Interview Photos

Mbagala again

If there was one picture so far that I wish I had, it would be of the woman’s face that I interviewed this morning. There was nothing singularly remarkable about it but it was such an evocative and beautifully aged face, one that had lived through so many of the hot seasons that I am currently melting in. One of the downfalls of having to use a translator, among so many, is that often the most eye contact that happens in an interview is between you and the translator, or the subject and the translator. Zubeda though, she looked right at me every time she talked. It took me two hours at least to get home from Mbgala today. My immediate point of reference was driving home to Corvallis from the Portland airport. Snaking, exhausting queues of traffic to go maybe twenty kilometers. Our bus took a back way through a neighborhood on the way out of town and I got to see the utter anarchy of the backstreets…three lanes of cars pushing in one direction as the other side bottlenecks into unseen roads. After sitting for four hours on a wooden stool, I thought I was going to crawl out of my skin so I got off the bus a bit early heading instead to my friend Roxanne’s apartment where I borrowed her swimsuit and slipped into the rudely hot pool as darkness set in and the bats started flying overhead. Finally. I could move my body. Such an amazing and strange day. So much languid physical discomfort juxtaposed against such rich stories. At that moment, the act of getting in the pool, my ability to do that, seemed to cement the vast differences in this world…all of them…just by getting in to the pool. The ability to reflect on difference, to have the data to reflect and the analytical training to do so, makes all the truisms about how everyone in the world is essentially the same feel like a criminal misrepresentation. Yes sure ok we are. But that gets at nothing.
Zubeda doesn’t know when she was born…she knows it was during Yange, a time of famine that Kassim tells me was around 1945. She tells me of marrying and divorcing twice, of moving to the city alone with her first child to live with her brother. Of making mattresses for a living, and having six more children…in total losing all but two out of seven. She tells me about buying her own land and marks all passages of time by who was president at the time and how hard her life was at the time…a historian’s dream…she naturally seems to think of life segmented by major historical events and regimes. It seems so selfish and unscholarly that Zubeda’s life would make me think about my own…the fact that she can’t read or sign her name but she left for the city on her own, made her own money and bought her own land…that I think about those things…and then think for some reason of listening to a song for the umpteenth time on my headphones, utterly entrenched in my own drama of happiness and identity. One is not more noble than the other, nor one more ‘evolved’. Its history though… never I ever been such a champion of my discipline. Is it amazing that the world is small enough now that we can interact and understand each other and maybe learn from each other? Or is it just shameful? Because there is no one I think who would disagree…Zubeda’s life has been hard, and mine has been easy. I’m not trying to bludgeon myself or anyone else over the head with the magnitude of difference in our lives (not just materially…but the way in which we imagine the world and live in it)…in the pool though, inserting Zubeda’s life into different historical patterns and themes…oh, I don’t know…this bird’s eye view while floating placidly, looking upwards…it all sounds so trite. its there though. The difference is palpable, interesting, powerful...something to utterly respect. The difference is an outrage, the difference is a blessing.

Mbagala

This last week has been exhausting in a whole new way. It has been interesting and challenging and tiring…not such a bad combination now that I’ve had a bit of a break from it. Kassim, a farmer and fisherman who lives in an area called Rufiji has become my sometimes research assistant. I think I mentioned him earlier…he has on and off for a few years now assisted a French anthropologist doing research in Rufiji and that is how I was put in touch with him. Many of the people from his region have moved into Dar es Salaam in the past forty or so years and so he set up interviews for me with people living in the neighborhood where his brother lives. These are interviews to ask people about moving into the city, what it looked like when they arrived, how they made a living, how they accessed power and water and got rid of their trash, whether the government has helped the area develop, how often they moved around and how they decided where in Dar they would live when they arrived. This is my first time doing any sort of oral history interviewing and I’ve really enjoyed it. I just wish I was able to do it without a giant language barrier. My Swahili remains nowhere near good enough to do this on my own, and Kassim’s English is enough to convey the main idea of sentences but totally lacks nuance. It is a really interesting process to get to ask people questions about their lives and their history… and while it is their lives and stories to tell, you get to ask the questions and direct the conversation…decide in some ways what is interesting. In other words, ask people questions about aspects of their lives they probably never thought were interesting or significant before.
A big part of the adventure though was simply getting out to Mbgala every day. Mbgala is a neighborhood in the south of the city on the way out of town. “peri-urban” The first day Kassim met me in town and took me out to show me where to get off the bus. You get on a mini-bus in Posta, winding through downtown towards the water past the ferries, sitting in the heat on the bus with the smell of fish filling your head, then snake out of town through enough traffic that sometimes makes the 15 kilometer trip take about an hour or longer… and then the minibus drives on a long, straight road built by the Japanese government with houses and shops crowding all the way up to the street and going back past my line of vision where there seems to be no streets. When we arrived in Mbagala the first day, and well, every day after that, I was quite a spectacle. This isn’t a neighborhood where “wazungu” (white people) come. Everyone stared open-mouthed at me, looking back over their shoulders after they had walked by. Kassim explained to me that some women leaning against their house were gossiping about whether I was Chinese or European. Kassim thought it would be trouble for me to bring my camera in so I don’t have any pictures to show but it was a neighborhood almost completely devoid of roads but rather just had walking pathways between houses. No pavement, just sand, and, while Africa generally lives up to its reputation for being a very colorful place, these concrete houses were all uniformly unpainted as people waited for enough money to paint them. It looked like…a village, I think…houses sort of clustered with communal space in the center of each cluster. Except that houses in the village are made out of mud instead of concrete. People sat around everywhere listening to the radio, women sifted through rice, made mats out of dried grass, or cooked on single propane burners…the men clustered in different areas, the old ones playing a game made out of a wooden board called Mancala.
The men I talked to were not sure what to make of me, but because I was paying them for their time (about six dollars), word got out that it was a good thing to talk to the white woman…I’m not sure what that will mean when I go back next week. Kassim is worried that it may not be safe anymore for us to go in there as word gets out that I am paying people money each time I come in. Its frustrating to face that aspect of things when the experience there so far has been so friendly, hospitable and full of mutual curiosity. So it has been good, the stories interesting…but most of all maybe, I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to step briefly into these people’s lives…begin to get a grasp of what they have been through, how modestly they live and survive, what they think the future may be like. Just talk to these people whose history I claim to be writing? Its only four days worth…but that is world’s more information than never having been there at all. Hopefully in a week when we begin more interviews again I will get a chance to talk to these women too…hear their stories too. (The picture on this post is not of where I was…but an old photograph from the seventies of Dar…but it looks approximately like Mbgala.)