Sami Kiama lives in a rented room with his lover Atende and their two-year-old daughter in the Kariakoo neighborhood of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Atende longs to be married and for their daughter to be considered socially legitimate, but her father forbids the union, dismissing Sami as a worthless hooligan. Sami's low-ranking government job pays him so little and so infrequently as to be pointless, and he resorts to a life of petty thieving to support his household of three. A testament to their dire material circumstances, Sami and Atende name their daughter Sina, or “I have nothing.” Failed by society, and by kin, Sami joins a band of hardened criminals who plan and execute the burglary of the Ismaili Jamat Khan mosque, a prominent institution within the city's Asian Muslim community in downtown Dar es Salaam. Among his co-conspirators, Sami plays the role of the street-smart local with inside knowledge of the city and its networks. It is his job to bribe security guards, arrange for the tailoring of fake police uniforms, and manufacture a counterfeit key to the safe. On the night of the great heist, all goes according to plan except that a night watchman is killed. Several days later, Sami is apprehended by Inspector Sindi, a cantankerous detective known and grudgingly respected in Dar es Salaam's criminal underworld of thieves and con artists. As Sami is being hauled off to jail, he looks off in the distance and sees Atende and their daughter in the crowd and thinks wistfully about the life and the family that might have been.Footnote 1
Hammie Rajab self-published that story, Ufunguo wa Bandia, or The Counterfeit Key, in 1979. As a young man, Hammie moved from his hometown of Morogoro to the city of Dar es Salaam and he lived his everyday life in the very same streets where his fictional character Sami Kiama plied his trade. Like Sami, Hammie would have also passed by the Ismaili Jamat Khana mosque frequently in his daily comings and goings. In the 1970s, Hammie's Kariakoo apartment became a central location in a literary network whose members spent their days in each other's company, trying out different storylines on each other and writing them by hand in notebooks. They would circulate among the city's newspaper stands, checking whether any of their books had sold, or chatting and drumming up potential readers. In the evenings, they would meet at local bars and illicit homebrew beer stalls to see and be seen, and to regale each other and other listeners with stories.Footnote 2 Their small publishing companies had names and reputations, but no legal addresses or permanent locations in the city. For their mobility, semi-legality, and apparent informality, these young men were labeled “briefcase publishers” by Tanzanian literary elites.
Rajab was one of the most prolific of the briefcase publishers in Dar es Salaam's underground pulp fiction industry. His novels, like those of his colleagues, borrowed from international genres, especially the crime thriller, and featured glamorous generic characters, including spies, double-agents, beauty queens, kung fu fighters, nightclub singers, detectives, motorcycle gangs, cowboys, and criminal masterminds, yet the protagonists of the stories were nearly always young urban migrant Tanzanian men who lived apart from their parents, but did not support families of their own: much like the authors themselves. The stories unfolded in recognizable locations in Dar es Salaam: in the streets, buses, squatter neighborhoods, police stations, and beachside hotels and nightclubs, where young male heroes used their knowledge of the city to solve or commit crimes, defeat villains, seduce women, and achieve social recognition. The novellas were written in a colloquial style of Swahili, ran between 75 and 150 pages in length, and had provocative cover artwork. This underground industry emerged in 1976, following the closing of the border between Kenya and Tanzania. It expanded and thrived for ten years, and then declined over the second half of the 1980s, concurrent with the end of Tanzania's socialist era and the beginnings of market liberalization policies.
The pulp fiction publishing industry was the product of a specific moment in Africa's urban history. In the 1970s, political leaders retreated from a post-World War II developmental vision of state-led modernization while urban expansion and the urban form itself were increasingly driven and shaped by the unregulated activities of urban migrants.Footnote 3 From the mid-1970s, urbanization in Africa and the global south has been distinctive for the rapid growth of urban populations in the face of economic decline, decreasing real wages, and collapsing state capacities and infrastructures.Footnote 4 This pattern, occurring in the absence of centralized urban planning and rising standards of living, gave rise to new forms of grassroots urbanism characterized by livelihoods that were provisional, temporary, and ad hoc. This mode of urbanization in postcolonial Africa, and the global south more broadly, eludes conventional forms of documentation that appear in national archives.
This trend towards rapid, unplanned urbanization was especially pronounced in postcolonial Tanzania, which over the course of the 1970s simultaneously had one of the world's highest rates of urbanization and one of its most virulently anti-urban political regimes.Footnote 5 In the early days following Tanzania's independence from colonial rule in 1961, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the ruling party, embraced urban modernization as one of the central promises of decolonization. However, within a few years, in the context of the global economic recession and the explosion of shantytowns around Dar es Salaam, many of those earlier promises of urban modernization faded from public political discourse.Footnote 6 As of 1967, Tanzania's leaders committed to a set of socialist policies known collectively as Ujamaa, which laid out a vision of economic self-sufficiency and national sovereignty through rural development, and had as its central policy objective the reorganization of all Tanzanian citizens into collectivized rural villages.Footnote 7
The push for rural socialism was accompanied by anti-urban policies and propaganda. From the mid-1970s, the state divested money from the city and dissolved Dar es Salaam's municipal status, exacerbating the economic and infrastructural collapse already underway.Footnote 8 Ruling party officials confronted the growing number of young people in Dar es Salaam's streets through a revival of colonial era policies, routinely arresting the urban poor and unemployed and repatriating them to rural areas.Footnote 9 The TANU Youth League, the militant youth branch of the ruling party, carried out squatter demolitions and policed the movements of young urban women.Footnote 10 Politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals publicly denounced urban youth migrants as unpatriotic and as threats to national development.Footnote 11 In spite of anti-urban policies and rhetoric, mass migration occurred at an increasing pace and the squatter settlements of Dar es Salaam expanded the peripheries of the city each year.Footnote 12 Tanzania's briefcase publishers were among these urban sojourners.
More than stories, the pulp fiction novellas of socialist era Dar es Salaam are artifacts of emergent forms of male sociability, mobility, and urban belonging in this new urban era in Africa. The briefcase publishers were simultaneously a literary movement and a social and economic network created by newly arrived young men in a rapidly changing city. Both in form and content, the novellas reveal the processes by which newly arrived migrants invested in forms of urban masculinity characterized neither by the expectation of regularized wage labor and reliable state infrastructure nor by forms of prestige and security that were possible in the rural areas of their birth, but instead by the improvised construction of networks, credentials, and reputations. In printing fictional stories about urban life on pilfered paper and ink, and distributing their texts along informal circuits throughout the city, these writers not only described the infrastructure of the city, but also simultaneously created it.
As a collection of historical artifacts produced and distributed in a city whose growth and trajectory was increasingly charted outside the purview of formalized planning and investment, Dar es Salaam's pulp fiction novellas map a layer of a city expanding along a trajectory separate from that of the postcolonial nation-state. Assembled and interpreted as an archive of the postcolonial city, Dar es Salaam's socialist era pulp fiction novellas illuminate a mutually constitutive relationship between texts and the cities in which they are produced and circulate.
AFRICAN SOCIALISM AND STREET TEXTUALITY
Tanzania was one of several African nations that, in the wake of African independence movements through the late 1950s and 1960s, pursued a socialist program in an effort to ameliorate colonial legacies of inequality and poverty. Newly sovereign African nations faced material barriers to conventional Marxist modernization trajectories due to a severe lack of industrial infrastructure and skilled manpower. A seemingly impenetrable “development barrier” appeared to separate their economic path from that of the rest of the world.Footnote 13 While industrial development remained a goal for many postcolonial nations, other leaders envisioned models of socialism that could be manifested in the absence of an industrial revolution and a robust urban proletariat. Many political leaders identified agricultural labor as the key to economic and political sovereignty, arguing that, lacking the infrastructure and skilled manpower of the industrial north, African countries had to rely on their natural resources and the physical labor of their bodies to deliver collective economic uplift. Along these lines, Nyerere often argued that it was incumbent upon Africans to work harder than their Western counterparts. His rousing call, “We must run while others walk,” echoed the sentiments of other African and Third World leaders.Footnote 14
The central policy platform of Ujamaa was the organization of citizens into collectivized self-sufficient rural villages. While in 1967 Nyerere believed that Tanzanians would voluntarily relocate to rural villages, by 1973, in the face of opposition in rural areas, “villagization” was made compulsory. Those who refused to move could face punishment, and local-level government officials who did not enforce villagization would lose their posts. Meanwhile, the city continued to grow rapidly in the Ujamaa era at the same time as the formal economy went into sharp decline. Despite having one of the most virulently anti-urban regimes on the African continent, during the 1970s Tanzania was among the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world. The state addressed this problem in much the same way as their colonial predecessors: by demolishing squatter settlements, arresting the urban unemployed, and repatriating them to rural areas.
One of the ideological tenets of Ujamaa that made Nyerere distinct from socialist political leaders in other parts of the world was his argument that socialism was an extension of indigenous African cultural values. Authentic Africans, according to Nyerere, were neither materialistic nor competitive; capitalism was a foreign imposition, and expelling it from the continent would involve recovering and modernizing authentically African modes of production and communal life.Footnote 15 Within Tanzania, the fight against the deleterious consequences of capitalism and colonialism was often framed not so much as a class struggle as a struggle against racial and cultural inauthenticity and laziness. By conflating nativism and socialism, Ujamaa's political boosters could portray poor and unemployed urban youth as economic delinquents, but also as traitors to their culture and race.Footnote 16 Within this political view, rural villages fostered revolution while cities were sites of persistent colonial economic and cultural legacies. For a rural person to migrate to the city was to abandon the collective pursuit of national autonomy and to perpetuate Tanzania's indebtedness to the outside world.
Despite being vilified as culturally inauthentic and accused of shirking their traditional obligations, young urban migrant men who left their rural homes behind to seek life in the city were acting in ways that were consistent with traditions of personhood, in East Africa and beyond. For centuries prior to colonial rule, many young men throughout East and Central Africa had traveled away from home as porters, traders, or soldiers during their adolescence in order to seek distinction, wealth, and a reputation as part of their successful transition to adulthood.Footnote 17 In the nineteenth century, with the extension and intensification of long-distance trade routes into East and Central Africa from the coast, young men traveled to Indian Ocean port cities with the caravan trade, working for cash wages as porters or seasonal laborers. Control and distribution of newly available commodities could potentially allow them to bypass generational hierarchies and attain the trappings of male adulthood—through the rights to land, marriage, economic dependents, and to speak in public—which were controlled by elders.Footnote 18 Within coastal East African cities, the visible display of imported commodities was a way for urban newcomers, particularly enslaved peoples, to attain the trappings of urban citizenship and “civilized” status.Footnote 19 As Prestholdt demonstrates, imported luxury goods were embedded in social relationships and were necessary to the construction of a socially viable public identity.Footnote 20 Over the course of the colonial era, Africans had increasing access to the cash economy, allowing even greater numbers of young men to challenge the authority of elders and chiefs.Footnote 21 These generational politics, in which young men sought paths to prosperous adulthood while elder men struggled to control those pathways, informed postcolonial politics in East Africa and throughout the continent. Postcolonial African political leaders frequently drew on gerontocratic and paternalistic idioms to express their authority, and young men often made claims on the state by invoking the obligations of senior men towards junior men while attempting to forge paths to adulthood on their own, through other means.Footnote 22 Ironically, political leaders portrayed young men as cultural traitors for acting in ways that were consistent with deeper generational histories, while politicians who spoke of the traditional deference of rural African youth toward their elders drew on tradition selectively, voicing generational ideologies that obscured the intense struggles that had long characterized these relationships.
In this context of widespread vilification and criminalization of migrant youth, the content of the novellas reveal a space in public culture for the valorization of the social role of the urban migrant. Gyan Prakash has argued that, across cultural contexts, the genre of noir fiction produces a “mode of interpretation, which ratchets up a critical reading of specific historical conditions to diagnose crisis and catastrophe.”Footnote 23 Indeed, Hammie Rajab's Ufunguo wa Bandia appropriates the Western genre of the crime thriller and uses it to recast questions of urban citizenship and criminality in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. By offering a sympathetic portrayal of young men during an era when the dominant political rhetoric denounced urban youth as threats to the nation, Rajab used the crime thriller to create a crime counter-narrative in which urban ills are caused not by youth delinquency, but by systemic poverty, a lack of opportunities, and the failures of elder, powerful men to meet their obligations to foster younger generations. In the imagined community created between author and audience, the Swahili pulp novella opened a new space for a politics of urban youth subjectivity.
Yet Hammie Rajab and his contemporaries were doing more than critiquing existing urban social relations; they were simultaneously forging new ones. In addition to representing city life, these novellas were active components of the city itself. In developing this line of analysis, I draw on Karin Barber's anthropological approach to texts, which argues that texts are forms of social action. Authors use them to construct social relationships and publics. Texts reveal historical durability because they rely on social convention, defined relationships between author and audience, and the expectations each has of the other. At the same time, texts reveal change over time as they are reproduced, transformed, and reworked to meet changing circumstances. In their combination of convention and innovation, texts reflect the constraints and possibilities of the worlds in which they are produced.Footnote 24 Along similar lines, Derek Peterson has identified “creative writing” as a topic of historical inquiry, defining creativity not in terms of artistic merit, but in terms of how, through the act of writing, historical actors compose new publics, communities, and constituencies. Peterson argues that the division between fiction writing and seemingly more mundane kinds of writing—such as translation, bookkeeping, and epistolary exchange—is artificial, and he calls on historians to investigate the ways in which more quotidian forms of writing and reading are socially productive. Building on Barber's and Peterson's insights, and putting them to work as tools for urban historical inquiry, I argue that Swahili pulp novellas reveal not only representations and interpretations of urban life, but also the practical action of composing urban social networks, publics, and spatial practices.Footnote 25
This approach to textuality sheds new light on how everyday people have made lives and livelihoods in cities in the era of state collapse and economic crisis since the second half of 1970s, especially in the global south.Footnote 26 Following on the heels of an era of optimism and urban investment across Africa, the oil shocks of the mid-1970s and the decline in state capacity over the course of the 1970s coincided with rapid urban growth in Africa. This urban expansion, occurring largely separate from the development agenda of states, consisted mostly of squatter settlements whose inhabitants relied on non-wage forms of income. In describing this urban era, Jane Guyer identifies destabilization as a defining characteristic of African urban life.Footnote 27 Similarly, Abdoumaliq Simone has argued that, in such a situation of instability, people and the web of social relationships in which they are embedded become the most reliable form of infrastructure.Footnote 28 Throughout the 1970s, migrants across the global south were confronted with the question: what did it mean to plan one's life in an unplanned city?
As a collection of texts, the pulp fiction novellas of socialist Tanzania show the processes by which migrant men reworked older ways of attaining adulthood by investing their labor and resources in the cultivation of urban reputations and social networks. Investments in urban literary reputations departed from the kinds of distinction that would have carried weight back in migrants’ natal rural communities, where access to land, livestock, and gerontocratic authority formed the pathways to social advancement. At the same time, this literary movement embodied an understanding of literacy and authorship that departed from earlier associations of reading and writing with Christianity, educational credentials, and the expectation of modern salaried work. Just as intimate knowledge of the city and an ability to hustle was what made his fictional protagonist Sami Kiama a skilled criminal and a sympathetic protagonist, a similar set of skills are what made Hammie Rajab a successful pulp fiction writer and a prosperous and influential inhabitant of a changing city.
This urban ethos was embedded in both the form and content of the textual artifacts that briefcase publishers created. The authority and prestige of the Swahili pulp novelist extended beyond the literary merit of the text to encompass the artist's ability to produce a physical object, eked out of the city's informal networks in the context of dramatic material scarcity. As a product, the Swahili pulp fiction novella revealed an urban network of producers and consumers, displayed both in the books’ content and in their form. To be sure, Hammie Rajab's audience admired him for his thrilling plots and terse dialogues. But beyond this, to hold the book in one's hands, to see the dedication page, the words of praise printed on the back cover, the poor quality paper, the Dar es Salaam Swahili slang, the text riddled with typos, and the hand-drawn cover artwork was to be aware of the labor and numerous social connections that would be required to produce and circulate a book in the black market at a time when the state attempted to control publishing, entertainment, and urban life. Rajab fashioned his name into a byline, emblazoned his image on the back cover of each novella, and displayed his network of writers and publishers in the dedications, in cameo appearances in the narrative, and in blurbs on the back covers. His literary reputation was a durable kind of prestige that took shape outside of ruling party networks.
In this context, Dar es Salaam's pulp fiction novellas reveal a network that was simultaneously social, literary, and economic. In a city in which urban dwellers increasingly could not rely on the state to meet basic survival needs, these novellas reveal forms of authority and community that were dispersed into the city, through its social and economic networks. These linkages formed a loose structure of urban belonging at a time when other kinds of urban infrastructure and social security became unreliable.Footnote 29 Read as forms of social action, these texts reveal the forms of authority, community, and wealth that governed life in the city for urban newcomers, and the role of those newcomers in the transformation of the city. While these texts illuminate how the authors constructed and addressed their intended readership, they do not reveal the identity of the readers. The question of how readers interpreted, responded to, and used the novellas is important, but that question is beyond the scope of the sources, and therefore of this essay.
MASS LITERACY AND THE RISE OF DAR ES SALAAM'S BRIEFCASE PUBLISHERS
Jumaa Mkabarah was born in 1946 in Muheza, a town in the foothills of the Usambara Mountains of northeastern Tanzania. Like many Muslim children at the time, Mkabarah attended Islamic school in his early childhood years and later attended one of the local Catholic secondary schools. During the late colonial years in Tanganyika—the territory that would later become Tanzania—there was an official push to encourage literacy and writing among African students, and Mkabarah excelled in this area of his studies.Footnote 30 When Tanganyika won its independence from colonial rule in 1961, young literate men like Mkabarah were positioned to take up salaried jobs in the city, as government and private organizations began to Africanize their ranks. After finishing his studies, Mkabarah moved to Dar es Salaam where he spent several years working for Radio Tanzania before taking a position as an editor at the Tanzania headquarters of the East African Literature Bureau: a company based in Nairobi, Kenya with offices in Kampala, Uganda and Dar es Salaam. While working there, he published several novels and plays, and became a key player in Dar es Salaam's burgeoning literary scene. For young Tanzanian writers seeking to publish their work, Jumaa Mkabarah became an important person to know. Many young writers who went on to become local celebrities, such as Elvis Musiba, Hammie Rajab, Edi Ganzel, and Kajubi Mukajanga, got their start with Mkabarah's assistance.
Following Tanzania's independence in 1961, the state promoted mass literacy as a central objective of the new postcolonial nation. Tanzania in the late 1960s and early 1970s was one of the world's poorest nations, yet according to national testing figures reported by UNESCO, the Tanzanian literacy rate had risen from 33 percent at the beginning of Ujamaa in 1967 to 79 percent by its end in 1986.Footnote 31 Beyond imparting the skill of reading, the literacy program had specific aims: to cultivate the ideals of development and socialism in its readership, while discouraging cultural influences deemed foreign or capitalistic.Footnote 32 In support of this vision, the state built a publishing apparatus to print textbooks and moralistic fiction on developmental themes. One component of the program was the publishing of fictional novellas, or “development fiction,” which were meant to entertain, but also improve and modernize the reader. These books had mafundisho, or “lessons” on the back covers and conveyed the point of view of literacy teachers and social workers, whose task it was to cultivate socialist citizenship in Tanzania's growing literate masses. These texts reflect Nyerere's anti-urbanism, portraying rural areas as virtuous and prosperous and cities as impoverished and immoral. Often, the plot was driven by the redemption of a delinquent urban-dweller upon their return to an Ujamaa village.Footnote 33
Meanwhile, opportunities to print more popular forms of literature were gradually closed down.Footnote 34 Young fiction writers like Mkabarah and his cohort responded by sending their manuscripts over the border to Nairobi, both to the East African Literature Bureau and a range of smaller private publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines located in Kenya's more advanced and diverse publishing infrastructure. They wrote in Swahili, primarily for Dar es Salaam audiences, and imported their books back to be sold in Dar es Salaam.
The collaborative relationship between Dar es Salaam popular fiction writers and Nairobi publishing houses ended in 1976 when the collapse of the East African Community and the subsequent closing of the border between Kenya and Tanzania cut off Tanzanian writers from their patrons and publishing networks in Nairobi.Footnote 35 The following years saw an explosion of small independent publishing companies in Dar es Salaam. Jumaa Mkabarah began to self-publish his own crime thriller novellas under the company name Utamaduni Publications. Other new publishing endeavors included John Simbamwene's Jomssi Publications, Hammie Rajab's Busara Publications, Edi Ganzel's Tamasha Publications, and Kajubi Mukajanga's Grand Arts Promotion.Footnote 36 These started out as small-scale operations run out of the homes of individuals, families, or groups of friends, or out of stationary shops whose main trade was in office supplies. By 1978, there were at least eighty small-scale independent publishers operating in Dar es Salaam, each operation typically consisting of between one and three people.Footnote 37 Young writers peddled their books out of briefcases on the streets and in marketplaces, and through networks of newsstands and bookstalls, earning them the nickname “briefcase publishers.”Footnote 38
At the start of their publishing careers, the briefcase publishers were recent school-leavers in their late teens to mid-twenties. By the mid-1970s, John Simbamwene, Edi Ganzel, Jumaa Mkabarah, Hammie Rajab, and Elvis Musiba had already established a following of readers, and by the end of the 1970s, a new generation of writers including Kajubi Mukaganja, Ben Mtobwa, Jackson Kalindimya, and Agoro Anduru joined their ranks. Nearly all of the writers were born between 1946 and 1960.Footnote 39 The earlier generation of briefcase publishers who came of age as writers in the early days of Ujamaa had been educated in the colonial education system, were secondary students at political independence, and were young educated men of around twenty years old in 1967, when African socialism was first adopted as official policy. The younger generation of writers who got their start in the context of economic decline had been students during the early years of African socialism.
The briefcase publishers shared in common the experience of urban migration in the era of Ujamaa villagization. As outsiders in the city, none of them could boast connections to older forms of urban authority that came through long-term membership in the religious and social networks of the city. Moreover, the writers had gone to secondary school, but none had been able to secure admission to the prestigious University of Dar es Salaam. Most of them had vocational training and many worked as civil servants during the 1970s. Though they had education, employment, and high expectations, their experience of urban life was one of frustrated ambitions. They were part of the urban working class that watched the value of their salaries decline by 83 percent during the final years of Ujamaa, and were part of a larger group that left government jobs en masse during those years.Footnote 40
In interviews that I conducted in 2013, several of these former briefcase publishers recalled the production process. Dar es Salaam's new men of letters met in each other's rented rooms during the day to read each other's manuscripts and work out plot lines until evening, when they would head over to the bars and beer-brewer stalls to continue the conversations into the night. Hammie Rajab's apartment in Kariakoo became one of the central nodes in the social network. They would write their first drafts by hand in a notebook, and then bring the notebooks to a secretary—typically a female acquaintance with highly coveted access to a typewriter through her office job—who typed up the manuscript after hours at work. After receiving the typed manuscript, the author showed it to the other writers, marked up the typed manuscript, and then made another handwritten copy based on the changes. The secretary made a final copy, and then the author would enlist an illustrator to design the cover artwork.
Most briefcase publishers were financed by a patron, who fronted the costs and took a cut of the profits, and in the absence of legal agreements there was often an undercurrent of suspicion in these dealings. When it came time to print the books, the briefcase publishers had two options. The first was to take their manuscripts to one of Dar es Salaam's few small privately owned printing presses, such as the Nayani Bookstall in central Kariakoo whose main trade was in producing stationary or Islamic texts. One of the fears of briefcase publishers was piracy, since they often only had one handwritten or typed manuscript at any given point in the process, and no legal agreement securing their right to their material. It was in their interest to get a product to market quickly before pirated copies became available and outran their own supply, and so speed and efficiency was often privileged over quality in the editing process. When working with the owners of small printing shops, who sometimes also financed their endeavors, the briefcase publishers feared getting swindled. For example, as several writers explained, there was a risk that the printer would receive a request to print three thousand copies, but would then print an extra thousand to sell without the knowledge of the author.Footnote 41 Many of the briefcase publishers struggled to become autonomous from these small, privately owned printing shops.
The second option was to take the manuscript to one of the state cooperative printing presses. To go through the state printing presses, either Printpak or KIUTA, entailed another set of risks. Due to chronic shortages of materials and internal inconsistencies in the running of the factories, the official turnover time for even a small print job would typically be from eighteen months to four years.Footnote 42 In addition to the immediate financial strains this put on the publishers, by the time a manuscript was printed the initial buzz about a new novella would have likely died down. For this option to work well, the briefcase publisher needed a connection inside the print factory who could, often for a fee, push his manuscript to the front of the queue.Footnote 43 The final product was typically between 75 and 150 pages long, printed on thin paper folded in half and held together with staples at the seam. Briefcase novellas typically had an initial print run of between three thousand and ten thousand copies, and the books by the more popular authors would typically sell out in less than a month.Footnote 44 They sold cheaply, relative to other forms of entertainment. By the early 1980s, they sold for about one tenth of the cost of imported books in English, and three to four times as much as one ticket for a night at one of the less expensive worker cooperative dancehalls.Footnote 45 One could purchase one or two of these novellas for about the same cost of buying the daily newspaper for a month or two, depending on the newspaper.Footnote 46
The briefcase publishers distributed copies to itinerant newspaper hawkers and street corner book vendors around the city. They negotiated arrangements with truck drivers to send gunnysacks filled with copies of their novellas on lorries and buses headed upcountry to be sold by vendors in other markets, hoping that based on the strength of their relationships, either the books or the money paid for them would find their way back to them in the city a few weeks or months later. Often, the writers themselves circulated through the city selling their books directly to customers. Once purchased, the books would continue to circulate among readers. Mulokozi, a Dar es Salaam sociologist who conducted research on reading and publishing in Dar es Salaam in the late 1970s, cited the popularity of these novellas among young male school-leavers in the city. He explains that copies of books would be traded among friends in the neighborhood, circulating until the copy, printed with low-quality thin materials to begin with, was worn down.Footnote 47 This practice of trading and circulating books suggests that the readership of these novellas was significantly larger than the number of printed copies. This also explains why the books are rarely preserved, except by accident. They performed their work on behalf of the authors by circulating from hand to hand, rather than by staying still.
ARTIFACTS OF MASCULINITY, MOBILITY, AND REPUTATION
Jumaa Mkabarah, recalling his days writing and working as an editor for the East Africa Literature Bureau, remarked that in those days he could expect royalties and a modest advance for his work. He estimated that he would earn around 3,000 Tsh (Tanzanian shillings) for the initial print run of a novella in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To demonstrate what this meant in material terms, Mkabarah explained “a bati (a single corrugated iron sheet) was 800 Tsh.”Footnote 48 That Mkabarah would remember and communicate the value of his past earnings through the measure of urban real estate and specifically bati is telling, for a house with a bati roof was one of the most prominent symbols of the modernizing aspirations of urban Africans in Tanzania's era of decolonization. While writing was, for Mkabarah's generation, a middle-class profession that might literally put a roof over one's head and allow a literate person entrance into a particular kind of urban respectability and permanence, to be a briefcase publisher was not a profitable endeavor, nor did the young underground publishers expect it to be. As briefcase publishing replaced the larger publishing houses that had their roots in late colonial developmentalism,Footnote 49 the task of writing novellas went from being perceived as a middle-class profession to being something more improvisational. This was not a literary movement of middle-class breadwinners, but of mostly single urban male renters and squatters. Though they did not have the same overheard costs as publishers that sold their books in bookstores, after paying back their loans with interest the briefcase publishers usually barely broke even for all of their efforts. The payoff was in gaining a reputation, or “jina fulani”—a name.Footnote 50 “We were basically hustlers,” said Kajubi. “But everyone knew us, and that was good.”Footnote 51 The novella, as an object, was a technical means for enhancing reputation.
For this new generation of writers, as expectations of good paying salaried jobs waned, reputation was increasingly a kind of currency. The creation and valorization of urban reputations differed from notions of authority in the East African rural communities from whence Dar es Salaam's urban migrants came, where the right to “be heard” at public gatherings was acquired by becoming a categorical male adult with property and resources to disperse to junior and female dependents.Footnote 52 At the same time, it also differed from TANU developmentalist conceptions of authority, in which ruling party designations of expertise, articulated as a paternalistic responsibility towards ignorant but virtuous national peasantry, was what bestowed the right to speak authoritatively in public.Footnote 53 The novellas published by Rajab, Mkabarah, Kajubi, and Ganzel had on their back covers boasts about the skill and social network of the storyteller. For example, the back cover of Edi Ganzels’ novella Kitanzi contains the following text: “Hammie Rajab was reading it on a plane, and got so caught up that he flew to Kigali instead of his intended destination at Msamvu! He'll never make fun of Ganzel again! Geranija was reading it on the daladala and forgot to get off, and as a result, was charged a higher fare. Jumaa Mkabarah started to read the book while shaving, and forget to finish shaving the second half of his beard. Now he is walking around with half a beard!”Footnote 54
This mode of authorship was about pleasure and surprise and seduction rather than the improvement of the reader. At the same time, the blurbs on the back covers of books convey the attempt of the writer to build a reputation through the praises of other notable young writers. In addition, the briefcase publishers dedicated their books to their friends who were writers and staged cameo appearances of both fictional characters from other books and sometimes the authors themselves in the novellas. Through these textual practices, writers made their social networks visible.
The novellas were both about, and productive of, male friendship that took shape in public urban spaces of consumerism. Consider, for example, a passage from Ben Mtobwa's Dar es Salaam Usiku, or Dar es Salaam by Night, conveying the perspective of a female character, Rukia, who is out at a nightclub. Published in 1990, after the heyday of briefcase novellas had passed and shortly before Mtobwa's death, a stray paragraph in the novella expressed affection and nostalgia for the literary networks of writers in the city:
The table was now occupied by five men. One of them, Rukia recognized. Wasn't that Sam Kitogo? Yes, isn't that the stout young man, the writer of books? And that one, isn't that Hammie Rajab? Rukia had never met him, but she didn't need to be told. His face was recognizable from his books and magazines. Without a doubt, that must be Kajubi Mukajanga, because he and Hammie never left each other's sides. Those others … that one maybe Nicco ya Mbajo … and that one could be John Rutayisingwa. Rukia saw the barmaid approach them to take their order. Kitogo said something that made the barmaid laugh. Hammie said something that made her giggle. Now, she was stroking Kitogo's beard. And when she left to go fetch their beers, her gait was different. She tossed and swayed her ass. The writers laughed and toasted their glasses.Footnote 55
As this passage implies, the intense and close friendship between Kajubi Mukajanga and Hammie Rajab, despite their age difference of around twenty years, was well-known even beyond their immediate social circles. Hammie Rajab and his childhood friend Edi Ganzel published a book together, and according to their families, at times when Ganzel's excessive drinking led him to financial difficulty Hammie often helped him with loans and with publishing opportunities.Footnote 56 When asked how they became writers, briefcase publishers describe their education and their literary and cinematic influences, but they place equal or more emphasis on the process of arriving in the city, seeking patronage, and becoming part of the male social network of other briefcase publishers. Theirs was a social and economic role as much as it was an artistic one.
Women were markedly absent from this network of pulp fiction writers. If the requirements of participation in this industry were literacy, cosmopolitan style, and entrepreneurialism, there should have been many women among the ranks of briefcase publishers. Literacy and education rates were raised dramatically in the 1960s through the 1980s for both women and men.Footnote 57 Women wrote and published in other genres, including Christian advice and prayer books, journalism, and development fiction. Many of the most prominent writers in the development fiction genre, published by the Tanzania Publishing House, were women, as were many of the most celebrated writers in residence at the University of Dar es Salaam. In their novellas, short stories, and plays, educated elite women such as Penina Muhando, Martha Mvungi, and Zainab Mwanga wrote eloquently on the themes of women's emancipation, gender violence, and economic vulnerability.Footnote 58
This relationship between reputation, social networks, and mobility was productive for men in ways that were different than they could be for women, since the characteristics that created positive recognition for young men had different connotations and consequences for women. The networks of writers manifested in public spaces, such as nightclubs, bars, coffee shops, and street corners, or at bookseller and newspaper stands. While both the physical and social mobility of men was celebrated as a sign of modernity and collective progress, for women such ease of movement was widely interpreted as a broader sign of social decline, promiscuity, and the negative effects of Westernization.Footnote 59 The ability of the briefcase publishers to produce and “move” a novella, and the heroism of the protagonists of the novellas themselves, was based on an ability to move through urban space, and to be seen and known. Narratives of female mobility and public visibility, produced by men and women writers alike, were markedly different. For example, a powerful short story Martha Mvungi published in the University of Dar es Salaam literary magazine Darlite describes a girl of little means who leaves school in rural Njombe to follow a lover to Dar es Salaam. Once there, her lover abandons her in the city with no money or social connections. The story describes her desperate struggle to return home, with only a few shillings in her possession. The protagonist must rely on the driver of an oil truck making a delivery from the port of Dar es Salaam to Zambia. The author conveys her protagonist's terror when she gets into the passenger seat of the truck, noting his larger physical stature and insisting that he only drive her as far as her money is worth so that she does not owe him anything.Footnote 60 Whether sympathetic to the women as victims or critical of them as vamps, portrayals of female mobility in the city connoted dependence, vulnerability, and sexual danger.
The success of a briefcase publisher emerged out of an interdependent relationship between urban knowledge, reputation, and mobility. For young aspirant men, though not for women, images of mobility within the city, and the appearance of having access both to the public spaces of the city and the world beyond, fed into a positive reputation for being knowledgeable about the city, its entertainments, its social networks, and its economic possibilities. Stories about hijacking planes, detectives moving throughout the city to investigate crimes, and heroes and villains traveling on foot and on motorcycles around the nightclubs of the city resonated with a fantasy that valorized male mobility as a sign of Afro-modernity. Moreover, describing the public spaces of the city where their stories were set and money was exchanged suggested urban social connection in ways that carried a positive connotation for men. This reputation for mobility and urban sociality was embedded in the novella through blurbs, images, and dedication pages. The books are artifacts of male sociability, conveying not only the story within them, but also the social networks, mobility, and cosmopolitan knowledge required to produce that story. A book was not merely the product, but also an amplifier of a social process that would continue after the reader reached the end of the last page. The book moved, congealed reputation and urban knowledge, and displayed networks, and it moved though the city in much the same way its male authors and fictional characters aspired to.
LOVERS AND FIGHTERS IN THE SOCIALIST CITY
The content of the novellas mirrored the social networks in which it was embedded, celebrating in its fictional heroes many of the same characteristics that made a briefcase publisher successful. Though they drew on fantastical elements from popular literary and film genres, the briefcase publishers combined them with realistic challenges of urban life as would have been encountered by a young male newcomer, away from his closest kin networks, seeking to create new kinds of social bonds in the city.Footnote 61 Like the authors, the protagonists of pulp novellas are young literate urban migrants, typically between the ages of eighteen and their mid-twenties. Many of them appear to us in the novellas reading newspapers and books and exchanging letters with their lovers, affirming the prestige of literacy.Footnote 62 They are self-consciously modern, smoking cigarettes, going out dancing, and paying special attention to how they and their lovers dress, favoring cosmopolitan styles. They refer to their aspirations to be “watu wa kisasa,” or “up-to-date people,” and it is this aspiration, and the challenges of attaining it, that drives the plot.Footnote 63
The writers valued their mobility within Dar es Salaam, and the theme of physical mobility is extended and wildly embellished in the novellas. Young protagonists move around the city on motorcycles or in cars, or else looking jealously at those cars, which they identify in the text by precise make and model. The characters also move between rural and urban areas around Tanzania, traveling on trains and buses and negotiating their enduring obligations to their rural relatives.Footnote 64 In some cases, the protagonists move across national borders, participating in liberation struggles of other African nations or, in some cases, smuggling.Footnote 65 The Benzes of wealthy men and the motorcycles of heroes and villains move quickly and efficiently through the city, to the posh hotel lobbies and nightclubs, while buses and public transit grind slowly through the city's disintegrating roads.
Despite valorizing ideals that were at odds with the official Tanzanian vision of citizenship, the writers signaled their loyalty to the cause of African national liberation movements. Perhaps the best-known example of this is the spy Willy Gamba, the hero of Musiba's novels. Willy Gamba is fashionably dressed, irresistible to women, and a major player in the nightclub scene at Dar es Salaam, but when he is called to duty, he works protecting Africa from its enemies, fighting on the side of freedom fighters from FRELIMO against Portuguese spies, helping to find assassins responsible for the deaths of South African freedom fighters, or protecting Tanzania's natural resources from nefarious foreign diamond smugglers.Footnote 66 Sipekta (Inspector) Beneza of Jumaa Mkabarah's Marehemu Susanna comments to his partner how much better life is in Dar es Salaam since the departure of colonialists, while Joram Kiango, the dapper hero of Ben Mtobwa's series of novellas, makes his living undermining plots against the Tanzanian government. Kajubi's controversial novella Mpenzi, a highly critical piece about the abuses of the Tanzanian military police, begins with epigraphs quoting both Mao Zedong and Agostinho Neto. Through these references the authors signaled their political sympathies, which were sometimes central to the plot and at other times obliquely mentioned as an aside.Footnote 67
The authors displayed their knowledge of global popular culture through the themes and motifs they deployed in their Dar es Salaam stories. By the 1950s, cinemas playing Bollywood and Hollywood films were key sites of leisure,Footnote 68 and crime thriller films and pulp fiction paperbacks were available in Tanzanian bookshops and libraries, particularly the detective novels of James Hadley Chase, Ian Fleming, and Peter Cheyney.Footnote 69 Musiba's Willy Gamba, for example, was a spy and man of international mystery in the style of James Bond.Footnote 70 Mkabarah and Anduru told stories about criminals and their victims using the format of courtroom drama.Footnote 71 Detectives dust for fingerprints to catch the culprits, drive around in police cars, and keep elaborate files on criminals.Footnote 72 Ndibalema's novel includes car chases, shoot-outs, and a gang of villains dressed like cowboys, derived from “spaghetti western” films,Footnote 73 while Ganzel's criminal gangsters ride motorcycles and hijack planes. Kassam and Mukajanga's novellas, written in the era of Bruce Lee, cast young Tanzanian men in the role of homegrown kung fu experts who, despite their poverty, are able to defeat wealthy villains using their physical and mental training.
By situating their protagonists within circuits of cosmopolitan culture and pan-Africanist politics, briefcase novelists posed urban aspirant man at the center of the project of African modernity. Yet, while fantasizing about young African men as heroes on a global stage, they also portrayed the intimate and local struggles of young men in search of love and adult respectability. The novellas contrasted modern progressive urban “lovers” with conservative rural relatives. This theme of intergenerational tension spoke to the experiences of many urban youth in the Ujamaa era.Footnote 74 Most urban dwellers maintained links to their rural families, and most urban squatters in Dar es Salaam at the time expected to inherit land in the rural areas where their relatives lived.Footnote 75 In many of the novellas, the modern protagonists face pressure from controlling and “traditional” parents. For example, Jumaa Mkabarah's 1974 novella Kizimbani, or On the Witness Stand, tells the story of the young Rosa, who is found dead in her lover's bedroom. The lover, Joseph Gapa, is poor and comes from a family of little means, which is why Rosa's family rejects him as an mshenzi or “uncivilized person,” even though he is hardworking and virtuous. After Rosa's death is made public, her father viciously attacks Joseph with a machete, but in the end we learn through a note left by Rosa that the young woman had committed suicide after learning that her father has forbidden her from marrying the man she loved. Joseph Gapa is proved innocent in court and is carried out of the courtroom on the shoulders of the crowd: a hero of love and youth.Footnote 76
Writers like Rajab, Mkabarah, and Ganzel wrote about the struggles of young men to start families and attain adulthood by dramatizing their conflicts with conniving women and “backwards” elders. By the late 1970s, writers began to pit their characters against another infamous archetypal villain: the sugar daddy. The sugar daddy was an old or middle-aged man who was able to use his wealth to take advantage of young women, typically schoolgirls, for sex. Unlike the conservative rural elder, the sugar daddy was an urban character that possessed modern forms of wealth. They prey on young girls who are physically repulsed by them, but who are desperate for money, for rides in cars when public transit is unreliable, and for food when they are hungry. The sugar daddy and urban male youth were physical opposites. In contrast with physically fit young men—who play soccer or practice kung fu,Footnote 77 wear the latest fashions in second-hand clothes that accentuate their thin athletic bodies, and comb their hair into Afros—sugar daddies are soft and overweight from eating luxury foods, like chicken and chips, and from moving around the city in expensive cars rather than walking. Young men look elegant through their cosmopolitan savvy and creativity; sugar daddies simply have money and can adorn themselves with illicit finery. While the young urban male protagonist is motivated by romantic love, the sugar daddy acts from an uncontrolled lust. In these novellas of urban crime and violence, the sugar daddy is a foil for urban youth. In the novellas of this new generation of writers, the sugar daddy, rather than hooligan urban youth, is the cause of the city's moral ills.Footnote 78
In this way, the writers used cosmopolitan fashion and mobility in the telling of stories that were quite personal concerning everyday matters of love, family, and respectability. An aesthetic of heterosexual virility runs through the novellas, pushing young lovers towards each other. The male protagonists in the novellas believe in and are guided by romantic love, and the heroes suffer for the sake of romantic love.Footnote 79 They give their lovers gifts and take them out on the town, and they lose their jobs over them;Footnote 80 they betray their rural families and follow their lovers to the city;Footnote 81 they withstand abuse and torture from their romantic rivals.Footnote 82 Many of the novellas feature young women killing themselves or committing adultery because their parents married them off to older or wealthier men for the sake of money instead of emotional love.Footnote 83 Romantic love not only marked the protagonists as modern and emotionally authentic, but also offered an ideological justification for youth claims on autonomy, opportunity, and urban space.Footnote 84 Taking on the perceived greed, hypocrisy, and physical repulsiveness of sugar daddies, the conservatism and backward thinking of rural elders, and the materialistic greed of their female age-mates, young men made the case that, in a modern society, it was they who were best suited as sexual and romantic partners of young women.Footnote 85
In recasting the city as a site of male romance and heroics, young writers intervened in some of the most intense debates of the Ujamaa-era city.Footnote 86 While the dominant strand of political discourse blamed urban ills on the lust and unruly material desires of urban youth who were in need of moral re-education, the thrust of these novellas was to shift the diagnosis of urban ills from a problem of youth delinquency to other causes, be they imperialist holdovers, the agents of global capitalism, or the hardships imposed on youth by an older generation of African leaders who failed to meet their obligations to shepherd virtuous youth into respectable and productive adulthood.
In such a context, briefcase publishers suggested that kin and ruling party elders had failed them, and they looked instead to the city—its spaces, its stories, its second-hand imports—as the raw materials with which to craft new paths to manhood. The same skills that were celebrated in the fictional protagonists like Sami Kiama were those that writers emphasized in the cultivation of their own reputations: the ability to improvise in difficult circumstances and achieve notoriety and cosmopolitan elegance through urban sociability, rather than relying on the assets of rural families or on ruling party trajectories. In this sense, the content of the novellas mirrored the production process itself. It was not just the content of the novellas, but also the new kinds of public authority and urban masculinity that caused observers like the University of Dar es Salaam literature professor Euphrase Kezilahabi to express alarm about the briefcase publishers. In an address to his colleagues at an academic conference in Germany, he said: “Armed with the most dangerous weapon of half-education they demand cards, which would make them members of a class to which they think they belong. With anger they keep on spitting poisonous saliva like rabid dogs, and frenziedly snarl at every car passing by. Walking idly in the streets they go round counting stories of skyscrapers and knock at every door looking for jobs. They are furious.”Footnote 87
Kezilahabi was part of a larger cohort of literary elites from the University of Dar es Salaam that criticized the low-brow literature of the briefcase publishers.Footnote 88 Yet Kezilahabi identifies this literary movement not only by the content of their novellas, but also by the material position and aspirations of the writers in the unplanned, rapidly growing city. It was not just that the fictional representations of urban life that they produced and disseminated were distinct from the agrarian and nativist images of the socialist state, but that in the process of self-publishing their novellas, they gave their counter-narratives of the city durable form.
CONCLUSION
To be a briefcase publisher was to be more than a writer: it was to pursue an urban ethos that valorized improvisation, cosmopolitanism, and elegance in the context of constraint and scarcity. Authors projected reputations as young men who were literate, socially connected, cosmopolitan, and flexible, poised to react to, and participate in, the uneven urban economy. This urban ethos was inherent to the artistry and embedded in the novellas as artifacts. Tanzanians have not systematically preserved these texts.Footnote 89 As artifacts of the city, these books were not meant to document the self as a kind of personal archive: they were ephemeral, and they were meant to move, rather than endure. They performed their work on behalf of their creators by circulating through the city, making the names, reputations, and pictures of the authors known. As historical sources, they should be read as active components of the city in which their authors lived.
The pinnacle of this literary movement coincided with severe economic scarcity from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s—with the global economic recession, Tanzania's costly war with Idi Amin's Uganda, and the collapse of the socialist state in the early 1980s. During those years, Dar es Salaam's urban economy became increasingly unmoored from state control, since the government was unable to pay salaries that could reproduce an urban working class, and urban-dwellers increasingly looked toward non-wage forms of income for survival.Footnote 90 Meanwhile, pulp fiction novellas continued to appear on newsstands and in markets across the city during the final years of Ujamaa, even as basic items like rice, sugar, bread, and soap were unavailable. In 1985, Tanzania's socialist experiment came to a close with the resignation of Julius Nyerere and the inauguration of Tanzania's second president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi. The selling off of government parastatals, massive layoffs from government jobs, and the shrinking of the public sector led to skyrocketing unemployment in the city alongside an influx of foreign business interests, and economic disparities took visible shape in the simultaneous proliferation of skyscrapers and shantytowns. The opening of Tanzania's markets during the Mwinyi years allowed for the importation of popular cultural forms, particularly television, which had previously been banned. Dar es Salaam's briefcase publishing industry began to shrink with the collapse of socialism until it had all but disappeared by the end of the 1980s, in part because writers who had played the role of brokers and curators of cosmopolitan entertainment now faced competition from foreign imported films, music, books, magazines, and television.
During the transition from socialism, many of the briefcase publishers parlayed their reputations and connections into careers in other related fields. In the early 1980s, many started their own popular culture magazines to supplement and promote their novellas. They began by expanding their individual novella-publishing endeavors to include magazines, which featured short stories, advertisements, and human-interest news stories, as a way of supplementing their book publishing.Footnote 91 Briefcase publishers came together on the editorial boards of these new publications, many of which were named after the small publishing houses that had been started by individual young men. They made use of their networks and notoriety, advertising the books of their fellow writers in the pages of the magazines and featuring their editorial pieces about cultural events in the city. They also presented movie reviews, often printing images from Bollywood film posters on the covers, and promoted the concerts of local musicians. Some of those involved in producing these popular magazines during the 1980s would go on to become prominent journalists, filmmakers, and political cartoonists in the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote 92 With the allowance of privately owned newspapers from 1992 onward, the pulp novelists were among the first to launch Dar es Salaam's popular privately owned newspapers and news magazines.Footnote 93
The wave of novellas published between roughly 1976 and 1985 chronicles a moment in the life of an African city. In Tanzania, they reveal the forms of urban culture, economic life, and literature that were possible, paradoxically, during a time remembered for its anti-urban policies and its equation of national citizenship with rural development. As artifacts of the broader history of the continent, they reveal forms of urban belonging that emerged in the gaps between state national culture and urban cultures, which widened in the 1970s as the trajectories of African cities began to outrun the modernizing agendas of postcolonial nations. As a literary movement and an historical episode in the life of a city, the briefcase publishers illuminate a dynamic mutually constitutive relationship between texts and the city.
