Introduction

Through an Urban Borehole

Soon after arriving in Dar es Salaam, just before Christmas in 1990, I discovered that asking young people in Dar es Salaam about their notorious Lugha ya Wahuni (Language of the Ignorant) was a useful way to start learning about their world. The outcast language, which was actually a rapidly changing vocabulary that youths invented and continuously revise, has helped establish their identity as a separate yet demographically dominant sector of Dar es Salaam society. In the Lugha, simple responses can be dense with meanings. A young man might respond to a typical greeting, such as Habari ya mihangaiko? (How are your anxieties?), with the thumb's up sign. He may accompany this with words such as kwa soks (with socks, or condoms), meaning the young man practices safe sex and has not been infected by AIDS. He may also select one of the multitude of borrowed English phrases such as no sweti (no sweat) to suggest that he's doing well. A third kind of response might be to say nothing, a signal that his ethnic group practices circumcision and that he views himself as one of the "civilized" youth in town.

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Empowered Victims

Growing up in Burundi refugee society taught the young men in this story about victimization, fear, secrecy-and how to work the system. While growing up in refugee camps, their elders had never allowed them to forget how their Hutu identity forced their families to flee Burundi in order to survive. At the same time, their refugee identity reminded them that they were foreigners in Tanzania, the only country they had ever known. In both cases, the young refugees learned that they were outsiders-exiled from the old country and less than citizens in their country of residence. Growing up unsettled by stories of their violent, distant homeland and frustrated by living inside a remote refugee settlement, it is hardly surprising that thousands of young Burundi refugees wanted nothing more than a chance to escape to Bongoland, an adventure that might distance them from their bloody past as well as their difficult, but more frequently boring, present.

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Bongoland Adventures

One who has ever lived in Dar-Es-Salaam would be familiar with the completely overcrowded and infrequent ... buses bulging with chickens, bags of mchicha (spinach), mihogo (cassava), and mapapai (pawpaws), and commuters from the suburban areas around Dar-Es-Salaam. One would also be familiar with frequent water cuts which sometimes leave areas dry for more than a week, frequent electricity blackouts, telephones which maintain an eerie silence, inadequate parking spaces, overflowing sewage, lack of traffic regulation, hospitals without medicine (but with fly-infested garbage), pick-pocketing, and armed robbery. -Dr. Joe Lugalla (1995: 96)

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Suspicious Lives

Directly or indirectly, John, William, and James frequently alluded to the internalized fears that so often governed their perceptions. The term they most often used was kuogopa, which translates as being afraid, startled, or terrified (Rechenbach 1967). In one way or another, they constantly reminded me that they had much to fear. John was fond of giving me signals when suspicious characters entered the shop. James made it clear that we must never refer to Burundi in his shop, because he was surrounded by Tanzanians who might become suspicious of him. William's concerns that Tanzanian visitors to the tailoring shop could be spies frequently led him to withdraw into the safety of silence.

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Undercover Urbanites

This chapter will describe how young refugee tailors presented, or, as Goffman termed it, "misrepresented" (1959: 58) themselves as Tanzanians. Their strategies are contained in the term kujificha, a Swahili verb meaning "to hide oneself," and one that John, William, James, and other young refugees often used to allude to those activities which pertained to hiding. This chapter describes the public personae of John, William, James, and Luka. James was far more relaxed than the others, since he operated as the only refugee in an otherwise Tanzanian tailoring shop. On the other hand, palpable tension existed in Pastor Albert's shop between John, William, and Luka, caused in part by the conflicting Tanzanian personae each had created. They had all developed a strategy for presenting themselves as Tanzanians in public according to individual perceptions of danger in their immediate surroundings, and these perceptions often clashed.

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Satan's City

Perhaps no aspect of African refugee society and culture is as overlooked by researchers and most humanitarian relief agencies as the refugees' religious lives. This may also apply to religious studies: Pirouet, for example, observed that she was "not aware that theology [had] ever addressed itself to [the refugee] phenomenon" (1996:82). For young Burundi refugees searching for opportunities outside the isolated settlements they grew up in, their Pentecostal faith, and the networks that emerged from Pentecostal congregations, played a critical role in facilitating their escape to Dar es Salaam.

The rise of Pentecostalism among Burundi refugees is actually part of a much larger demographic phenomenon: the expansion of Pentecostalism across Africa. "In Africa," Harvey Cox observed, "Pentecostal congregations ... are quickly becoming the main expression of Christianity" (1995: 15). But its arrival as "the salient sector of African Christianity today" (Gifford 1998: 33) is due in large part because Pentecostals have targeted and accommodated youth needs. One can immediately see the appeal for urban migrant and refugee youth, because Pentecostal churches, as Cox has noted, "give people a sense of dignity, a place in a community of friends which often stands as a surrogate for an extended family fractured by mobility and change" (1995: 259). Gifford, moreover, has found that the churches "re-order society for the benefit of youth," creating a bond with "many who previously would have been regarded as different" (1998: 347).

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)

Conclusion

A Second Refugee Generation

Three weeks before completing my field research in Dar es Salaam in 1992, I hired John and James to each make me a pair of pants. I could not ask William because he was visiting his family in Ulyankulu settlement, and would not return until just before I left town. John and James helped me choose the material, but I asked that they design the sort of trousers that they preferred to wear. John selected a sedate, blue-gray polyester material. The trousers had neither pleats nor cuffs, and seemed emblematic of his public persona in Dar es Salaam: practical, conservative, and intended to blend in with respectable Dar es Salaam residents. James designed a very different pair of pants. His were made of lightweight, blue-purple plaid polyester, and were both pleated and cuffed. They were also roomier than John's pair-far from the baggy style favored by the many of the machekibob in the neighborhood, but certainly leaning, if only a little, in that direction. The stylishness of the trousers that James made was signaled by the lebo he sewed into seams along one front pocket (which said "Mr. Dor") and above the back pocket (which read "Non-Iron Van Brook 65% Teturon"). It was the sort of trousers James would wear: understated but contemporary.

Price: $9

Download full chapter (PDF)