Over the last five or ten years, there has been increasing interest in multi-sited and multi-lingual research in the western Indian Ocean. Up to now, most of this scholarship has involved studies that range between the Arabian Gulf and East Africa that have been carried out by researchers with a command of both Swahili and Arabic. This book expands on that trend, but Bertz did his research in western India and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In addition to knowledge of Swahili, he also knows Gujarati. The result is a book that makes a real attempt to write a history of urban Tanzania in the twentieth century that engages with the transnational nature of the Asian population of the city.
The book consists of case studies that focus on two arenas where Dar es Salaam's Asian and African communities mixed and interacted – education and the cinema – and where questions of belonging and national identity came up repeatedly. There are four chapters devoted to these case studies. Two look at education and cinema in the colonial era and two at the same issues in the national and postcolonial era. An introduction and a chapter on ‘Diaspora and Nation’ precede these chapters.
The introduction and Chapter One (the chapter concerned with Diaspora and Nation) are the ones that stand out as a departure from conventional approaches to East African history and Indian Ocean history. There are interviews, some conducted in western India, with people who left East Africa after independence. Others left even before independence either because they had never intended to settle permanently or because of failed business ventures. One tends to think of Indian migration to East Africa as mostly a one-way process, but Bertz makes it clear that people came and went in both directions. I found these interviews to be the most compelling part of the book. They offered interesting and intensely human stories, and Bertz's analysis of them was critical but sensitive. There is also an interesting section on brides traveling to East Africa to marry Asian men that has the ring of an Amitav Ghosh novel.
The four chapters that deal with education and cinema are illuminating, but read like a more conventional history of race and urban life in colonial Africa than do the first two chapters. Oceanic connections appear and events in India sometimes shape events in Dar es Salaam, but one gets the sense that these chapters derive largely from archival material found in Tanzania. Despite being somewhat more conventional, these four chapters offer an excellent history of race and urban life in Dar es Salaam. Schools and theaters were both sites over which Indians, Africans, and the state struggled. The colonial state sought to provide or permit education and entertainment that was suitable to each race. Thus for Indians there was education that created clerks and businessmen, and for Africans, training in agriculture. Cinema for Indians could be entertaining but ought not to show Europeans in a negative light or as vulnerable. For Africans, suitable films dealt with topics like hog husbandry or dipping cattle.
The colonial state was also deeply concerned to censor films that might give religious offence. In 1930 a film called The Light of Asia about the life of the Buddha was going to be shown in Dar es Salaam. Three days before the movie was supposed to open, the Sinhalese Buddhist Association protested that the movie was offensive and ultimately prevented it from being shown.
In independent Tanzania many of the same dynamics persisted. The nationalist government was anxious to provide all Tanzanians with equal education and to end segregation by race. But the complexities of religious divisions and the correlation between religion, race, and community made that task almost impossible. Similarly, the independent government tried to create an indigenous film industry that would produce suitable socialist fare, but what little they produced was largely rejected by theater goers.
The book concludes with the video revolution that killed off the big urban cinemas, while liberalization and structural adjustment resulted in an expansion of private education that is self-segregated in ways that are reminiscent of the colonial era. Just as the author cannot quite seem to reconcile the diasporic parts of his narrative with the nationalist elements of it, so too Tanzania has not yet resolved its relationship to the Indian Ocean world.
