This well-researched and well-written book adds to the expanding bookshelf on the history of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in a number of important ways. First, it centers on and demands a nuanced reconsideration of the brief period of German control over the city as playing a vital role in establishing the spatiality of the colonial city. Second, Hege works to examine “colonial urbanism from the middle” (12) by focusing on intermediary agency of African, Arab, and South Asian communities in the town both before and during German rule.

The book’s origins in Hege’s dissertation have been well concealed, through extensive revisions and further research. However, strengths of relying on that dissertation as the backbone of the book lie in the rigorous methodology and the effectiveness of the literature review. The book engages with and draws upon the literature on East African history, geography, and anthropology, while also connecting with the historiography of African urban studies and colonial studies more broadly. Hege’s self-professed “bad habit of wanting to see and read everything in archives” (viii) may have slowed his progress on the dissertation, but it certainly deepens the book.

There are some curious aspects to the book. First and foremost, Hege uses the seemingly odd spelling, Daressalam, in the title and throughout the text, to refer to “the Omani ‘stone town’ adjacent to Mzizima [the preexisting Zaramo settlement] in the eastern harbor” from 1865 to 1885 as well as the city during German rule from then until 1917. This is to distinguish the space from the modern city and the town under British rule (1920–61), spelled Dar es Salaam (xvii). This can take some getting used to for readers, whether one is very familiar with the city or not. There are also a few of what Hege himself calls “persisting head-scratcher formulations and sentences with unnecessary jargon” (ix)—but they are far less frequent than Hege’s phrasing might suggest.

The book’s opening pages establish both the centrality of the colonial intermediaries, through Hege’s narrative of the Aga Khan’s 1899 visit to Daressalaam, and the engaging quality of the writing. While the Introduction then moves toward the more conventional opening strategies of connecting the book to wider literatures, detailing the methodologies and source materials, and providing a chapter overview, it does so clearly and efficiently. I found Chapter One exceedingly valuable because it offers a comparative lens on German colonial cities in Africa that is quite rare in English-language histories of European colonial urbanism in Africa. It is fascinating to juxtapose Douala, Swakopmund, Windhuk, Lomé, and Dar es Salaam through this lens. Ultimately, Hege uses this to highlight how useful an approach can be to Dar’s history that centers “how East Africans constructed the city and renegotiated urban space through their long history of hosting guests, strangers and even occupiers” (43). Chapter Two then builds on that point with its careful focus on Mzizima, the preexisting largely Zaramo/Shomvi settlement, adjacent to where first Zanzibar’s Omani rulers and then German colonizers established the modern city. Hege uses multiple sources to give a nuanced picture of Mzizima that troubles stereotypes about East African coastal urbanism as either Arab, Swahili, or African historically, as he notes the “social and ethnic heterogeneity” (66) that characterized the place for the first half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter Three covers the violent and destructive second half of that century and the disappearance of Mzizima that paved the way for “building the colonial state” (87) by the Germans. Chapter Four delves extensively into the German planning for Daressalam. In both chapters, however, Hege is at pains to stress the agency of both East African and South Asian residents. This is one of the most important findings for me in Hege’s work: “Because Africans [and South Asians] resisted military efforts of racial segregation and social reordering in both Daressalam and the European garden city, they remained in close proximity to Europeans” (106). Contemporary Dar es Salaam is often seen as a city with rather limited segregation and income inequality (although the latter is growing by leaps and bounds), and the post-colonial socialist ideology of ujamaa (familyhood) is often credited with this achievement; Hege argues that the roots are far deeper historically, stretching back to the city’s modern origins. That line of argumentation continues through Chapter Five’s examination of German public health and sanitation planning in the last decade of the nineteenth century as well as the development of Sewa Hadji Hospital.

The last three chapters of the book are the most intriguing. While African and South Asian perspectives are presented throughout the book, they come to the fore in these chapters. Hege presents both collaboration and resistance in these communities’ engagements with the German occupiers early in the twentieth century. This is also one of the first books to carefully consider how the Maji Maji War of 1905–7 transformed Dar es Salaam, particularly through the agency of African police units. It likewise makes a novel contribution to the creation of a so-called “death zone” (175) separating races in Dar. The segregationist strategies and urban plans of 1912–14, under the guise of hygiene and sanitation, proved influential in the region—for instance in Henry Lanchester’s 1923 planning scheme for Zanzibar, which utilized the German principle of “redistribution” in racialized planning and explicitly cited Dar as “an example of good alignment.”Footnote ¹ Yet Hege shows how the plans “ultimately failed” (204), and not merely because it was to be only a few years later that the city came under British rule. The primary cause of this failure seems to have been the disregard for the agency of non-European residents, a disregard for the urban majority that lingered through the entire British colonial period as well.

The relatively short period of German colonial rule in Dar es Salaam is often overlooked or dismissed as fairly insignificant. This book accomplishes much more than simply forcing a reconsideration of that dismissal, placing the German period within a timeline of continuity from precolonial years through the Omani-Zanzibari era and into the British colonial period that followed German occupation. Throughout the past—and, I would argue, continuing through to today in Dar es Salaam, at a time of billion-dollar World Bank investments in planning for sanitation, transportation, and climate change—the sentence with which Hege ends the book rings true to the narrative in this city, as in many others across the continent: “urban identities [are]… made, and remade, by the residents of the city” (212).