Dar es Salaam has been oddly neglected in the growing literature on African urban history, lacking the substantial monographs that have been written on Nairobi and Mombasa. That is now changing, however, with a spate of dissertations and journal articles by a younger generation of scholars. Of this newer scholarship, African Underclass is the first book-length study to be published in English. Burton focuses on urban policy during the British period, in particular the persistent attempts to impose colonial order on townspeople who just as persistently refused to be controlled. Indeed, as Burton tells us, before the Second World War policy-makers were uncomfortable with the very idea of an African urban population. Convinced by official ideology and political temperament that Africans belonged naturally in the countryside, colonial thinkers slotted any who turned up in town into the catch-all category of ‘detribalized natives’. Such assumptions placed serious limits on officials' knowledge of what was going on in the town, which, combined with a lack of resources and political will, only exacerbated their inability to craft effective policies of control. Their thinking began to change in the 1940s, however, as part of an overall policy shift away from a reliance on migrant labor and indirect rule and towards labor stabilization and the encouragement of limited local self-government. Planners and administrators now envisioned a place for urban Africans – but only for a narrowly defined stratum which was steadily employed in respectable work and whose embrace of colonial modernity rendered them fit to participate in the new institutions of non-tribal colonial politics. Henceforth urban planners aimed their anxieties not at all ‘detribalized natives’ but only at the ‘spivs’, ‘loafers’ and ‘undesirables’ who did not fit into their neatly imagined categories.

This greater precision (such as it was) prompted administrators to intervene more aggressively in town life, thus producing the irony at the core of Burton's analysis: government acknowledgement that Africans could play a legitimate role in the city was accompanied by a determination to control their presence more tightly than ever before. Although these renewed efforts at control were no more effective than the half-hearted ones that preceded them, their impact on individual lives was often disastrous. By the 1950s, massive ‘de-spivving raids’ were an almost daily occurrence: a battery of roadblocks and police sweeps that at their height removed over 2 per cent of the town's African population annually, ‘repatriating’ them to the countryside. Burton notes that similar notions of urban order have continued to shape policy since independence, most recently in the Tanzanian government's efforts to clear Dar of street hawkers.

Burton charts the debates that gave rise to these policies with meticulous research and admirable attention to context. (His continent-wide overview of colonial urban policy would make an excellent reading for graduate or advanced undergraduate syllabuses.) Among Burton's remarkable revelations is how close Tanganyika came to adopting strict influx controls modeled on Kenya or South Africa: town administrators urged that course of action as a way to staunch the flow of migrants, but higher-ups felt constrained by the paternalist scruples enshrined in the League of Nations mandate. Still, much of Burton's overall analysis might seem familiar to students of East African urbanism, given that he has been preceded by a substantial literature on Nairobi and Mombasa, as well as by Frederick Cooper's magisterial overview of late-colonial urban and labor policy, studies that Burton fully acknowledges. This sense of familiarity stems also from Burton's modesty: in the Introduction, after reminding us of the limitations of his largely official sources, he disavows any aim to write a history of Dar's African community. This is ‘principally a study of urban administration’, he writes, ‘though inevitably aspects of the city's social history do emerge’. Those glimpses of social history are alluring, especially when they go beyond details about housing and other infrastructure. Most arresting are the vivid descriptions of the ‘de-spivving raids’ and their targets, who were often tagged as wahuni, a pungent Swahili noun that carries connotations of vagabondage and moral unreliability. Wahuni lived by their wits on the margins of the colonial economy: those discussed by Burton included street pedlars, beggars, rickshaw boys and homeless youth. They also included casual laborers (many of whom made intentional use of ‘repatriation’ as a free ticket back to the countryside). Post-war government attempts to stabilize labor brought casual workers to the fore of militant labor agitation, including dockworker strikes that had an enormous impact on nationalist politics.

By outlawing the marginal urban economy, Burton argues, colonial statutes ‘actually creat[ed] criminals’. But given the unusually limited hegemony of the colonial state, such state-driven processes of criminalization never penetrated very deeply into African society. The book's title, then, is somewhat misleading. For American readers, ‘underclass’ is likely to conjure recent sociological fashions claiming to describe a racially defined substratum of the urban poor, trapped in pathologically criminal behavior, who are abhorred and feared by the state and by middle-class African-Americans alike. Burton, in contrast, recognizes that most Africans did not regard the wahuni's activities as morally transgressive. Even some of his British sources expressed cognizance of the inherent injustice of the wahuni raids, one describing their targets as ‘the young pioneers of the African population’. (In contrast, Burton describes meeting a contemporary municipal official who assumes a direct link between unlicensed peddling and criminality.) The violations most likely to earn ‘repatriation’ were unemployment and tax delinquence.

Little of the book, then, is actually about crime in any commonly accepted sense, and as a result we learn little about African notions of criminal transgression. To be sure, Burton compellingly describes middle-class anxieties about the wahuni and the ‘unrespectable modernity’ they represented. But he stresses the ambivalence of those anxieties, most apparent in how TANU nationalists harnessed resentments generated by the de-spivving raids as a way to garner popular support. However, that did not prevent TANU from announcing, on the eve of independence, that its own policies of urban control would continue those of the second colonial occupation. And, aside from fears of government raids, we learn little of the anxieties of the wahuni or other town poor – who, one imagines, would have constituted the bulk of the mobs that inflicted street justice for crimes that were generally regarded as transgressive.

But these are quibbles. As an analysis of urbanization and the fraught attempts to formulate and impose colonial notions of urban order, this is a welcome addition to our understanding of a great African city, from which subsequent scholars will derive immense benefit.