Paper short abstract:

The paper examines new houses in contemporary Tanzania as a window on Africa’s ‘new middle classes’. It focuses on architecture, interior décor and compound space in Dar es Salaam and Kilimanjaro to show how houses are made through old and new circuits of mobile people, capital, ideas and materials.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the construction of new houses in contemporary Tanzania as a window on Africa's 'new middle classes', a group about which we know very little. The paper begins to address this lacuna through a discussion of the distinctive houses now being built by the middle class in Tanzania. Through an examination of architecture, interior décor and compound space in urban Dar es Salaam and rural Kilimanjaro, the paper explores the different ways in which houses are constructed through old and new circuits of mobile people, capital, ideas and materials. The aesthetics of new houses demonstrate continuities and discontinuities with the ujamaa period. There are houses that conform to the aesthetic politics of ujamaa (modesty, equality, functionality) while others indicate a shift from function to consumption, patched together from a globalised shopping mall of materials, decorations and furnishings. Such houses are a response to economic, political, and socio-cultural changes since at least the first half of the twentieth century, when young educated people began to leave Kilimanjaro to take up posts in colonial government. Change has taken new shape in the post-socialist period which has seen the minority prosper. The building of new styles of houses is an attempt to fix value and values, and to protect wealth and status in uncertain times. Yet, the very materiality of the house can destabilise claims to inclusion in the middle class: houses can stand empty, unfinished, or crumbling for years. Houses do not simply make their builders middle class.