Since moving to Dar Es Salaam four months ago, I have been urged by friends around the world to write about my experiences of life and culture here. But I have not really done so, mainly for this simple reason: I have just barely scratched the surface. Although I love the landscape, the culture, the cuisine, the antiquities and the wildlife of the Swahili Coast, and although those things helped me to choose to live here, I did not come here to appreciate those things.
I have neither the time nor the money to be much of a tourist. And my arrhythmic brain makes is extremely challenging for me to operate in languages other than English. So, generally, I have little to report because I can’t understand anything anyone says in Swahili (or any other language other than English for that matter) and I spend all my time either writing or sitting at home or in a café with my head in my hands processing all the shit that has gone down in the past decade of my life.
But there is one thing I feel I can talk about now with some authority: the greatness of Dar’s social contract when it comes to getting around. Let me begin with what I do not mean by that: I do not mean that the government has good policies or rational infrastructure for transportation.
There is an elevated light rail system, they just stopped building a few years ago, despite it being about 80% complete. There is no plan to resume work. There are two bus systems, a city-wide bus system that is completely opaque and incomprehensible to non-Swahili speakers, with no posted schedules or routes I can find anywhere and a local rapid-bus system that goes nowhere near my home or anywhere I want to go and whose schedules and fares can only be discovered in-person at the depot. There is also a commuter rail system whose schedules and fares are equally hard to locate and which is plagued with service interruptions that it is almost impossible to find out about.
The local road system is similarly idiosyncratic, to say the least. Aside from the divided highways, the major thoroughfares all have seemingly randomly situated large speed bumps. And 80% of the roads are unpaved and ungraded, meaning that, with the precipitation levels the city experiences, roads like the one in front of my home, Zalishamali Street are an undulating mass of rock, dirt, mud and deep puddles. Following the logic of places back home like Prince George’s Cranbrook Hill and Vancouver’s pre-Olympic Mackenzie Heights and Southlands, often the most unnavigable roads lead to the homes of the richest people, because they keep all but the sturdiest i.e. most expensive vehicles out of the neighbourhood. When I was looking at moving to a nicer apartment, the swankiest building I visited on a gated road that more closely resembled a seasonal creek and required four-wheel drive to navigate.
Yet it is in the context of this transportation maelstrom that I have the opportunity to experience the most prosocial transportation social contract I ever have, one that combines the best individual and collective impulses of the crowd.
The Horn: My Plan Not Your Mistake
While not unique to Dar, Dar traffic culture is especially exemplary of a phenomenon we see with city traffic throughout the Global South. There is a fundamental difference in understanding of what car horns are for. Where I am from, people use their car horns for one purpose: to express criticism and displeasure towards other drivers. One only engages the horn if one is so unhappy with what another driver is doing that one wants to begin a confrontation.
When you hear a car horn in Vancouver, you know that a driver thinks you or someone else is making a mistake, behaving badly and needs to tell you that, in those shoes, they would make better, smarter choices. In other words, almost all car horn use is purposeless. It serves no function other than to engage in social conflict and criticism of others’ actions.
In Dar, the function of the car horn is to announce one’s plans. Common messages are “I am in a hurry so I can’t let you in right now, even though I know you’d like to get in,” “I don’t think I can stop; please let me through,” and “I’m going into this lane I shouldn’t stay in but I’ll be out soon.” If people have an honest-to-God beef with another driver, they can damn well shout at them or pull over and gesticulate. Car horns are too important to be wasted on social conflict and catharsis.
Be the Best You Can Be At What You Are
Dar’s roads and sidewalks are a roiling mass of pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, bajaji (mini-cabs), cars, buses and trucks. Most major roads have sidewalks but not all and there are a few crosswalks and pedestrian lights. While cars are good at staying in their lanes, smaller vehicles and pedestrians are not expected to. Indeed, one of the reasons to order a mini-cab rather than a taxi and why one will often happily pay more is because it is expected that bajaji will squeeze between lanes of traffic, veer onto sidewalks and around pedestrians, accelerate through gaps in traffic when the light is against them and briefly cross into oncoming lanes if no traffic is coming.
While these behaviours are common throughout the Global South, what I find especially congenial about Dar’s traffic is that everyone supports this behaviour. Cars will tack to one side of their lane to make space for a bajaj to squeeze through; pedestrians will scoot to the edge of the sidewalk or hop up onto a curb to make way for a mini-cab. That is because people’s instinctive thought is not “if I can’t do that, no one should be allowed to” but “I can’t do that but it’s cool this driver can. What can I do to enable that?”
This deference also applies among mini-cabs. If there is a manoeuvre one cab can make but another cannot, the driver who cannot make the move will situate himself in such a way that the other one can. This even crosses over into paying fares. One of the things a bajaj driver with a fare can signal with his horn is that he’s on the clock. A driver who is just searching for fares or heading back to the depot will move to the side and yield because he is invested in the other cab’s fare arriving as promptly as possible. And by the same token, if a bike or a motorcycle can make it through a tight spot or negotiate a move a bajaj cannot, mini-cab drivers will themselves yield accordingly.
Being Alive and Awake
Because there is a lot of traffic and a distinct lack of through roads suitable for all vehicles and pedestrians, the paved road space that exists has to operate at peak efficiency. That means that every scrap of available pavement needs to be used when it is needed. Pedestrians are expected to adapt to this situation. With few crosswalks and a laissez faire attitude to those that exist, pedestrians are expected to be as awake and vigilant as drivers, crossing not just when there are gaps in traffic but also assessing the manoeuverability of vehicles if there are no clean gaps.
If you must cross with traffic coming towards you, wait until it is composed of highly manoeuvrable vehicles, motorbikes and bajaji and make sure to walk at a consistent speed and do not stop. That way, these vehicles can drive around you as you cross the street. Drivers are used to proceeding with precision and will whiz by quite closely if they have confidence in you being self-possessed and observant. If you freeze or look like you’re not paying attention, they will always stop. And even then, no criticism is expressed; no horn is honked. The worst criticism you can get is a look of mild disappointment.
This is not a place where one sees a lot of seniors behind the wheel. Driving is not just a young person’s game but a young man’s game. Being highly vigilant and proficient with one’s vehicle is not optional; it is baked into the social contract. Driving is not a right in Dar, nor is it a privilege. It is an art, and a respected one at that.
We All Have To Show Up Looking Okay
I have mostly been living here during rainy seasons. I arrived in the Little Rainy Season in December. Now it is the Big Rainy Season. That means that not only are there often big puddles and oozing mud covering my local street but sometimes the main drag, Kajenge Road and the parking lot at the local mall where I make my big foreign goods purchases have big pools of water. Even Bagamoyo Road, the recently upgraded divided highway through in my neighbourhood will often have long deep puddles.
As many road users, especially during morning rush hour are pedestrians on their way to work, dressed in business attire, one would expect constant splashing incidents as everyone is trying to go as fast as circumstances permit their vehicle to go.
But no.
Unlike the assholes of Vancouver, London and the other great rainy cities of the world, the drivers of Dar slow right down if there is a chance they might splash someone on their way to work and screw up their nice polished shoes and carefully ironed work clothes. As with the ethos around mini-cab fares, one of the great things about being in this majority Christian yet culturally Muslim place is that everyone is invested in everyone else succeeding at their business, their enterprise.
One of the ways in which Islam was more successful than Christianity in its efforts to confront and bridle the power of the agora is that it chose to regulate commerce by sanctifying its practice not by condemning, criticizing or marginalizing it. Unlike any place I have lived, other than the mid-town Toronto streetcar suburbs, people here support each other being successful at work. Everyone is economically and spiritually diminished if another person’s success is thwarted through a lack of vigilance and consideration on our part.
In all my time here, on all the rainy days, not only have I not seen one vehicle splash a pedestrian or cyclist; I have never seen a wet pedestrian or cyclist who appears to have been splashed while I was not looking.
Dar Traffic Makes Me a Better, More Complete Person
Every time I have gone out with my fly unzipped accidentally, every time I have failed to notice some other major sartorial error on my part, I have been immediately notified by people I meet on the street or see at the café. Nobody is mad that my shirt has ridden up, my belt has broken, my fly is half done-up. They just let me know these things matter-of-factly.
And, as anyone who has met me in person, whether I’m walking down the street, crossing the road or trying to dress myself in the morning, I am one of the most incompetent noticers on the face of the earth. But here, in Dar, it’s like everyone is my friend Karin Litzcke, who has spent almost the entirety of our friendship sorting errors I have made with my shirt collar or buttons.
The great thing about Dar’s street culture is that it is making me notice things more, it has helped get me in tune with my own senses, exist more in the moment, more in the physical world. And I credit the fact that this place has a culture of people who are fully awake to their senses but see those of us who are less awake as slightly disabled people who require their assistance, not screw-ups who require a scolding.
The Social Costs of Safetyism
But of course, there is a politics to all this too. This wouldn’t be one of my essays if it did not say something political at the end. I am beginning to understand the full implications of “safetyism,” one of the master discourses of the progressive social order in the Global North: our traffic cultures are too safe, too rules-oriented, too coddling of the inattentive. All of this safetyism makes people self-centred, inattentive and grievance-based in their day-to-day experience of moving through space with other people.
People are shut down, disengaged from their immediate surroundings and when something happens that they do not expect or desire, their reaction is to blame and accuse others of failing them, rather than thinking about their own conduct or how maybe this is not a problem so much as a thing that happens. Ultimately, what has pushed me out of Canada is that our normative culture has become one of unempathetic, inattentive, self-centred angry scolds.
For much of my life, I have applauded, welcomed and even campaigned for new rules, new infrastructure, new protocols to make people “safer.” I know we have saved some lives and definitely prevented a lot of injuries along the way while we have done that but, in the course of our uncritical and endlessly elaborating embrace of safetyism, we have may have gone too far, rendering our lives less worth living and ourselves less worth saving.
I have likened my experience of the social transformation of progressive Canadians to a zombie invasion in that I wake up every morning wondering which of my friends has, since I last saw them, become a mindless walking corpse, hell-bent on eating my brain. I realize now that one of the reasons ordered progressive societies are more susceptible to zombie invasions is that zombies, with their flat-footed tunnel vision and simple angry brains can more easily pass for human in a city like Vancouver than they could in Dar Es Salaam.
