Zanzibar

Getting really lazy...

Keep thinking I should write, thinking about what i could write about...and then, just laying under the air conditioning instead. Back to interviews this week after a few weeks grappling with trying to find archival stuff and visit the municipal council all over again. I did realize recently that half the battle in research here is simply explaining to people what i want to see, which takes an articulation about my own research i usually lack. For example, I finally gave up trying to get documents at the municipal council after the information officer,having indulged me being some earnest white girl coming to do research, told me that the documents are stored in a building that has now been turned into garage where they park the city's cars. He also introduced me to the city council clerk who I asked in a last ditch effort if there were still records from city council meetings in the eighties and he came back after twenty minutes with two crumbling files of payroll stubs from employees that literally started turning to dust in my lap. He proudly pointed at the dates on the files as if he was handing me papyrus scrolls or something. I also gave up after two trips to the Department of Lands and Housing and four trips up nine flights of stairs, when i explained to the woman who was trying to help me what exactly I was interested in looking at and she said, "oh yes, we have all those files in the basement but why would you want to look at that stuff? It smells and is dirty down there." On my way out of that building though on my second trip there, I noticed a sign by the elevator (that I refuse to take due to the frequency of power outages) that mentioned a library. I asked two people behind the counter who had just directed me to come back in a week's time, "oh yes, you can go there if you like." I walked into the room to find (see below) a mass of government documents and boxes waiting for the archives that I could look through freely. I just don't understand what i said to the five people I had talked to in that building that failed to communicate to them that I may want to be directed to the library. The library didn't yield much in the end...but still...its been an interesting process trying to figure out what to even ask for, let alone to find it. Maybe its because I don't know entirely myself...but I think more to the point, it has to do with a bureaucratic culture that prescribes to collective amnesia, where there seems little point to each new generation to keep the files of failed old attempts at governance, especially when there are such bigger fish to fry, like governance itself. Of course, westerners are obsessed with paperwork and put far too much faith in the banality of it all actually explaining things. Who knows. I could try harder...but its just getting so damn hot.