This is why we can’t forget communal hangout spots

A street in Tanzania’s commercial capital Dar es Salaam. PHOTO | BEATRICE MATERU | NMG 

In Summary

• We maintain our green city with shade trees and the odd plant or two. We live on these logs and watch as the world, and time, goes by. And no matter how big this city grows, we will never become too modernised to forget the simple civility of organically growing our hangout spots

By ELSIE EYAKUZE
More by this Author

The topics of urbanisation, concrete jungles, and the weakening of community connections and integration necessary for thriving have been a major concern of modern times. The city is a desirable place but also known for its tendency towards corrosive loneliness: somehow as we pile up in increasingly crowded we also learn to avoid each other and communal intimacy. Humans are strange creatures.

I have observed this as Dar es Salaam and I grow up together. It started out with a tiny and very short CBD which branched out to suburbs where nobody had fences.

Now it has become a collection of suburbs where fences are a necessity and walls are preferable. The only ones without these fierce boundaries live in apartments. But the apartments have gates.
Happily, our relaxed communal ways combined with the Swahili coastal baraza-veranda-culture have required us to find a workaround all these barriers. Behold: the stone.

What I am referring to is the informal community hangout that emerges organically in every “unoccupied” space in the city where it makes sense to sit and rest for a minute.

The youth will start out by staking the amenable patch with cheap materials: maybe a few pilfered concrete bricks, a broken chair, all set in a semicircle.

Next, someone will locate a log from a nearby felled tree and drag it there. A used car tyre will also appear, with fertile dirt placed in the centre. Do not sit on the car tyre.

As the log and broken chair and circle attract regular occupants, the car tyre—which has been carefully placed—will sprout a sapling. Regular occupants will have names, but more usually they have nicknames corresponding to some characteristics like skin tone, occupation or habitual behaviour or even ethnicity.

Someone enterprising will set up shop nearby to offer the necessary: snacks, beverages. At no point will you ever catch anyone in the act of maintaining or even furnishing this hangout but it will grow, like the carefully tended sapling in the car tyre.

Within a year or two, that sapling will have become a well-groomed and short shade tree. The entrepreneur selling snacks and drinks will probably be offering a few plastic chairs and stools.

This hangout has multiple functions: it is a community centre, a resting spot, an information centre. Politics and current affairs will be discussed here, perhaps a news-stand will also appear.

That is how Dar grows the stones that anchor us in our communality, and also earn us a reputation for laziness. You will always find people sitting there during the workday, seemingly doing nothing. They are not. They are chilling, in-between odd jobs and clients, protecting the neighbourhood and observing absolutely everything.

We maintain our green city with shade trees and the odd plant or two. We live on these logs and watch as the world, and time, goes by.

And no matter how big this city grows, we will never become too modernised to forget the simple civility of organically growing our hangout spots.

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: elsieeyakuze@gmail.com