Lars' Impressions #5: A House with a Yard

“A house with a yard” – isn’t that the aspiration of most Canadians? Didn’t that fuel the expansion of North American suburbs? As we take our daily walks around our Dar es Salaam neighbourhood, just before the sun goes down, we see scores of Tanzanian families trying to build very much that same sort of future for themselves.

Dar es Salaam is a sprawling city and the area we live in was quite undeveloped, even a decade ago. The Bagamoyo Road that I drove down forty years ago was partly just a sand track in the coconut groves – now it is paved all the way, and our section of it is usually blocked, nose to tail, by traffic jams. All the same, our neighbourhood seems semi-rural – herds of goats forage wherever they can, the odd cow appears occasionally in the garden to nibble our flowers and roosters crow every morning at the crack of dawn (and often well before).

Of course, it looks very different from our Halifax neighbourhood, where the streets are laid out in a clear rectangular grid, and all the lots are unambiguously defined – some may be 60 x 100 and others are 30 x 100, but that is the extent of the differences. Tidy old Canada seems almost obsessively organized compared to Mbezi Juu, where we now live. Perhaps partly because the area is so hilly, everything is absolutely irregular – in the whole neighbourhood, there is only one survey marker that I have been able to find, and absolutely nothing that is at right angles. Although it is evident that people do own plots of land here, I cannot figure out how they demarcate one lot from the next.

The main road runs along the crest of the hill, and somebody obviously does do some maintenance on it, because there are ditches along the side. Because it is made of crushed coral rock, the sharpest bits of which have been worn down a bit by relentless traffic, it is incredibly rough, but solid. But there is no evidence of any maintenance of the side roads. At irregular intervals, tracks branch off winding down into the valleys, wide enough for a single car. Right now is the dry season, but it is easy to see how much drainage ditches will matter during the rains,  because erosion has cut huge holes in the road surface in many places and most side lanes seem to us passable only by four-wheel drive jeeps (if then).

 Nevertheless, economic growth has been strong in Dar es Salaam and our neighbourhood is changing as we watch. Along each lane are new houses, some under construction and some just completed. Some are huge and some are hovels, but many are also middle class – kitchen, living room, two or three bedrooms and a front porch. Because mortgage finance for housing purchase is practically unknown here, people get a lot and then build as the money becomes available.

Some dig sand from the river bed and combine it with a little cement to make sun-dried concrete blocks, while others buy the blocks from one of the many suppliers in the area. In our area there are countless houses at various stages of construction, from slab pouring to wall building to corrugated iron roof erection to window and door installation. Footpaths run everywhere, in and out of yards, so Canadian notions of ‘trespassing’ require some revision. Nevertheless, people apparently feel no qualms about leaving a half-finished house empty for months. Remarkably, there is little sign of squatting and evidently nobody is too worried about losing their corrugated iron roofing to theft.

To somebody who is used to the continentally open North American market – where anything you buy at the building supply store probably came from thousands of miles away, it is refreshing to see how very locally-sourced production is here. Both at the top of our hill and at the bottom, small shops make wooden doors and windows. Basic inputs like cement and iron bars come from a distance, but the concrete blocks are made on site or just down the road. Under a small awning, a welding shop around the corner turns out decorative railing and window hardware. Most everything you need to build a house is manufactured within a 500 metre radius of where we live.

Dar es Salaam is growing strongly, and expanding to the north and west. People are evidently willing to pay a big price in time for the dream of a nice house, with a yard, of your own. If we travel at peak times, it takes an hour and a half for us to get part way to the downtown – and often it is much worse. At the office, I know many people who are commuting in from much further out than us – and one has to wonder how much worse congestion will become if more Tanzanians start to drive cars, rather than brave the massively overcrowded fleets of mini-buses that now ferry most commuters. Still, the urge to have a plot of land and a single family house drove the relentless suburban sprawl of North America, a sprawl which still continues. That seems also to be very much the same vision that drives many Tanzanians – although it would be nice if they could avoid some of the city planning mistakes we have made.

Of course Dar es Salaam is not a good snapshot of the country. It takes a growing economy for people to be able to afford to build new homes, and there was little economic growth in evidence when we visited Tanga last month. Dirt floors, mud walls and thatched roofs are all that most people can afford there – very picturesque and low cost construction, but also not very durable when the rains come.

Nevertheless, the cleanly swept yards and flowers that you often see planted outside impressed me forty years ago, and the same cleanliness and care is still very evident today. It must be pretty difficult to keep a dirt floor clean, and when you see a house without running water or electricity, but you also see that people are stepping out the door wearing a spotless white shirt ironed to a razor crease, you know that that it took a lot of work to look sharp. In Tanzania, in small villages (as in large towns) people work hard to keep up appearances. 

“A house with a yard, and keeping up appearances” – seems like these are pretty similar, and pretty common, aspirations, in Canada or in Tanzania.

 Here is the duka where I buy our tomatoes (on the far right) - almost directly across the road from us.

Here is a project that won't get completed, at least not any time soon. It is the school right next door to us, built by the Holy Ghost Fathers on land donated by Brian, our landlord. Apparently they ran out of money several years ago, and now the need for secondary schools in not so urgent. We think there is a family living in there now.