For this week’s seminar, we explored an entirely different aspect of our theme of space: the built environment. We broke with tradition and invited one of our own – our new lecturer in environmental history, Emily Brownell – who took us on a fascinating journey through the urban sprawl of 1970s Dar-es-Salaam and the concrete fantasies of postcolonial socialism. Mathew Nicolson was our note-taker on the day and you can read his report below. You can also listen again to the whole lecture on Audiomack or by tuning in to our podcast channel (accessible via iTunes or your favourite podcast app).
By framing the city of Dar es Salaam as the explicit subject of her research instead of simply the backdrop for its people and elites, Emily’s research on post-colonial building materials provides an innovative approach to the history of post-independence Tanzania.
She began her paper by outlining the political, social and economic background of 1970s Tanzania. Noting that the short timespan of this period makes her study unusual within environmental history, a field more commonly examined over centuries rather than decades, Emily explained her approach by emphasising the rapid changes Dar es Salaam experienced during these years. On one hand, the state ideology of ‘Ujamaa’ as advocated by Tanzania’s first President, Julius Nyerere, led to the government concentrating its development funding in rural parts of the country in order to address inequalities inherited from the colonial area. On the other, the combined impact of famine, the 1973 Oil Shock, a collapse of commodity prices and the 1978-9 war with Uganda sparked a trend of rapid urbanisation, creating intense pressure on Dar es Salaam’s infrastructure at a time when funding for urban development was already scarce.
These conflicting pressures form the core of Emily’s study. She asked how urban residents shaped their environment in the face of anti-urban state policies and, more broadly, how Tanzanians subsequently adjusted their material and ideological expectations for the future. To answer these questions, she traced the history of the city’s building materials back to the colonial period. The presence of a growing African population in cities caused initial anxiety among British colonial administrators, for whom urban areas were generally European spaces. Unplanned migrant neighbourhoods were prohibited from becoming permanent, limiting their structures to ‘traditional,’ non-permanent materials such as mud and wattle. This contrasted with the permanent concrete and brick structures inhabited by Europeans, resulting in the de facto segregation of Dar es Salaam along material and racial lines.
After the Second World War, colonial administrators increasingly framed colonialism as a modernising project. Emily suggested building materials played a key role in such attitudes, evidenced by the belief that Tanzanians would become ‘civilised’ by inhabiting permanent structures designed for a European-style nuclear family.
The arrival of Tanzanian independence in 1961, by contrast, created the first opportunity for Tanzanian elites to shape urban and material policy. How did these differ from colonial-era regulations? Emily argued that, while Nyerere sought to reverse the material segregation of urban areas through a programme of slum clearances, replacing impermanent structures with concrete housing, his approach nevertheless maintained the colonial distinction between permanent and impermanent housing within government policy. The state therefore continued to perpetuate the colonial narrative regarding the ‘civilising’ properties of permanent materials.
In particular, cement assumed a vital position in the post-independence national consciousness. Major construction projects created an intense need for cement, including a new airport, a hydro-electric plant, railways, harbor extensions and the relocation of the country’s capital to Dodoma. Prevailing architectural styles favoured cement as the ‘new national aesthetic.’ To meet this need, the Wazo Hill Cement Plant was established. Cement produced in the plant was marketed with the Dar es Salaam name, leading to what Emily referred to as the ‘territorialisation of cement.’
However, Tanzania’s deteriorating economic situation throughout the 1970s created growing problems for Wazo Hill, which faced outages and production stoppages. The state responded by reversing its policy as Nyerere condemned his country’s ‘unhealthy addiction to “European soil”.’ Economics, then, also influenced the state’s ideological attitude to building materials.
New techniques were subsequently sought to compensate for these shortages. Emily explained this development by charting the emergence of brick manufacturing as an alternative to cement. Community brick building was promoted with utopian imagery, portrayed as – literally – ‘building socialism,’ while the bricks were increasingly viewed as the solution to Third World slums. Yet, brick manufacturing also brought a major environmental cost: 25,000 bricks produced requiring the felling of 70 trees.
Emily concluded by remarking on the value this period offers African scholars. Specifically, it represented a time of continuing optimism before the emergence of a ‘desperate reckoning with terror and failure’ which forced a reimagining of the future.
Commenting on Emily’s research, Isabel Pike (University of Wisconsin-Madison) emphasised the role of building materials in recording life changes among urban residents, whereby individual and community progress has often been described alongside changes to such materials. Isabel then raised the possibility of comparing Tanzania with neighbouring countries, questioned broader global attitudes to cement and inquired into the role materials play in Tanzania today. After listening to Emily’s paper and engaging with the discussions that followed, those of us in the audience left with a keen sense of the possibilities offered by urban and environmental history to reshape our understanding of the past, both in a post-colonial setting and more widely.
Mathew Nicolson is a PhD student in Scottish History. His research interests focus on the politics and culture of postwar Scotland with particular emphases on its ‘peripheral’ island groups and imperial connections. His thesis explores the politics of culture, identity and constitutional change in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles from 1969 to 1999. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.