Seeing Dirt in Dar es Salaam: Sanitation, Waste, and Citizenship in the Postcolonial City

Abstract

This chapter examines early postcolonial discussions about infrastructural neglect and environmental change in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Scratching below the actual dirt, these changing discourses on waste and cleanliness came to reinforce an exclusionary notion of urbanization without actually leading to a cleaner city. Newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and political speeches sought to instill an ethos of self-discipline aimed at urban citizens. In Dar, as in many urban settings, discussions of dirt and displacement often went hand in hand.¹ Calls to protect public health and urban environments provided a convenient excuse for governmental regulation of specific populations and geographies of the city. After independence, President Julius Nyerere and the state capitalized on colonial narratives of sanitation and urban control to rid the city of its “disorderly” people and rein in the uncontrolled growth of urban spaces. However, in the following decade, as was the case across Africa, urban populations grew dramatically. By the middle of the 1970s, Tanzania’s economy was near collapse and its cities were only becoming more crowded. At this time, the rhetoric of waste transformed in two interesting ways. Although it remained a tool for purging urban areas, waste and wasted spaces began to reflect not just personal uncleanliness and laziness but also a larger narrative of the failure of citizens to embrace the national call for self-reliance and self-help.