One of the things that annoys and delights me the most about Dar es Salaam is how everything can be twisted into a business venture, into an opportunity for profit or pleasure. Everyone is an entrepreneur, and everyone (in every context) is a potential consumer.
Entrepreneurship in TZ can look whimsical: there's a guy near the ferry who put a scale out on the sidewalk, along with the sign, "Upime Mzito, 100/-." Learn your weight for a mere six cents!
Or it's kitschy: in Zanzibar's eastern beaches, there are some Masai guys who dress in full warrior attire and walk up and down the hot sand, faking nonchalance, totin' spears and smeared in paint, hoping that a tourist will be like "omg look at those warriors on the beach we're so lucky can u believe this crazy photo op???"
Or it's extraneous: If you've ever tried to park a car in Dar, you've had like 3 guys magically materialize from the bushes to "help" you park by waving furiously for you to reverse, then screaming "Stop! Stoooop!" And in their magnanimity, they only expect a minor return for their efforts.
Or it's actually helpful: In Kariakoo, the major fruit/veg market in Dar, kids will wait until some poor lady is juggling all the food she just bought, and come running up to sell her a convenient plastic bag.
I recently watched a TED talk by Rachel Botsman called "The currency of the new economy is trust." Her focus was online economies, and she talked about the "third wave" of human trust in the internet: First we shared our personal info online, followed by our financial info, and today, we trust the internet to connect us with real-life strangers. We rent rooms and cars from each other, buy books and appliances from each other, and even run errands and pet-sit for each other -- all through connections formed on the web.
She talks specifically about an economic value shift taking place, in which human connection and trust can translate into quantifiable benefits:"At its core, [collaborative consumption] is about empowerment. It's about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that enable us to rediscover a humanness that we've lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces (like Airbnb, Kickstarter and Etsy) that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions. The irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us. They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age. We're beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything."
In Tanzania, more than anywhere else on earth, people believe you can "share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything." Whatever tiny resources people have at their disposal can be flipped into business-schemes, resulting in the daily emergence of thousands of impromptu translators, mechanics, chefs, valets, fundis, guides, bodyguards, etc. And what Botsman calls a new shift toward trust & human connection, and a "return to old market principles" is already operative and flourishing in Dar es Salaam -- here, business has never been divorced from the actual human beings who are profiting and paying.
One thing that sometimes annoys me about Tanzania's economies (both formal and in-) is the absolute imperative to barter, for everything from peanuts to hotel rates. Bargaining and heckling is not optional -- it's totally necessary in nearly every context where money is involved. Like, when I'm trying to get a ride back from town, the conversation sounds like this:
-Itakuwa bei ngapi kufika ubalozi wa ufaransa?
-Ehhh... shingi elfu tano tu rafiki
-Ah ndugu, nimekuja kwa elfu mbili.. nadthani hii ni bei ya kawaida
-Eh dada, lakini bei ya gesi inapanda siku hizi. Elfu mbili haifai
-Sawa bana, hamna shida, ntachukua basi ya Mwenge. Asante
-Eh sawa, fanya kwa elfu tatu dada
-Tafadhali fanya kwa elfu mbili.. ubalozi sio mbali
-Eh, sio mbali
-Kweli siwezi kulipa zaidi
-Ahhh unanishtuka dada
-Ni kweli tu, siwezi kutupa hela zaidi.. unakubali kwa elfmbili?
-Hiya, let's go
So during an average conversation about the price of the ride (which always ends up being the exact same, though it takes 3-5 minutes to settle on it), we talk about the price of gas, the economy, the distance to the Embassy, the city traffic, our respective financial situations, and we've probably referred to each other as "brother" and "sister," all before I hop onto the motorcycle. We have a relationship, however provisional.
Botsman says that through collaborative consumption, a shift is taking place in which "instead of consuming to keep up with the Joneses, people are consuming to get to know the Joneses." Well, Tanzania beat everyone to the punch in that respect. A major facet of any business transaction here has always been the relationship between buyer & seller, the rapport between provider & consumer. Throughout TZ's history, the "humanness" of business never once fell by the wayside. So is Tanzania ahead of the game economically? Hardly. But we do have something worth hanging onto. As Tanzania becomes more digitized/ technified in the coming years, our goal should be to move toward web-aided "collaborative consumption" without passing through that impersonal, sterile middle-phase of "empty transactions" that dominated Western business for decades.
Tanzanians usually place a high priority on people & relationships, and I love that -- I think its rare and beautiful. We can fault TZ's economy for a ton of things, but not for its inhuman-ness!
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