Much like the cities themselves, academic studies of urban Africa are growing with rapid richness. Recent work by Vivian Bickford-Smith and Kenda Mutongi illustrate the lush possibilities presented by broadly literary sources to study Africa's urban history. Emily Callaci takes a similar approach in Street Archives and City Life, a literary history of socialist-era Dar es Salaam. The book shows how the aspirations of recent migrants to Dar es Salaam, expressed through kutafuta maisha or ‘finding a life’, shaped the city itself. ‘Literary’ to Callaci means something much broader than narratives, as her study is an investigation of ‘texts’, those durable and mutable creative expressions that go beyond the printed word to include songs, images and graffiti; and which Karin Barber has defined as words joined together that give ‘a recognizable existence as a form’ (p. 11). Callaci's central actors are ‘popular urbanists’ who shape discourse and ‘call together an urban public’ (p. 8), thus forming a semi-independent creative class that can be understood in relation to a more general sociology of urban migration defined by sharp divisions of class, gender and generation.

The book's opening chapter sets the social and cultural scene of Dar es Salaam, a colonial town that continued to grow rapidly after independence despite official discouragement through aggressive disinvestment and scolding socialist norms that valorised rural life and livelihoods. Through perceptive attention to reportorial perspective, Callaci shows how male press representations of women subtly shift and harden from the 1960s to the 1970s, from an insider's sympathetic portraits of their urban plights to an outsider's suspicions concerning their morality and political reliability. The second chapter charts reformist literature, much of it penned by women, concerning young female migrants and their vulnerability to male predation. It illustrates a diverse terrain of urban institutions that range from church hostels to reproductive rights organizations. The third chapter tours Dar es Salaam's licentious nightlife through a geography of its dancehalls. It is based primarily on the lyrics and personalities of local popular music. The core social drama is again men's sexual pursuit of women, in which male generosity and female dependence unfold as a contested moral terrain, itself badly out of step with prevailing norms of Tanzanian socialism or ujamaa, which stressed prudent self-sufficiency. Some small errors appear along the way, such as a few mistakenly placed neighbourhood names in the book's maps of Dar es Salaam, and the usage of TANU (the ruling party) as a simple synonym for government, which at times it was not.

The book's strongest chapter examines ‘briefcase publishers’ – pulp-fiction crime and thriller novelists of the 1970s and 1980s who bypass both state-controlled publishers of ‘development fiction’ and the era's forbidding economics of material scarcity to self-publish popular novellas of fantastical plots set in gritty urban circumstances. The main characters are inevitably young, lean, virile men who represent what Callaci terms ‘frugal cosmopolitanism’ by implicitly accepting the sparing egalitarianism of ujamaa while outwardly embracing the global styles of sharp modern dress and mobility. These protagonists, most famously the James Bond-like heroes of Elvis Musiba's Willy Gamba and Ben Mtobwa's Joram Kiango, seek to realize a kind of patriotism and urban adulthood in the face of villainous spies, traitors and crooks, nearly all of whom are older men subverting the causes of socialism and liberation while taking advantage of younger women. Through a combination of subtle interpretive readings of the fiction itself along with revelatory oral research concerning the material and financial production of these ‘informal’ novellas, this chapter sets a very high standard for what African literary history can accomplish. The book's final chapter charts transformations in Dar es Salaam's urban lexicon as Tanzania abandoned socialism to embrace neoliberal reforms during the 1980s, transforming principles of urban virtue from sweat (jasho) to cleverness (ujanja).

In writing a history ‘from the standpoint of urban migrants’, Callaci claims to depart from ‘an academic historiography of Tanzania that is strikingly bifurcated between studies of rural socialism and studies of Dar es Salaam’ (p. 5). Yet for all their dynamism and creativity, Callaci's rural migrants bring little in the way of specific cultural baggage to the big city. No doubt Saturday ngoma (traditional dances) and Sunday vernacular sermons kept low profiles in the face of ‘anti-tribalist’ strictures of ujamaa-era Dar es Salaam, and thus scarcely survive as ‘texts’ for Callaci to examine. The textual forms that Callaci's popular urbanists do embrace – self-improvement primers; health advocacy pamphlets; popular music, fiction and film – are more or less universal genres that owe little to indigenous textual traditions that anchored the cultural lives of older urban residents. Migrants were not quite as free as this, nor did many wish to be. This is most notable in the continued resilience of shairi, a famous quatrain verse form of Swahili poetry that for decades marked the privileged status of established urban residents while also signifying migrants’ mastery of urban culture. The ujamaa-era ubiquity of shairi in newspapers, magazines, radio and public festivals suggests an urban cultural landscape where both social precedence and imposed textual constraints continued to play an important role, furnishing values that were embraced as well as transformed by Dar es Salaam's growing migrant population.

Overall, this book is a wonderful achievement and should be widely read. Callaci's careful yet creative interpretations of seemingly ephemeral media such as pulp fiction and birth-control primers provide fresh insights into how the postcolonial city was understood and constructed by its literary residents. By seeking to remake the city in their own image, these popular urbanists succeeded in exerting some degree of independence from the political didacticism and economic scarcity that otherwise defined socialist Dar es Salaam. It is a study that opens up further vistas for literary histories of the continent's creative cities.