Flags and Shields: Muslim Socialities and Informal Livelihoods in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

In this article, I explore entanglements of Muslim sociality and informal livelihoods in Dar es Salaam. I propose that Muslim practices of affiliation deserve to be counted among the ordinary strategies that urban majorities employ to navigate the city amidst conditions of uncertainty. Building on Stephan Lanz and Martijn Oosterbaan's (2016) work on "entrepreneurial religion," I draw on fifteen months of ethnographic research in Kariakoo, a super-dense market district at the center of the city. The first part of my analysis explores associational life in Dar es Salaam, combining a historical overview with ethnographic description. I explore how urban actors use affiliations to football teams and political parties to generate livelihood opportunities and to secure protection. The second part of my analysis uses emic notions of "flags" (bendera) and "shields" (ngao) to demonstrate that Muslim modes of association operate in strikingly similar ways to those pertaining to football and politics. Engaging with the conceptual vocabularies of AbdouMaliq Simone and Erving Goffman, as well as recent debates about "everyday" and "lived Islam," this article foregrounds the interplay between religious forms and neoliberal processes of informalization as they are unfolding in African cities and beyond.

Disarming the xenophobic everyday: Muslim migrants and the horizons of urban mutuality in Durban

“…As such, Muslim socialities do not merely 'compensate' for the exclusionary dynamics to which migrants are exposed, but actually serve as enabling conditions for the very fabric of the CBD as a shared habitat, the mutualities that it can sustain, and the collective energies that diverse residents continue to invest in it. These insights enrich and extend recent work on mutuality (Bjarnesen and Utas 2018; Chari and Gillespie 2014) and migrant sociality (Dube 2017;Hankela 2020;Siziba 2016) in African cities and beyond, illuminating the often unacknowledged ways in which everyday forms of religious association are reproducing and reconfiguring shared urban worlds (Larkin 2016;Katsaura 2018;Kirby 2020).…”

“…In her research in Durban's CBD, Shauna Mottiar (2019: 288) demonstrates how street traders develop ephemeral livelihood networks that assist them in forming business collaborations and anticipating police crackdowns on unlicensed vendors. To these ends, greetings provide an important means by which business operators can elicit encounters and consolidate social ties with fellow traders (Goffman 1971: 73, 79; Kirby 2020: 567–9). Because of migrant traders’ limited capacity to participate in protracted isiZulu greetings, it is difficult for them to incorporate black South Africans into their livelihood networks.…”

“…In Ally's experience, then, Islamic salutations are themselves susceptible to a parallel gestural politics to that which is associated with isiZulu greetings discussed above. Where in the context of Tanzania the term sheikh is widely used as an honorific title (Kirby 2020: 567), Ally understands that Indian South Africans use it to confer on black Muslims an exaggerated status which is incongruent with their prevailing attitudes towards them.…”