Reconnecting with the World

There is nothing quite like the shock of rejoining the urban world after months of existence in a quiet little isolated town. From the plane window Dar Es Salaam spread out before my eyes, with its cluster of highrises crowded up against the coastline and its spiraling mass of tin sheet rooftops shaping the landscape as far as I could see. Miniature-sized traffic snarled intersections in dense settlements, industrial silos and petroleum tanks poked out of the fray, humanity scurried around in its self-made concrete world- all these were reminders of a reality I knew existed but had forgotten how to digest with my own senses. Disembarking at the airport, I suddenly felt reconnected to the ebbs and flows of the world, a connection that is often rather tenuous during my current stint in northern Mozambique. A crowd mobbed the visa application windows in the terminal, with passports flailing and US dollars waving. As I struggled to get noticed by the immigration officer amidst what seemed like half the population of the Comoros Islands just off a plane, I could feel my excitement rise. Crowds. Bustle. Energy. Life. Welcome home, urbanite.

From the airport parking lot, my taxi pulled onto a roadway larger than I had seen in months, into a flow of battered dala dalas and rumbling trucks. The smell of diesel hung in the air as the roadside offered a steady string of disheveled industrial estates and warehouse size commercial ventures. Intersections were a dusty jumble of market stalls overloading the corners, people darting across the lanes, and immobile vehicles purring in line as the crossing road flowed by. As the taxi waited far back from the frontlines of the traffic light (a traffic light!), hawkers streamed down the lanes of vehicles and by my taxi, selling everything from oranges, newspapers and snacks to globes and a wall clock. As we snaked our way from intersection to intersection, soon we were in the city center, surrounded by busy streets, worn-looking concrete office complexes and people in business suits darting down the sidewalks. From my perspective at that particular moment, Dar was an urban explosion, a place of previously unimaginable bustle and energy. I guess northern Mozambique will do that to a man. I was enthralled by the chaotic dance of the rush hour dala dalas, packed to the brim and swerving liberally about the way.

I found Dar a hard place to read in the few days I was there, as my impressions of the place were dominated by the mere fact that I was back in a city. So whatever one may think of the place, to me it represented a wealth of urban delights; a helping of crowds, consumerism and bright lights wrapped in a sun-baked, dusty package. This overwhelming sensation was furthered by the disorientation encountered in a new place when one has no sense of direction, and every experience is an isolated island in unrecognizable surroundings reached by taxi. Raucous barbecue restaurants, bamboo garden bars, roadside stalls for sampling the local moonshine, darkened discos where the guards try to get you to buy them drinks; I had no clue where I was, but I was loving it.

Dar offered the sort of sprawling, rudderless urban form that emerges when density and a moneyed class combine with a glaring absence of public infrastructure and zoning enforcement. Randomly located islands of wealth scatter among shack-lined dirt roads in suburban areas, sometimes kilometers away from the small portion of the city that is bank towers and boulevards. Guarded and enclaved, you can enjoy your pastries, your coffee, your Subway or your South African chain restaurant in a comfortable bubble of wealth and expats, gated off from the dusty jumble outside. These environments offered me a chance to pretend I was home for a few minutes, wandering down hospital-like aisles of useless food products and junk food calling to me in their shiny packaging. Of course, the fantasy was tempered slightly by the darkness of a quasi-permanent power outage.

In my experience of this corner of the world, limited to fragments of Mozambique and Tanzania, I’ve had to readjust my ideas regarding the display of wealth. There seem to be no really wealthy areas per say; everywhere the general infrastructure is shoddy if existent at all, the environment raw and unkept. Rather, there is only private wealth, concrete block homes with grated windows behind walls; isolated shopping centers with expensive wares suffocated by shacks, taxi stands and garbage-strewn streets; expensive-looking 4WDs navigating bumpy dirt roads. Apart from a few major boulevards and a basic city grid in the city center, urban layout is left to its own chaotic yet dynamic devices. Suburban sub-divisions appear in dusty fields next to slums; highrise apartments grow randomly from the landscape miles from anywhere; generators rumble away. Public services are barely provided, and little expected. Everyone who can afford a car drives and parks anywhere, creating congestion on roads that cannot handle either activity.

So long have I focused my interest in the urban on skylines and transportation systems, on panoramic views of landmarks and highways of flowing tail lights. This might work to some extent in the ‘industrialized’ urban areas of North America or East Asia, for example, where we have built up our environments on such an enormous scale that the citizen is lost amongst showcase urban skylines and elevated highway concrete pillars. My time in southern Africa has been helping me to overcome this bias, and understand the city more as a sum of its people than its infrastructure. It’s not that difficult really, since public infrastructure is on the rather sparse side in this corner of the planet. If it exists, it is likely falling into disrepair or under permanent construction.

So Dar wasn’t so much a landscape of physical urbanity as it was a swirl of Kiswahili, people in business suits, drunk mzees, young south Asians in suped up cars, or perhaps the entrancing call to prayer right outside the window. It was having access to Chinese food and drinking ice coffee at a drive-up diner. It was joining the expat crowd on a beautifully situated suburban terrace with waves crashing against the rocks below; it was dancing in random one-room clubs to all the same music I’ve been hearing for the past three months in Pemba (apparently, Sean Paul is taking over the world). It was getting a wash and a haircut at a salon, the first time hot water had graced my head in longer than I can remember. It was just watching the daily lives of traders and hawkers as they sat outside their shops and stalls. It was navigating the bustle of faces and stories on a sidewalk in the city centre, or maybe dashing across a roundabout, the vehicles too caught in traffic to make their usual effort to hit pedestrians.

Dar Es Salaam was my reintroduction to the urban world that we as humans are flocking to in ever-larger numbers despite the fumes, crowds, grinding traffic and strained infrastructure this environment increasingly offers worldwide. Seeing the city from the air, I was reminded of something I read in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums:

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor

This is perhaps an overstatement concerning Dar- I found on a whole the city was bright, cheery and mostly devoid of the bleak urban cynicism that clouds much larger, more dangerous and more dysfunctional cities. My shock at being back in an urban environment aside, Dar was less of an onslaught than it was a pleasant encounter at a manageable level. Nevertheless, its disregard for the trappings of planning and infrastructure, its jumbled landscape of shacks, gated malls, SUVs and loitering hawkers, reminded me once again that our standard conceptions about life emanating from realities such as Canada are perhaps off the mark. We like to think of the planned, organized city as the standard for humanity, a state attainable by those ‘backward third world’ countries if only they would stop being so corrupted, poor and chaotic. When every society eventually gets its act together and emulates the Euro-American world, as the Economist tells us they should, they will join the modern world of glass and steel through the inevitable march of economics and progress.

Somehow, I’m less and less convinced of this. The world of glass and steel is not so much a natural outcome of human progress as it is a forced landscape of state grandstanding and real estate speculation, hermetic worlds built for a quasi-imaginary ‘global elite’ by sweeping the unsightly masses aside. Maybe those of us emanating from the more regulated areas of the ‘developed’ world need to stop seeing ourselves as the human standard, the shining example, and come to terms with that fact that perhaps we are the anomaly on this planet, an over-regulated fluke in a sea of tin shacks, power outages and raw human interaction. Lest this make one overly pessimistic about the human condition, a place like Dar Es Salaam demonstrates that, even in these nooks of the planet labeled ‘backward’ or ‘poor’ by arrogant self-appointed centers of power, there is much life, culture and energy to be celebrated. Where the resources and coordination necessary for gleaming urban mega-projects are but a distant dream, the people shine through and make the urban experience a fascinating one.

Patrick Bennett misses traffic and other urban delights.