Maintenance

It is a fairly effective rule of thumb when visiting a city in Africa and looking for a place to stay not to ask for the best hotel but for the newest one. If open for less than a year, even the most basic hotel can be a pleasant place to stay. But the quality seems to tend to deteriorate rapidly thereafter; once broken, items in the rooms are rarely fixed, and if so, creative jerry-rigged arrangements are the norm rather than the exception.

We had a new daladala station open here 6 weeks ago paved with laid bricks and with raised islands to channel the buses. I was paying more attention to it than usual on my way home the other day and noticed that most of the concrete curbs along the raised islands are already chipped, crumbling, or missing, the casualties of foot traffic and the weight of too-wide buses attempting to force their way through. Only faint vestiges of the yellow stripes on the curbs remain, having been completely rubbed away by a combination of bus tires, shoe soles, and the gritty dirt that seems to cover everything here, despite the best efforts of the tireless women who toil in the hot sun as street sweepers. The whole station looks as though it could have been built decades ago and neglected ever since. 6 weeks--somehow I find that a bit disturbing!

Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari (a rather sensationalist and stereotyped account of an journey across Africa by a rather unlikable man, but somehow memorable) laments that the school library he helped to build and set up in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s has been looted for its books and left to decay. Theroux was far from the first to observe that things tend to fall into disrepair in much of Africa over time, but the Western world has tended to be content to stereotype this tendency toward entropy as a consequence of some culturally imbedded laziness or carelessness. Few people ever bother to look beneath these easy—-but oversimplified and very often wrong—-explanations. Surely there are lazy and careless people here, but Tanzania is no more special in that regard than the rest of the world!

Many, many people work extraordinarily hard to maintain their property in Tanzania. I have seen spotlessly tidy homes here, where floors are swept daily, clothes are washed by hand (each article meticulously ironed), and every item dusted daily. Even the sandy ground in my housing compound is swept to clean up the debris each morning. I would argue that laziness is certainly not the culprit in most cases (indeed, any impression of laziness one gets is generally explained by high rates of unemployment and a general shortage of jobs). Some actions I have observed may seem careless on the surface—such as daladala drivers driving over curbs, or people discarding their trash in the streets—until one considers that the daladala driver’s livelihood depends on extricating himself from the traffic jam as quickly as possible to pick up more fares, even if that means driving over curbs, and the fact that Dar es Salaam has no trash pick-up service, few public trash cans, and most trash is tossed into heaps and burned.

A significant fraction of the challenge of maintenance in Africa must be attributable to the poor quality of many of the materials from which buildings are built and the hot, wet, muddy climate. I often wonder how different Tanzania, Africa, and much of the developing world might look if only good quality cement, asphalt, and high quality paint were the norm (or even available). It is not uncommon that a road can be paved and have crumbled to bits within a season. Certainly, building to last is not impossible: the tarmac airstrip at the airport is miraculously smooth, and there are some roads that seem to last for several years. But this takes incredible investments of engineering, inputs into importing or producing quality materials, and the advanced equipment to do a good job. In just a year or two, a new building’s exterior paint is likely to be faded, chalky, dirty, and covered in mildew. Large cracks in the concrete of even the fanciest and newest buildings here are not uncommon.

Paying for and seeing a construction project through here presents other feats of coordination. It can take months or years to obtain permits, build, and finish a structure here. Since credit is difficult to obtain and interest rates are extremely high, most people build homes as they can afford them, meaning that many homes languish as cinder-block shells for years, crumbling in the sun, before enough money materializes to afford a roof, a cement surface on the walls, doors, or screens/bars on the windows. It is no wonder that it is hard to tell the difference here between a home completed 2 years ago and a home completed 20 years ago – indeed, ground might have been broken for both in the same year!

Yet another aspect is economics. Put simply, maintenance costs money and time, and it is hard in a country where the average income is a few hundred dollars per year for many people to afford the time and money to invest in maintaining their homes and businesses. Buying powerful and effective cleaning products is expensive; it is no wonder that many cleaning solutions are used sparingly or diluted with water (as is paint, for that matter). Ultimately, for the lower and middle class here, the effort needed to survive–-whether survival takes the form of pounding cassava or working long hours in a low-paying, unskilled job–-can easily trump the priority of a fresh coat of paint on the walls or mending a cracked windowsill.

Surely even these musings hardly provide a comprehensive explanation for why maintenance is often a losing battle here in Tanzania, but it seems only fair to recognize people's extraordinary efforts to work with what they have.