Urban Environments in Africa by Myers Garth

Author:Myers, Garth [Myers, Garth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781447322948
Google: jwVpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2016-02-24T04:29:32+00:00

Mji wa Kusadikika (city of make-believe)

I have spent more than a quarter-century researching and writing about Zanzibar. In the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s (2005: 92) brilliant, acerbic editorial “How to write about Africa,” published a decade ago in Granta magazine (including advice like this: “never have the picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize”), “Zanzibar” is suggested as a useful subtitle as long as you have “‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title.” Wainaina lands startlingly close to the truth of most outsiders’ deployments of stereotypes about Africa and Zanzibar. As I was writing this chapter, the New York Times travel section published what seems like its semi-annual article on Zanzibar (Doyle, 2014: TR9), which opened with this: “The name Zanzibar conjures up visions of sultan’s palaces, paradisiacal beaches and winding alleyways,” beyond its “cocoa-fringed shore of purest white”—despite the fact that cocoa trees have never been even a marginal part of the forest cover.

After more than 25 years of research, Zanzibar “conjures up” none of these exoticized visions, despite its many inevitable (And legitimate!) appearances in the subtitles of my publications. For me, it is a city and an island archipelago that lacks adequate solid waste management or effective implementation of urban environmental governance, and which overthrew an oppressive oligarchic Omani sultanate only to endure more than a half-century of a different sort of suffocating misrule as the nominal capital of a semi-sovereign part of the United Republic of Tanzania under revolutionary socialist control. Energetic and enthusiastic planners and activists in Zanzibar have attempted several generations of ambitious, transformative urban environmental plans, with only very modest positive impacts given that political context. It is a place where I have watched my friends of all backgrounds be forced into exile, or be ground down by whatever the latest falsehood masquerading as a government may be. (Multiparty politics returned to the islands in 1992 and to the electoral process in 1995, but the ruling Revolutionary Party [CCM, for Chama cha Mapinduzi, its KiSwahili name] manipulated the results to claim dubious, narrow victories in the first four Zanzibar elections of this new era over the Civic United Front [CUF].) However, it is also an urban environment profoundly alive to the people who live in it, on multiple dimensions, beyond the perceptions of outside observers like me.

One of the ways that Zanzibaris have talked with me about their city is in relationship to the great Swahili novel of the Tanzanian mainland writer Shaaban Robert (1991 [1951]), Kusadikika (translation: Land of make-believe or Imaginary land). Kusadikika has some narrative parallels with Swift’s Gulliver’s travels, as Robert tells the satirical tale of Kusadikika, a country that floats in the heavens, and its misrule. Robert first published the novel in 1951, and it is typically taken as a parable about colonial oppression. Many Zanzibaris read it in contemporary times as a fable about the misdeeds of the pirates and tyrants who have ruled the islands since the 1964 socialist revolution.

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