for a rare live fish.

We walked along the waterfront, with the port in the distance and a row of squat German buildings to our right. Most were now government offices, except the Lutheran and Catholic churches. We ended the tour at Old Boma, the oldest standing building in the city, built by Sultan Majid of Zanzibar in the 1860s. There was a rooftop bar, and I took some time to enjoy the sea breeze.

Swindled by King David?

My next stop was the National Museum, and I had walked about 5 minutes when a man in his forties who introduced himself as “King David” started chatting with me and invited himself to tag along. The museum was an odd place. The first exhibit was a series of placards donated by the US embassy about the relationship between JFK and Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president. JFK is portrayed as an anticolonial leader learning from Nyerere, and the two are supposedly close friends. The main exhibits concern Tanzanian history, which seems to have started with the arrival of Europeans in the 19th century (a little earlier on Zanzibar, which was an Arab sultanate). Finally, there was an excellent exhibit on African megafauna and human evolution. What happened on the Tanzanian mainland in the period between 100,000 and 150 years ago?

Probably the most pleasant block in Tanzania

We sat on concrete pylons in the courtyard eating ice cream next to a derelict memorial to the 1997 US embassy bombing. David mentioned that he wanted to learn some Hebrew, and said there was a place we could go. First, though, he wanted to take me to his friend’s tour office where I could get help with any bookings I needed. Ordinarily, I would object, but I actually wanted information about the ferry to Zanzibar, and didn’t really have anything better to do in a strange city in which I knew nobody. The tour agent wasn’t happy that I didn’t want to book anything, but I told her I would be in touch for a ticket to Zanzibar. We crossed the street and ducked – literally – into a little pub. It was really an alleyway between buildings with some plastic tables and chairs, but a cold Kilimanjaro beer was 2,000 shillings (85¢) and I had a feeling I would be buying quite a few.

I translated some Hebrew phrases, David asked me whether I wanted to buy weed, and he told me that he quit his job as a teacher because of “corruption”. When I told him I had 8 siblings, he was amazed, and said it was “like an African family” – his own grandfather had 35 kids from 4 wives. Several beers later, we were joined by Yusuf, whom David exclusively addressed as “Rasta Man”. I heard stories about Rastafarian life on the Tanzanian coast and lots of praise for Israel from the two of them. As I waited for a boda to take me home, David asked me for cash, ostensibly to send his kids to school. Forging connections with local people has its challenges everywhere, but East Africa is particularly tenuous. White visitors are often treated as cash cows, which leads to lots of uncomfortable interactions such as this one. Had the entire afternoon just been a ploy to get some free beers and cash off of me?

The Slow Trip North

I had planned to go out with the crowd from the previous evening, but the combination of the heat, jet lag, and sleep deficit carried over from the flights sent me to bed instead. Throughout the night, I could faintly hear the beats from Kitambaa Cheupe through the window, and the street in front of it was completely thronged with people when I drove past in a taxi at 4:45 am. With very few people working conventional office hours and a culture that valorizes a carefree lifestyle, it’s cities in Africa that truly never sleep. People are out literally at all hours, markets and restaurants often only open in the evenings, and people break up work by going out.

The bus left at 5:30 sharp, barreling down some side streets with Nigerian hip-hop blaring before gunning it down the highway heading east out of Dar. The driver maneuvered the big bus like it was a motorcycle, weaving through multiple lanes of trucks before coming to an abrupt stop on the shoulder. The boy on the steps would then hang out of the door yelling “MOSHI ARUSHA” at the top of his lungs, some people would rush to get on, and the exercise would repeat at the next intersection. The sun came up, the woman in the passenger seat made a 20-minute-long announcement, and the TV above her started playing gospel music. One music video featured a Kenyan woman named “Kathy Praise” in a tallit (thanks to Shazam you can find it here), which contrasted rather nicely with a truck that sped past us with Osama bin Laden on its air deflector.

The drive was incredibly long, but I was sitting in a leather armchair with snacks and a book with nothing better to do. Every couple hours or so we would pull into a rest stop, but they only announced the amount of time we were stopping for in Swahili, so I couldn't wander very far. The other stops were at police checkpoints every few kilometers. At some, the woman in the front would get off and chat with them, sometimes passing very close behind them in what I was nearly sure was a cash exchange. At others, the cops had a look at me in the front row and waved us on. This was basically the opposite of what I was expecting, but I later learned that the police were under strict instructions not to do anything that could put Tanzania’s vital and damaged tourism revenue at risk. As we drove north, the endless expanse of shrubs was replaced by the lush Usambara Mountains to our east, and then by a desert plain. We turned west just a few kilometers south of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but it was too cloudy to see anything. Finally, after 12 hours and 3 minutes, we arrived at the city that would be my home for the next few weeks: Arusha.