Kisutu’s “registry houses” tell the Modern History of Tanzania
© arcomai I The “registry houses” of Kisutu.
Dar es Salaam, whose name in Arabic means “House of Peace”, was originally a peaceful city on the Indian Ocean, or so it must have seemed to the first Sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Majid, when he decided to move his court there in 1866. Later, his successors moved the residence back to Zanzibar, but Dar (as the city is also called in popular jargon) had meanwhile transformed from a fishing village to a small town. In 1921 it became the capital of Tanganyika (as the country was called before the unification with Zanzibar in 1964) until 1996 when it was moved to Dodoma in the center of the African country, while still remaining today the economic and administrative center of the state, as well as the capital of the homonymous region. Important government offices and foreign embassies are in fact still here.
© arcomai I The “registry houses” of Kisutu.
Today that small town is a metropolis of about 4.5 million inhabitants. A number that exhibits all its weight with the contrast between the massive modern buildings that, in various phases from unification to today, tower over the few remaining ones built in the second half of the last century. This building process is evident in the port district of Kisutu which, like an archaeological site of urban modernism, testifies to the colonial architecture formed in the century between 1860 and 1960. The Arabs were the first to arrive and build a series of artifacts along Sokoina Drive in the center of the district, including the Old Boma, the building built in 1867 as a residence for the sultan’s guests, now home to the Association of Architects of Tanzania. But it is only with the arrival of the Germans in 1891 (with the German East Africa Company, an organization founded in 1885 for the purpose of administering the colony of German East Africa) that the city will begin urban development following a plan, initially characterized by a division of the territory by ethnic groups and then developed according to a planning in line with European tradition, which is still visible today in the urban grid. Their architecture was distinguished by the use of porticoes, verandas, high ceilings to create ventilated rooms, technical devices to moderate the hot and humid climate through shading and natural ventilation. The Samora Avenue shopping center was built in this period and integrated with rows of trees.
Starting in 1916, the British took economic and political control of the city, which they retained until 1961, the year of independence from the British Empire. Having found much of the infrastructure already built by their predecessors, the new colonizers dedicated themselves to the maintenance and expansion of urbanized areas, always according to the territorial division by race, dividing the city into three separate sections: Usunguni with beautiful tree-lined streets and various services for Europeans; Uhindini to the west of the first, intended for new immigrants from India, imported by the British to perform a series of manual labor; and Uswahilini, where today stands the large market of Kariakoo (a few meters from Kisutu), without any infrastructure, for the indigenous populations. Under their power, it was the Indian social group that expanded and with it the city’s economy, giving rise to a new building season, witnessed by an invaluable heritage of late Art Deco architecture still visible in Kisutu.
© arcomai I The “registry houses” of Kisutu.
These are mainly buildings constructed over three decades between the late 1930s and the late 1960s of the last century, as can be seen from the inscriptions on the facades that bear both the date of construction and the name of the building, according to a typically British habit. Built following new typologies, dictated by new ways of working and economies linked to international trade, these houses are developed on a maximum of 4 levels with the shop and offices on the ground floor and the residences on the upper floors. Often painted with pastel colors, the houses incorporate late Art Deco stylistic elements on the facade but with evident external contaminations such as the colonial architecture developed by the Italians in the 1920s and 1930s in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia).
Salama Building 1937, Sulemani Building 1937, Cycle House 1951, Ramjiharji Mansion 1959, these are just some of the identifying details imprinted on the buildings. Like the personal details of a person, or rather of a house for people, their worn plaster, the additions, the distortion of the original intended uses also mark the end of an era that coincides with the rise to power of Julius Nyerere (1922-1999), founding father of Tanzania and President of the country from 1964 to 1985. Considered one of the most important figures in modern Africa, during his mandate, he undertook a socialist-style development project, announced with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which established the fundamental principles of African Socialism, based primarily on the collectivization process of the country’s agricultural system, known as Ujamaa. Nyerere’s goal was to bring Tanzania to self-sufficiency, energetically refusing the country’s entry into the international market logics of the Western model, unlike neighboring Kenya which instead embraced the logic of international capitalism immediately after independence. Although it may seem that he was not able to contain the pressures of foreign investors, or rather that his political legacy was not strong enough to hinder the so-called “development” of the “new colonizers” of the global market, his assumptions contributed to slow down those processes of urban transformation that still allow us to read here in Dar es Salaam a recent past that is already history.
© arcomai I The “registry houses” of Kisutu.