Pimp my ride...

I took a couple of taxis the first couple of days after I arrived in Dar es Salaam, while my wallet could still handle it. I was shocked that a ride of just 2-3 miles could easily cost 7000 shillings ($6 USD!). Granted, gas costs $5 per gallon here, so it’s unlikely there’s any price gauging of wazungu going on. Even fewer people can afford cars than can afford a taxi ride, and yet people rarely seem to walk long distances in the heat. So how, I wondered, do most Tanzanians get around? Enter the daladala, the Tanzanian version of the chicken bus.

Daladalas are so named because a ride once cost the equivalent of a US dollar – now, thanks to devaluation of the shilling, it’s roughly 16 cents. The term daladala is loosely applied to a wide variety of vehicles, most of them essentially 15-passenger Toyota conversion vans from East Asia (some still flaunt Chinese or Japanese characters on the sides and back). There is also a larger version that looks more like a Third-World city bus, and deceptively, even says “City Bus” on both sides – it is, however, merely a daladala. All have a large sliding door on the left side where passengers get on and off, and from which the conductor (kondakta in Swahili) hangs while the daladala is in motion, usually erratically. There are no laws about the maximum number of people permitted to ride on a daladala, and they rarely leave stops until they are completely full, usually holding as many as 23 or 24 people, and a friend of mine swears she once counted 31 people on a daladala. However (thankfully?), there is a law that the door must be closed while the daladala is moving… go figure. I got some nasty sneers today for asking to get off at a non-established stop on a busy road (at least I think that is what invited the sneers) – but how would this ignorant mzungu know? Extricating oneself, particularly if you’ve been lucky enough to get a seat, is an adventure in and of itself, and it’s standard procedure to crawl and push your way over multiple people and seats to make it to the door. Suffice it to say, personal space is an unheard-of luxury. I have even found myself providing free babysitting services when space is at a premium – I had a Tanzanian toddler plopped atop of my lap (on top of my backpack) yesterday when space got tight. An American kid might have wailed, but he just sat there until the daladala emptied out a little, then crawled over the seat in front of us to rejoin his dad.

My biggest challenge is figuring out which daladala to take to get to (or close to) one’s desired destination. There are no daladala route maps, but each route’s beginning and end are painted in stenciled white letters on the front. After awhile, you start to notice those that routinely ply the same route because many of them are decked out with ornate decorative elements. Religious imagery and phrases are common decorations, presumably for their amuletic ability to compensate for the often reckless driving. For some reason, Islamic phrases (Allah Karim, Allah Akbar) bedecking daladalas are much more staid than the Christian ones (e.g., Jesus’ Family, Top Jesus), which always make me grin. But my favorite is Afrika Babu Kubwa (“Big Grandpa Africa”). Traffic or heavy rain can cause a daladala driver to take a long-cut through neighborhoods of unpaved, bumpy roads, which add to the exoticism, or annoyance, depending on one’s perspective. And pity the person who has to take a jump seat in the space that would ordinarily be the aisle, or worse yet, who has to stand, bent at the waist with one’s head against the roof of the daladala. It’s the perfect setting for a Dial soap ad…