ABSTRACT
Tanzanian cities are, like many cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, undergoing a process of profound transformation in economic, political, environmental, and cultural life. Among the countries for which statistics are kept, Tanzania has long languished in the bottom ten in the world in economic indicators. The country has been one of the world’s leading per-capita recipients of development assistance for several decades. After nearly two decades of socialist planning (1967-1985) that the IFIs blamed for enormous public debts, Tanzania was forced into signing a structural adjustment plan in 1985, in effect to pay back the previous decades of assistance. Structural adjustment programming is credited by the IFIs with stabilizing Tanzania’s economy by providing ‘‘changes that had a positive bearing on private sector development’’ (World Bank 2001, p. 63). The World Bank was so pleased that Tanzania became, in 2001, the third African country to be offered debt relief under its much heralded Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Most scholarship on Tanzania’s experience of structural adjustment, by Tanzanians and others, paints a less rosy picture, of the negative, or even devastating effects of SAP or HIPC on everyday survival for most Tanzanians, especially in its largest city of Dar es Salaam (Lugalla 1995; Tripp 1997). Tanzania has also switched from a single-party political system (in place
from 1967 to 1992) to a multi-party parliamentary democracy. Although the multi-party era began in 1992, and November 1994 marked the dawn of multiparty local councils, the October 1995 national presidential and parliamentary elections are typically seen as its real beginning. Tanzanians sometimes describe this change in terms of the Swahili proverb, ‘‘the donkey is the same; we have only changed the pack-saddle,’’ because of the ruling party’s continued dominance of a political-economic framework established from outside (Myers 1996). At independence in 1961, Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) had a government headed by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the only party in its parliament. Following Zanzibar’s January 1964 revolution and
April 1964 unification with Tanganyika, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) headed the islands’ somewhat autonomous regime. Both parties ruled the respective wings as single-party states. In 1977, the TANU and ASP merged, under the direction of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, to form the Revolutionary Party. This ruling party is known by its Kiswahili acronym, CCM (Chama cha Mapinduzi, literally, Party of the Revolution). Despite the multiparty system that has been operative now through two national elections (1995 and 2000), and despite an evidently more open society in some ways, CCM has continued to attempt to control Tanzania’s political stage and its government. It does so now firmly within the rubric provided for it by IFI neoliberal good governance, but CCM control rests atop a growing pile of local resentments. Those resentments, perhaps unsurprisingly, pile up rather high alongside the garbage in Dar es Salaam, as the country’s largest city, economic engine, and political-cultural heart. Tanzania’s environments are among the most widely represented African
landscapes in the world. They are also among the most formally protected, since more than 110,000 square kilometers of the land surface of the country is covered by a game reserve, national forest, national park, or conservation area. The Tanzanian government has developed a considerable array of institutions, laws, and policies since the 1990s dedicated to environmental planning, and sustainable development rhetoric is heavily utilized in government development documents (Bagachwa and Limbu 1995). Environmental programs are prominent in the priorities of the major donors to Tanzanian development, perhaps because of the visibility and representational character of the Tanzanian landscape (given the presence of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti Plain, and the islands of Zanzibar). Much of the extent of the country’s resource richness has only been discovered in the past two decades, such as the Songosongo natural gas field, and the mineral wealth in gold, rubies, tanzanite, and other gems or precious metals. This new prominence to environmental planning more broadly provides yet another backdrop for why Dar es Salaam would serve as the pilot city for the Sustainable Cities Program. Culturally, the last decade in particular has brought a whirlwind of change
to Tanzania. The country’s leadership once prided itself on an ideology that privileged self-reliance (kujitegemea), collective responsibility (ujima), social unity (umoja), family-ness (ujamaa), and similar virtues (these four – not coincidentally – having been inspirational in the creation of the AfricanAmerican holiday of Kwanzaa). The old Tanzania promoted the Swahili language to unite its more than one hundred ethnic communities and to supplant the English language. The old Tanzania engaged in a lively, thoughtful, literate and very public debate over whether or not tourism was an industry worth investing in, given the demeaning character of so much of the employment it creates and the fact that so much of the income it generates remains with outsiders. The new Tanzania is a very different place, a land of ubinafsishaji (privatization). By the early 21st century, Tanzanian culture, slipping somewhat from the grasp of the state that had so thoroughly sought to shape it, seemed to be recombining and reconnecting with far-flung influences at a very rapid pace. Keeping up with cultural change in Tanzania has one
feeling a bit like a cartoon character on a train, having to lay the tracks down out of a box just in front of the train, faster and faster in order to keep up. Dar es Salaam is the origin and the terminal point of these railway tracks. In this chapter, I utilize Dar es Salaam’s experience with the UN Sustainable
Cities Program – and especially its programs for solid waste – to reflect on the confluence of neoliberalism, sustainable development, and good governance in Sub-Saharan Africa’s cities at a time of alleged culture wars and clashes of civilizations. My argument is that the progressive rhetoric deployed in the Sustainable Dar es Salaam Program belies an authoritarian governance framework at its core, one whose ties to the city’s colonial legacies are unmistakable. The program’s short-term successes – as measured in improved rates of the collection and disposal of solid waste –came at the expense of longer-term possibilities for reconstructing the relationships between Dar residents and the local and national state. Such a reconstruction might still be possible, but a reinforced exclusionary democracy may serve the interests of neoliberal development. Exclusionary democracy in planning also simply extends the possibilities for a divisive politics of cultural difference in a city that had been relatively free of the violence of those possibilities until the last dozen years. Before laying out the case study and my argument about it, I introduce the city in the section below.
