A new arrival to Dar could be forgiven for thinking that the men dressed in red checked and purple robes, white sandals and beaded anklets are wearing costumes for the benefit of tourists. (I’ve heard other people suggest this and, alas, the thought crossed my mind as well.) The Maasai are such symbols of the tourist industry here — and even have some kind of advertising cache inside the country, as the billboard below shows — that at first, it’s easy to doubt that people are going around dressed like that just because they want to.

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I’m not talkin’ Miami here. I spent a lovely two days on Mjimwema beach a few miles south of Dar. To get there, you ake a crowded ferry across Kurasini Creek. Everyone is in a rush to get on, before moving at about .5 knots across the 200-yard expanse of water. A ten minute taxi or daladala ride later, after passing through bucolic palm forests and coastal scrub, you arrive at a pristine beach. (To get the full effect of the ferry ride while looking at the pic below, listen to “Always On My Mind” by DaVille featuring Sean Paul, which was playing on a loop on the ferry. I’d link you, but sadly it seems to have been removed from the Internet.)

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Guess what? I’m in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I arrived last week and I’ll be spending a few months in East Africa in a post-graduate-school, hopefully prolific daze. Here are some initial impressions.

Tanzania is a hybrid place. Last week I saw hundreds of Indians leaving juma’ prayers and then ate rice pilau at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, Asians at one elbow and people of African descent at the other. In the crowded streets there are people in every kind of dress, from the face-covering niqab – called buibui here – to both sober and colorful hijabs, wax prints and pants, stylish neckties and badly matched ones, shorts and djellabiyehs, Manchester United jerseys and Afrocentric dashikis. (There was even one guy dressed exactly like E-40, from glasses to jumbo-T-shirt-draped paunch.) Continue reading →