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Street Textuality: Socialism, Masculinity, and Urban Belonging in Tanzania's Pulp Fiction Publishing Industry, 1975–1985
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Abstract
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a network of young urban migrant men created an underground pulp fiction publishing industry in the city of Dar es Salaam. As texts that were produced in the underground economy of a city whose trajectory was increasingly charted outside of formalized planning and investment, these novellas reveal more than their narrative content alone. These texts were active components in the urban social worlds of the young men who produced them. They reveal a mode of urbanism otherwise obscured by narratives of decolonization, in which urban belonging was constituted less by national citizenship than by the construction of social networks, economic connections, and the crafting of reputations. This article argues that pulp fiction novellas of socialist era Dar es Salaam are artifacts of emergent forms of male sociability and mobility. In printing fictional stories about urban life on pilfered paper and ink, and distributing their texts through informal channels, these writers not only described urban communities, reputations, and networks, but also actually created them.
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43 Several writers described the process in interviews, including Jackson Kalindimya, Farid Hammie Rajab, and Kajubi Mukajanga.
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45 This is based on estimates from advertisements in the newspapers the Daily News and Wakati ni Huu in 1982, which advertise novellas selling for between 30 and 40 Tanzanian shillings. For comparison, tickets to see Urafiki Jazz Band cost 8–10 shillings, as did seeing a movie at a cinema. See also “Paying Dearly for Books,” Daily News, 3 Nov. 1981, which estimated the cost of imported books as ranging from 330 to 350 shillings.
46 In the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, newspapers ranged in price from around 50 cents to 2 shillings, judging from the prices printed on the newspapers Uhuru, Mzalendo, the Daily News, and the Sunday News.
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83 For example, Mkabarah, Kizimbani; Simbamwene, Mwisho wa Mapenzi; Balisidya, Shida; Mbenna, , Sitaki (Dar es Salaam: East African Publishing House, 1976)Google Scholar; Hammie Rajab, Ufunguo wa Bandia; Anduru, Fugitive; Mkufya, Dilemma.
84 Several scholars have spoken of romantic love in African history as a way of claiming modernity. See, for example, Cole, Jenifer and Thomas, Lynn M., “Thinking through Love in Africa,” in Cole, Jenifer and Thomas, Lynn M., eds., Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5 Google Scholar. Brian Larkin has argued that romantic love stories in Northern Nigeria, drawing on Bollywood film, offered youth a kind of “parallel modernity”: “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 67, 3 (1997): 406–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Laura Fair and Andreana Prichard have argued that virtuous romantic love was associated with the creation of national citizenship; see her “Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences and the Construction of Romance in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Cole, Jennifer and Thomas, Lynn, eds., Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prichard, Andreana, “‘Let Us Swim in the Pool of Love’: Love Letters and Discourses of Community Composition in Twentieth-Century Tanzania,” Journal of African History 54, 1 (2013): 103–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 For a discussion of intergenerational tension between young men and elder men over practices such as polygamy, bridewealth, and so forth, and how caricatures of “sugar daddies” in the press played into this, see Ivaska, Cultured States, 166–205.
86 These debates raged in the newspapers of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Public intellectuals and politicians debated whether polygyny should remain legal, whether the government should regulate bridewealth payments, whether youth could marry without their parents’ permission, whether unwed mothers should be allowed maternity leave from their jobs, and whether female students should be allowed to continue their studies after becoming pregnant. For a discussion of debates over marriage laws, see Ivaska, Cultured States, 166–205.
87 From an address by Euphrase Kezilahabi at an academic conference in Germany, which appears in “The Swahili Novel and the Common Man in East Africa,” in Schild, Ulla, ed., The East African Experience: Essays on English and Swahili Literature, 2nd Janheinz Jahn-Symposium (Mainz: Verlag, 1980), 78–79 Google Scholar.
88 Mbuguni, L. A. and Ruhumbika, Gabriel, “TANU and National Culture,” in Ruhumbika, Gabriel, ed., Towards Ujamaa: Twenty Years of TANU leadership (Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1974)Google Scholar; F.E.M.K., “Insinuations: Tanzanian Literature after the Arusha Declaration,” Tanzanian Affairs, no. 30 (1 May 1988): n.p.
89 Among the twelve writers and children of writers that I interviewed, only one retained copies of all of his earlier publications, and in fact several writers asked me to share my photocopied versions with them. I came across them in used bookstalls in Dar es Salaam, in neglected uncatalogued boxes in Tanzanian libraries, and scattered in libraries across the United States and Europe.
90 Tripp, Aili, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Informal Urban Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
91 Publications in this genre included: Kajubi Mukajanga's Hamasa, and Wakati ni Huu; Ben Mtobwa's Heko; Nico ye Mbajo's Mcheshi, and Sani, which he published with Saidi Bawji; Hammie Rajab's Busara; and Kassim Mussa Kassam's Cheka.
92 Perhaps most famously, Hammie Rajab went on to be a filmmaker in Tanzania's nascent film industry, adapting some of his novellas as short video films, until his death in 2011. Kajubi Mukajanga became a magazine publisher and eventually the CEO of the Media Council of Tanzania. Famous Tanzanian political cartoonist Godfrey Mwampembwa, known as Gado, got his start, as a Dar es Salaam teenager, publishing his cartoons in Kajubi Mukajanga's Wakati ni Huu, before becoming one of East Africa's best-known syndicated political cartoonists. Jackson Kalindimya works as a journalist for the newspaper Nipashe.
93 See the list of Tanzanian serial publications in the appendix to Sturmer's, Martin The Media History of Tanzania (Peramiho: Ndanda Mission Press, 1998), 201–71Google Scholar.
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