ABSTRACT
In August 2003, I was collecting garbage in Zanzibar. I was participating in the first few weeks at work for a community-based solid waste management organization formed out of the Mkele Ward Development Committee in the city. The group’s employees and I pushed wheelbarrows around the dusty rutted alleyways of Mkele ward in pairs all morning, dumping our cart-loads into the flatbed truck that the Ward Development Committee had secured a few months before this from the German embassy (see Figure 1.1). My wheelbarrow partner, Kasu Bachu, would jauntily sing out, to a tune of his own design, ‘‘bring us your garbage, we want your garbage, garbage is wealth,’’ as we worked. Three workers were also busy reducing the overwhelming backlog of waste that had built up at the group’s lone slab site, every once in a while coming across a rat or a snake in the muck. Whenever we filled the truck, four of us piled into it and took the waste to the partially controlled dumpsite that serves as Zanzibar city’s landfill. On our last such trip of the workday, we would stop by the bustling roadside stalls in the peri-urban community around the dump and buy some fruits. While the donor funding of the project lasted, the employees like Kasu would enjoy the modest, steady wages – about 50 dollars a month – and they were clearly going to enjoy the fruits while they could. One day, when Kasu and I came to his own house to collect, he insisted that
I come inside and meet his family. His neighbors gently teased him about his new rich mzungu (white) friend as we went in the door. We sat in the small sitting room that Kasu, his wife and his young baby shared with his parents and siblings. His mother brought us some juice, made cold by the small refrigerator that Kasu’s new job had helped the family to purchase. The house had few furnishings, bare concrete block walls, and a leaky rusted roof of corrugated iron. Its walls stood less than a meter from those of the neighbors on two sides, with about two meters open at the front. At the back, the plot backed up against a drainage ditch that threads its way through Mkele down a
slight slope toward the ocean barely a kilometer away. Water flows in the ditch all year long, and it frequently overflows when the garbage that gets thrown in it causes the stream to back up. There is so much trash everywhere in Mkele – in the drains, in the sands, in
the trees, much of it organic food wastes, but nevertheless mixed with a little gray water, battery acid, and pesticide – that even an intensive effort would barely touch the surface. Over the past few decades, Zanzibar has managed to collect and dispose of approximately 40 per cent of the solid waste its residents produce – a comparably respectable percentage among African cities. But Zanzibar, like many cities across the continent, has grown dramatically in the last forty years, from under 50,000 people in 1958 to nearly 400,000 people in the metropolitan area by 2005. This growth has come with only a meager expansion in the economic opportunities available to city residents and a chronic crisis in the provision of services like solid waste. The severe urban poverty and poor environmental health conditions in Zanzibar come attached to a contentious society that is still ‘‘searching for more democracy,’’ as the Tanzanian urban planner Fred Lerise (2000, p. 89) deftly phrases it. Having endured Omani domination (1696-1890), British colonialism’s polite repression (1890-1963), and a single-party police state (1964-1992), Zanzibar city residents have watched the first dozen years or so of a multi-party political system (1992-2005) heave to and fro in the rough seas of racial, regional, religious, gender, and class tensions. The challenges that cities like Zanzibar and the people in them have faced
have brought on wave upon wave of development agendas designed to solve them, for more than four decades now, to little effect. The latest of these waves,
Figure 1.1 Mkele’s truck at the dump, Zanzibar (2003) Source: author
to which phrases like ‘‘sustainable development’’ and ‘‘good governance’’ are inexorably attached, involves a heavy reliance on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private sector firms in what are euphemistically referred to as ‘‘partnerships’’ with government agencies in the management of everyday life. Good governance partnerships for sustainable development are supposed to provide a path out of poverty toward a better environment and a society with ‘‘more democracy.’’ For instance, the Mkele waste collectors work under the Mkele Ward Development Committee NGO, which works for profit in collaboration with the now democratically elected Zanzibar Municipal Council, under the Minister for Good Governance of the Zanzibar Revolutionary Government (itself a semi-autonomous ‘‘partner’’ within the United Republic of Tanzania). The money driving the project – quite literally so, in the form of the donated truck and wheelbarrows – has come from the German Development Service and the German Embassy. The Germans funded the creation of the drainage ditch behind Kasu’s house, too. We look at the Mkele case more closely in chapter four. For now, think of it as spelling out some basic questions about how far the new vocabulary of development has taken the urban poor majority along the path to a better life. Frankly, the first surface of an answer seems to me to be fairly simple: not very far. Garbage is only wealth for a very select few. Others, like Kasu, have decent jobs for a while, and little reminders of what could be, like the small refrigerator that made our juice cold. A few more tons of waste get collected for a while, in one of the more than fifty poor and under-serviced wards of the city. But no one involved in the Mkele project in 2003 was under any illusion that anything more would occur beyond a temporary dent in the fender of the steamroller of urban problems, to say nothing of global and national forces, that Mkele and Zanzibar face. The second answer, then, involves explaining a context with so few illusions or delusions of development left. In this book, I want to use questions about solid waste to explore what it has
been like to manage, to cope, and to live in cities like Zanzibar, in wards like Mkele, for people like Kasu and his family, in the last few decades. My main emphasis is on an examination of outcomes from the United Nations Sustainable Cities Program (SCP), the program responsible for the creation of the project in Mkele that Kasu works with. I examine three case study cities – Dar es Salaam and Lusaka as well as Zanzibar – in later chapters, emphasizing their SCP experiences. In this chapter, I lay out the broader context of the urbanization dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa, and four themes that define African development over the past fifteen years or so, which I label as neoliberalism, sustainable development, good governance, and the politics of cultural difference. I end the chapter by discussing the approach that I take in the book to understanding how these four themes intertwine in the cities.
