The Slipway

This, is The Slipway.

It is, as my professor put it, a 'white person paradise'. It's a clean, comfortable bastion of consumerism where everyone knows enough English to serve you. It has a pub, an Italian and a Japanese restaurant, a small deli and a small supermarket. It has a book store with mainly western books (I went in to another branch of it and asked if they had any book on Tanzania, they were unable to show me any). And of course, it has tons and tons of curios.

There's a new addition to Slipway, a curio market set up outside the main buildings, stuffed with vendors. You can find curios all over Dar es Salaam, I assume they are mainly for the benefit of tourists, though I'm unsure the extent that the local population might buy items to wear or decorate with. There's generally a wide variety of limited types of items: bracelets, necklaces, footwear, cloths, cushion covers, shirts, dresses, skirts, paintings, wooden sculptures. They're attractive because they represent what most people think of 'African culture', though I'm sure most people recogize its a highly commercialized version of it, but are willing to accept that, understanding the economic position of vendors of African culture.

What strikes me when I walk into this new Slipway market is the sheer volume of vendors and curios available. They're just stacked up, piled on top of eachother, table after table. It's a completely unabashed display of mass-manufactured representations of traditional African art and culture. When you find a little booth with a limited number of items elsewhere in town, the vendor might be able to persuade you that the paintings were done by a fellow tribeswoman and the carvings are done in his homeland. People love the idea of authenticity. They want souvenirs of the ancient continent, of primordial, animistic cultures, land-based cultures. And this is exactly what most items try to convey.

But I should stop myself before I get too cynical. I'd be very curious to learn more about the curio sector, and who makes different items. When Courtney and I were in Kenya we became somewhat cynical about it. One vendor sold us paintings on cloth, telling us his Luo step-sister made them. Of course, we found the exact same paintings in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. There are a lot of items where you find the exact same thing sold in every shop and naturally distrust any story told about them. Many of the 'African' shirts sold have tags that belie their origins (Thailand, China, etc...).

Yet someone makes all this stuff, and much of it does come from Tanzania, or the region. I spoke with the man selling the above masks and I asked them where they came from. He told me he buys them from different tribes in Tanzania, and told me which tribes made which masks. Could certainly be true right? The below man was sitting outside a shop selling paintings, in the process of making a painting of some Masai. There was a lot of similar art inside the store. That's a transparent production chain!

I have the sense that a lot of the stuff sold is still made by hand, and while there's a lot of it, they aren't really cheap knockoffs (with some definite exceptions... most clothing is made with cheap and uncomfortable fabric, for example. But of course you just need to pay more for better stuff). The art is indeed hand painted. There's also a lot of curiosities. I like the crafts which are made of found material like Fanta bottle caps, which say more about modern African culture than a kistchy (sp?) bracelet.

By the way, I should mention I donned a tourist mantle to get these pictures. I've taken very few pictures since I got here because it's difficult to find shots that don't have people in them, and as much as I'd love to share some of the sights with people in them, I don't believe that people are just on display for the tourists' camera. I'd want to get permission before taking pictures, and its generally hard to do hat. However, tourists do just that, especially at touristy spots. So I swallowed all the Swahili I knew and pretended to be a sightseer with camera in hand asking if I could take pictures. Which I should actually do more often!