sketches of dar, part 1

Dar Es Salaam is the largest city in Tanzania, where I've been living for the last three months. Don't let the following fool you; it's a totally OK place.

geography
the best view is from the plane, which shows downtown in miniature framed by an impenetrable maze of slums. it was a hobby of mine as a kid, drawing mazes, and here it's replicated writ-large, a labyrinth of tesselated tin roof shacks, an invitation to wander in, and get lost, get sick, get robbed, get drunk, get laid, get aids, get stabbed maybe. beyond that, the beach, the peninsula, the coast, the marine preserve, and finally the game park.

transit
the usual clusterfuck of cars, jitneys and cabs, which I've already written about at length. I've little to add to previous observations, but I did see the world's gnarliest one-car accident, when a 4 am drunk driver in a toyota hit the meridian doing a hundred and fifty clicks and spiraled through the air like a roll-bar movie stunt. the thing landed right in front of me and for a second I though it had literally fallen from the sky. the three occupants were all thoroughly wasted, and one was bleeding pretty heavy, but they all walked it off. one of them tried to pretend it hadn't even happened.

nightlife
dar es salaam means "city of peace" in arabic, and it's an apt description. too apt. this place is fucking moribund, and I even put this sketch off for quite a bit while I was feeling for a pulse. no luck. your best nightlife options are lounging with ex-pats at eighth level (douche chills) or grinding with prostitutes at one of several local HIV snakepits. there was a beachfront bar, but that closed for renovations, leaving little in its wake. I guess you could always go get swerved on a wallet-sized plastic bag of konyagi in the shantytown, if you wanted, but i've done enough slumming for one lifetime.

climate
hot as balls, and just as sweaty. the midday sun is a fucking jackhammer, and the palm trees offer little respite. plus the high particulate count of dust and vehicle exhaust in the air, which means the heat is somehow both parching and muggy at the same time. thank god for AC right? except the electricity goes out all the time. but thank god for generators, right? except hardly anyone can afford one. thank god I'm rich.

sport
soccer, duh. I've prepared a 52,944-word thesis paper on african notions of nationalism and identity and their semiotic linkage to antique british municipal rivalries, as expressed through ah who even cares anymore

government
pause for a second with me, yeah, and pour a little foam out your latte to commemorate the faded glory of ujaama, tanzania's late, great experiment in command economics. it was a bust, of course, they all are, those command economies, but was there ever a better-intentioned bust? not even the world bank can touch it, though not for lack of trying. and a moment of silence, too, for Nyerere's broken dreams (no coughing.) and... done.

speaking of the world bank, guess who's butt buddies with current Tanzanian president jakaya kikwete? along with the IMF and the MCC and the IFC and all the other TLAs and NGOs and footsoldiers of late-stage privatization (your correspondent is among the enlisted.) nice work everyone. cuz what could be better than mass privatization of a venal and weakened ex-socialist state. worked well in russia, didn't it? and it works well here, which is why the entire country was basically without electricity for the entire calendar year of 2006, while the top nobs of african development collected fat kickbacks from the washington dc-based post office box to which the electricity privatization "contract" had been outsourced. of course, the nobs had generators, so what did they care. and though I'm not a nob, but a mere footsoldier, I have a generator too, so what do I care? thank god we're rich.

architecture
I think maybe, in the two plus years I've spent out here, that these tired eyes have seen too much. I can no longer distinguish one african city from the next, and even if I could, who would care? there is no such thing as a nativist architecture here, except for 70s relics, and those are just rough copies of the housing projects along the karl-marx-allee. the rest is glass and steel, boring shit, cookie-cutter designs dumped out from dan graham's toilet-side sketchbook.

demographics
if Nyerere got one thing right, it was his relentless campaigning for national identity and detribalization. yeah I know, I know, it's tantamount to cultural genocide, but man, it had to happen. there are just too too many machetes and ak-47s and unexploded land mines in the world for old-school ethnic identities to persist. there are 100 tribes here, and sure some of them are still out there in the bush in various forms, but at least most people self-identify as tanzanians first and whatever else second, and that is progress, most def. this is the city of peace, in the country of peace, and the only real conflict they've ever had was when they kicked idi amin out of uganda, and that was only after he started it. if you want a textbook definition of "just war", there it is.

environment
yeah ok gorongoro and the serengeti and the great migration and the big five and blah blah blah. fuck that noise; land animals bore me. the real shit is under the sea, in the coral reefs of the indian ocean, where the gobies and the morays and the hawksbills are just chillin', looking at you right through the mask and being just like 'sup holmes?

scuba diving owns so fucking hard. it owns like bill gates or warren buffet. it owns like a predatory lender on a foreclosed home. it owns like a infertile lesbian spinster at a fancy cat show. it owns like ed asner in roots. in a world full of private ownership, it is the owniest thing since the invention of ownage. why just last weekend I saw a rock lobster the size of a fucking honda motorcycle, right here, right off the coast, not 18 meters down. thing had eyes like ping-pong balls and claws like tennis rackets. I swear to god I seen it. I will put my hand on a bible and say the same thing.

Stay tuned for part two...