This book explores the cultural production of migrants to Dar es Salaam in the African Socialist years from 1967 to 1985. In the early years after independence, Tanzanian government policy followed a modernisation model based on industrialisation, with cities as the engines of progress. But as the major cities expanded uncontrollably and vast unplanned informal settlements sprang up, Nyerere's focus changed to rural development: ujamaa was based on the valorisation of self-reliance and collective effort through hard agricultural work. Cities were now seen as the haunts of idlers, wasteful consumption, and pernicious foreign influences. When persuasion failed, TANU turned to force: villagisation and urban-rural repatriation were strong-armed in tandem. Yet the city continued to grow.
Callaci gets a grip on the potentially unmanageable and undocumentable proliferation of urban popular culture in two ways. First, she focuses on a relatively short time-span. Though well situated in relation to the colonial and early independence era and the postsocialist aftermath, the main substance of the book deals with the 18 years from the Arusha Declaration of 1967 to Nyerere's replacement by Mwinyi in 1985 which heralded the shift towards neoliberalism. Second, the focus is not on popular culture in general but on ‘popular urban intellectuals’: essentially, young migrants who interpreted city life through the production of texts and were thus able ‘to shape discourse and to call together an urban public’ (8). Each of the central chapters looks at a specific textual genre or performance site (or some combination thereof). Chapter Two contrasts the advice literature aimed at young women migrants by middle class Christian women writers with the findings of a Marxist university research project on working women. Chapter Three explores the culture of nightlife and the dancehall, which involved constant gendered negotiations of dress, money, and display. Chapter Four offers a fascinating account of ‘briefcase publishers’, young men who collaborated to write, print, and distribute novellas in Swahili, which were quickly sold from briefcase or bookstall and passed around among the urban readership. These case studies are followed by a chapter that traverses multiple genres and discourses to explore the innovative vocabulary forged by urban dwellers that they used to comment on experience and articulate a morality. Urban slang and sayings show that popular urban philosophy was simultaneously more modern, more cosmopolitan, and more in touch with long-standing indigenous ideas than was African Socialism's idealised, missionary-influenced image of the essential African.
Callaci distinguishes the production of the popular intellectuals from official ideology on the one hand and the ‘spontaneous, ephemeral subaltern urbanism of anonymous masses’ on the other (187). But throughout the book we are shown how the urban intellectuals operated in spaces and used ideational and artistic resources furnished by the state. Their interaction with state-sponsored cultural interventions — whether proactive or repressive — involved an interplay of convergence, cohabitation, and indifference rather than a stark opposition. And the wider ‘spontaneous’ popular culture of the city fed into, and was fed by, the urban intellectuals’ formulations.
The originality of Callaci's approach means that as well as being a notable contribution to the vibrant field of Tanzanian cultural studies, this book will also bring something new to comparative studies across the continent and beyond. Particularly noteworthy is the way Callaci embeds textual production in the material life of the city. She insists — and demonstrates — that the narratives and images of the popular intellectuals’ texts were not only made by the city, but also made it. They became part of the soft infrastructure of urban life by which people navigated shifting and precarious situations, approached and understood novel experiences, and — especially in the case of the briefcase publishers — created and activated the social networks and local reputations that enabled them to function in the city. Equally productive is Callaci's reading of the conditions of possibility of particular cultural forms and the unintended consequences of state policy. At the end of the socialist era, import restrictions were lifted, private media proliferated, and state support for selected cultural activities was withdrawn. Instead of fostering a cultural renaissance, these changes spelled the abrupt end of the urban culture that had flourished during the ujamaa years. Locally-produced pamphlets were swamped by glossy imported fiction; live bands were replaced by DJs spinning imported music discs; the creativity that had gone into assembling an outfit for a night out was no longer called upon when imported clothing became easily available. It turned out that material scarcity had ‘almost paradoxically’ provided fertile ground for local cultural production to flourish. And although official cultural intervention is consequential, its outcomes often exceed and diverge from government objectives: the state's stunningly successful literacy drive, for example, created a reading public avid for the kind of literature of which the state itself did not approve.
In the interests of clarity and coherence, Callaci recapitulates the main lines of her argument several times as she develops them in successive chapters. The conclusion therefore comes as a delightful surprise. Instead of further reiteration, she takes us on a tour of the basement of the National Library in Dar es Salaam and reveals her own methodology as she browsed through piles of heterogeneous documents from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a treasure trove whose riches and disorder mimicked the urban world from which they emanated. One can then see, looking back, that the exploratory, inquisitive relish of this encounter in fact permeates the whole book and makes it a deeply engrossing as well as a brilliantly informative and thought-provoking read.
