Love in the City: Navigating multiple relationships in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract

While the vast majority of low-level professionals in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania would express a verbal commitment to modernist ideals of family structure, such as monogamy, in practice, a significant number have entered into mistress relationships which ultimately constitute second families. This reality demonstrates how Tanzanian urbanites have created hybrid conceptions of morality and codes for responsible conduct within romantic relationships, conceptions which draw upon both European and local African models. These practices provide insight into the contemporary historical and economic contexts of African city dwellers, as well as African urbanism as a whole. [African urbanism, Tanzania, professional class, plural marriage, indigenized modernity] O ne issue of a popular Tanzanian cartoon magazine, Kingo (1994: vol. 3), centers on the question of nyumba ndogo ("little house," a colloquial term for a mistress), and the front cover portrays the central problem. As a couple walks down the street, the middle-aged husband gawks at a young woman wearing skin-tight clothes; his wife frowns with displeasure and clutches his hand, apparently to keep him from turning aside to follow the other woman. In the manner typical of cartoons, each character epitomizes a core category. The well-dressed stout wife is the matron, no longer sexually attractive yet entitled; the man's tie, jacket, and button-down shirt mark him as the office worker; the young woman's styled hair, short skirt, and high heels indicate that she is the quintessential vamp who seduces a man into maintaining her alongside his official family. Since all three characters wear fashionable urban attire and stand in a paved downtown area with cement buildings,

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