Tanzania

The politics of a Swahili identity

/ Eamon / 8 Comments

If you’ve been in Tanzania, you’ve probably heard some foreigner say something to this effect: The reason that Tanzania lags behind in some areas is that the kids learn Swahili instead of English.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere

On the surface, this makes at least some amount of sense. It may be (let me rephrase: it is) completely unfair and the result of a history of imperialism and exploitation, but nevertheless ignorance of English is a huge handicap if you want to get keyed into the global economy these days. More than that: English, this crappy, haphazard mongrel of a language, represents power. Without it, you are weak, vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And many Tanzanians struggle with English. Continue reading →

East Africa gets wired

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My story on the new fiber optic cable connecting East Africa to the world went up today on GlobalPost:

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Ramadhan Mubarak shook his head as he gestured to his six forlorn PCs.

“I believe that many people want to use the internet,” he said. “But most Tanzanians are poor, so they can’t manage the cost.”

Mubarak owns two of the handful of internet cafes in downtown Dar es Salaam, and he can barely cover his overhead of $1,500 a month. Like many people here, he’s hoping that will soon change: East Africa’s new fiber-optic cable has been laid across the Indian Ocean and made landfall here on July 23. When it goes into use in late August, it is likely to dramatically reduce costs and improve connectivity speed. Continue reading…
pre-cable internet ad

Crossroads of the Indian Ocean

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I spent the weekend in Zanzibar. It’s a place with streets like Damascus, music like Cairo and Congo intertwined, and an equatorial climate. It’s perched on the rim of the Indian ocean, ringed in palms, and everywhere bears the imprint of a history equal parts East Africa and Arabia, with plenty of Persian, Gujarati and other Indian Ocean ingredients thrown in. And I even found a band of roving, self-taught capoeiristas. They call themselves the Spartans (which means they have a link to my Guerreiros in New York, more on that later).

So yeah, you could pretty much say I’m in love. Not much time to write now, but here are just a few photos. I didn’t take many, because I hope to go back soon with more time for impressions.

The streets of Stonetown reminded me of Aleppo.

The streets of Stonetown reminded me of Aleppo.

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Dar’s Maasai

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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.

IMG_4629-1

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The cable to end all woes

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I’ve been mulling over the news that the new fiber-optic cable has finally been laid to connect East Africa directly to the world via high-speed Internet. Tanzanians and the East African press are greeting it with a lot of excitement. That shouldn’t be surprising — Internet connectivity is a big headache here unless you’ve got good money to spend, and even then, it’s hard to do a lot of things taken for granted in the States, like watch YouTube. Still, some of the promises about the boon to the economy and dramatic reductions in Internet access cost seem a bit outlandish. (Reading that last article I can’t help but hear echoes of the monorail episode on The Simpsons.)

Then I came across this great post on Jackfruity describing the chaos that took over West Africa last week when the main cable connecting the region to Europe went down. Continue reading →

South Beach weekend

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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.)

IMG_4623-1 Continue reading →

Swahili kaleidoscope

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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 →