The Baobab Lady and the Peanut Lady

Every neighbourhood has its rhythms, and part of the daily ritual of our corner of Dar es Salaam is when the owner of  “The Baobab Restaurant” arrives. Every morning around 6:30AM she sets up her small eatery – “restaurant” is really too grand a term – under the big baobab tree in the park across the road from where we live. We guess that it is her husband who helps her wheel in the benches and the table and set up the awning that protects her customers from the occasional downpours of the rainy season. Her young children come with her as well, and spend the day playing on the beach. She cooks up beans and rice on a charcoal fire and serves heaping plates to the fishermen as they return from a night’s work in the bay. Then all day there seems to be a steady stream of watchmen and gardeners and passers-by. Sometime around 4PM she folds everything up and wheels it all home again on two home made trolleys – and starts up again the next morning.

As can be seen from the photo above, it’s a small place – she cannot serve more than four or five people at a time.

And yes, those are goats wandering along the road. Somebody in the neighbourhood turns them out every morning and they wander the neighbourhood, trimming the shrubs and nibbling random bits of grass and any organic garbage they can find – a fine example of ‘recycling’ and urban agriculture in action. As dusk falls, by some mysterious signal, they somehow agree to form into a small herd and head home again.

Dusk is also about the time when “The Peanut Lady” packs up her table and calls it a day. She arrives sometime in the early afternoon, and sets up shop just outside our front gate, selling small packets of peanuts for about 8 cents Canadian. Every day I buy a couple from her as I get home from work. But she cannot have much of an income – that is her total inventory in front of her on the table. Even if she were to sell all thirty packets every day, total revenue would be no more than $2.40 Canadian, and it costs her something to buy, roast and bag the peanuts that she.sells.

Coffee seller

And I don’t imagine the Baobab Restaurant can be making a lot of income –  the going price for beans and rice is about 80 cents Canadian and the place is just too small, the clientele, too few. Still, she probably makes more than the guy on the main road near here who waits beside the bathroom scale that he owns for people to weigh themselves, or the energetic peddlers who throng the traffic jams, ever hopeful that you will decide – now that you are stuck in traffic – that what you really want to do is to buy pillows, mats (see below), coat hangers, TV aerials, shoes, maps, newspapers, flowers or live tropical fish (sold from a aquarium carried on the head).

It’s all part of “the informal economy” and it’s what people have to do to survive. There is no such thing as a public old age pension in Tanzania, and only about 4% of the elderly get private pensions, so there really is no “retirement” phase to life – people have to keep on working as long as they are able. The youth who flock from the countryside to the bright lights of  Dar es Salaam have to get some kind of income for themselves, since there is no welfare or unemployment insurance. Whatever you are selling, there is some margin (hopefully) to get by on. 

Of course, in Canada any restaurant would have to have stainless steel counters in the food preparation area and probably would have sterilizing dish washers. There is no water-pipe in The Baobab Restaurant – its owner must bring everything she needs with her in jerry cans, every morning, for both cooking and washing up. Tanzanians are very clean people – everybody scrupulously washes their hands before every meal – but you can only clean so much with a twenty litre can of water. There is just no way that The Baobab Restaurant could pass a ‘health and safety’ inspection, whatever its leniency.

In a country like Canada, one is not allowed to set up eateries on public land without permission. Rigorous inspections assure the public of food safety, wherever they choose to eat. The Baobab Restaurant, and any number of places like it in Tanzania, would simply not be allowed to exist in Canada.

But here, they serve a local need and provide people with a livelihood. And that’s one of the conundrums of development. If Tanzania is to develop, it needs tax revenue to build roads and schools – but the informal economy does not pay tax. If Dar es Salaam’s occasional outbreaks of cholera are to be stopped, public health has to be improved. If better jobs were available, people would not have to dodge oncoming cars trying to sell improbable objects in the traffic. One hopes that all these things will change, some day – but tomorrow morning, and for many mornings to come, the Baobab Lady will be setting up her eatery under the big tree in the park.
written by Lars, photos by Molly