60 Quoted in Iliffe, African Poor, p.212.
This was done in 1958.62 Finally, echoing the proposals’ of the Provincial Commissioner two decades earlier, ‘[i]t was agreed that an attempt should now be made to try to canalise the generosity of Muslims and others whose indiscriminate charity was having the effect of encouraging begging in the towns.’63 However, little headway was made in the attempt to institutionalise alms-giving in order to exert greater control over Dar es Salaam’s beggars. By the end of the colonial period, whilst growing numbers of indigents were making their way to the capital, the official response was much the same as it had been for the past two decades. The police, the Municipality and the native administration cooperated in the periodic removal of ‘the various beggars who were infesting the streets [who] would be summoned to the Local Courts... so that a decision could be made as to whether they should be maintained by the Government in the Nunge Pauper Camp or be repatriated to their home districts, if they do not belong to Dar es Salaam.’64 This was, as ever, a makeshift solution. It was simply a matter of time before indigents drifted back to the town and the whole process had to be started over. A lasting solution to the forces driving the destitute and the disabled to mendicancy in the capital was beyond the capacity of the colonial state.
Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919-1961
Unruly adolescents formed another group whose presence in town officials deplored. They included unaccompanied youth who made their way to Dar es Salaam from the rural areas, as well as the troublesome offspring of town-dwelling parents. The growing number of crimes committed by young offenders first came to be regarded with special concern by the administration in the early 1930s. Crime figures from 1928 and 1929 had revealed a ‘disturbing increase in the incidence of juvenile crime’.65 The phenomenon was blamed on the growth of vagrancy in the territory.66 In Dar es Salaam the usual response to such a state of affairs was to repatriate young vagrants to their area of origin. Frequently those sent home returned to the capital, however.67 In other cases repatriation proved impracticable. When, in 1931, the District Commissioner looked into the
62 See TCSS mins., TNA/540/1/78.
63 TCSS, mins., 24th March 1958, TNA/540/1/78. 64 MC, mins., 17th February 1961.
65 ‘Imprisonment’, Appendix D. 66 Ibid.
background of several boys who had been brought to him by Dar es Salaam police for repatriation, he found himself in a quandary:
On investigation I have found these boys claimed to have been brought by their parents from other districts when they were very young and that they now have no parents living and do not know o f the existence o f any relatives. To repatriate these lads did not seem to me to be a practicable solution. To whom are they to go? What are they to do? They are a problem.
It was, wrote the DC, ‘not desirable to leave them to grow in Dar es Salaam.’ For parent-less juveniles in town were vulnerable to a descent into criminality:
They thieve to obtain the wherewithal to live, and they are tools o f habitual criminals who teach them the trade and relieve them o f the proceeds o f the theft, very often paying the toto a few cents and getting o ff with the swag themselves, leaving the youth to get o ff with caning if subsequently detected and convicted.
These hom eless waifs and strays become the catspaws o f adult rogues and sw ell the numbers o f the criminal class.68
By this time, however, there had already emerged in Dar es Salaam juvenile gangs who appeared quite capable of operating independently of adult mentors. In his 1931 report, Baker noted the presence of ‘particularly impudent’ groups o f youths who were known collectively as the kompania ya sinzia; kuwevi sinzia being Swahili for the method used by thieves who stole whilst one of their number distracted the victim.69 According to Baker, the youths would
mark down a man with money, notes or perhaps a watch in his possession. One o f the band will either abstract the valuable from the pocket o f the victim or grasp the latter round the arms while another does so. In either case the booty is at once passed on to a second and often a third confederate and when the case is brought up it is merely the word o f the victim against that o f the original thief.70
Baker noted that, in true delinquent fashion, their ‘amusement after dark [wa]s to annoy the respectable members of the community by acts o f discourtesy, assaults or petty thefts’.71 Y An editorial on hooliganism (uhuni) in Kwetu later in the decade complained of young trouble-makers ‘[n]o longer subject to the influence of their parents.’ ‘Among them,’ the editorial observed, painting an almost Dickensian scene, ‘will be found a fair
67 See Statistics o f juvenile offenders for 1934 in PRO/CO/691/144/7. G8 DAR for 1931, p.20, TNA/53.4.
69 The definition is from the S tandard Swahili D ictionaiy. 70 Baker, ‘Social Conditions’, p.93.
percentage of tax-dodgers, street ruffians, pickpockets, as well as our best athletes... Most of the petty thefts are committed by them; they are suborned by weaker men to fight out their differences with other people, and they rob our children.’72 They also victimised Indian residents of the town; snatching jewellery ifom women and children and harassing shopkeepers in Zones II and III, and mugging lone pedestrians in the early evenings. In 1938, sixty-six Indian retailers from the New Market area wrote a letter to the Tanganyika Herald to complain of their activities:
For the last three months we are being harassed in broad daylight in our shops as well as in streets, by five or six gangs o f loafers: and on being approached, the Police are showing their unwillingness to apprehend them: they are replying that they could do something if we ourselves caught them and brought them to the police.
How they steal?
As you are aware, it is almost impossible for shopkeepers to leave their shops and chase thieves. The method employed by them is that one o f them comes to a shop which is surrounded by a crowd o f customers: takes with his own hand whatever article he finds within his reach: passes it to another member o f his gang who goes away to be at large and he remains there a while having no proof o f his skilful act.
Show o f knives
In these circumstances and in the absence o f Police it is very difficult to catch any one o f them. If an attempt is made by either by the shopkeeper or his man to chase the thief he is prevented from doing by other members o f the gang. It also happens so that in order to help them accomplice members o f the gang make assault on the shopkeeper who goes after the running loafer and in that event he loses articles and is beaten for nothing.73
At the end of the day, the retailers complained, the youths would keep up their mischief by throwing stones at Indians’ houses late into the night.
The gangs contained up to 60 individuals, and their size was increasing. According to police records, forty eight of their number had had dealings with the police in 1937, of whom forty three had convictions recorded against them that year. Their ages and backgrounds were varied. The Commissioner of Police informed the Chief Secretary that some of the kompania ya sinzia
are orphans while others are boys who have run away from home, children who have been neglected and abandoned, and those over whom parents can exercise no control. Their ages average between 8 and 18 years, and they are comparable to the ‘street arabs’ to be found in any city in the world. With the exception o f six who have homes in Dar es Salaam, the
72 Kwetu, 21st Feb. 1939. Quoted in D.H.Anthony, ‘Culture and Society’, p.159/60. 73 TH, 11th May 1938.
remainder have no regular abode, sleep anywhere they can find shelter and obtain food in any way they can,74
The backgrounds of individual gang members were described by the Commissioner of Police. Seven were Zaramo, one was Makonde, one Tivi, one Ngindo, one Doe and one Nyamwezi. The youngest, Juma Nassoro was a 12 year old Tivi youth, whose father was working as a tailor in Ruvu (a railway town west of Dar es Salaam) and who had been abandoned by his mother in Dar es Salaam after she went off with another man. He was, according to the Commissioner, ca precocious child and leader of a small gang’ who had been dealt with many times by the police. In contrast, the eldest, Nasib Salim, who was 25 years old, from Bagamoyo and had no living relatives, was considered ‘of weak intellect’. He had eight previous convictions. The others were aged between 16 and 19 years. Some had parents living in Dar es Salaam or in the rural part of the district, others had relatives there or in neighbouring districts, whilst others had no living relatives.
Officials had difficulty devising a response to the problem of crime amongst Tanganyikan youth. In their 1932 report, members of the committee on imprisonment in the territory, troubled by evidence that ‘frequently children are deliberately employed by thieves and rogues’,75 had recommended that a reformatory be established to ‘reclaim’ convicted juveniles and to prevent them entering the schools of crime that many took the prisons to be. An approved school was eventually opened at Kazima, near Tabora, in 1938, after initial opposition by London on financial grounds.76 The 1932 report also recommended more use of corporal punishment in place of prison sentences. Judging by surviving breakdowns of juvenile crime in the 1930s this advice appears to have been partially acted upon.77 Up to twelve strokes with a ‘light rattan cane’ were commonly administered. Contrary to the report’s recommendations, however, these were often reinforced by short terms of imprisonment.
74 CP to CS, 13th May 1938, TNA/21963/Vol. 1. 75 Ibid.
76 Memo, in P R 0 /C 0 6 9 1/132/6.
77 The ages, offen ces and sentences received by young offenders for 1934-36 can be found in P R 0 /C 0 6 9 1/144/7, CO691/149/42086 & CO691/155/42086.
Whilst the Kazima approved school had some early success with its inmates,78 these initiatives proved to have little impact on the problem of delinquency in the Tanganyikan capital. In 1942, the Superintendent of Police warned the Provincial Commissioner:
There still rem ains... the problem o f unemployable youths, who with some precocious youngsters as hangers-on, band themselves into small groups and pester the bazaar and native residential areas. They are mentally unoccupied and by being semi-sophisticated are ripe for any m ischief that presents itself from stone-throwing to shoplifting. They are most difficult to control and by their association with bad influences present both a social as well as a police problem which will have to be faced.79
The following year it was estimated there were in Dar es Salaam ‘about 2,000 young scamps, living on their wits and without any form of parental or other control.’80 Baker counselled that to have any chance of solving the problem three measures needed to be taken. Child labour had to be prohibited in the town. All parent-less children in Dar es Salaam were to be removed and the town was to become a restricted area into which children could not enter. Meanwhile, those children who remained in the town should be made to attend school compulsorily.81 Whilst child labour was prohibited the same year, London opposed introduction of controls over movement within the territory, and there were never enough resources devoted to education in Dar es Salaam to establish compulsory school attendance. The problem of delinquency refused to go away.
By the early 1950s it had emerged once again, according to a quarterly police report, as ‘the problem of major importance’.82 In 1952, the Labour department estimated that there were as many as 10,000 children and juveniles in the town without a parent or guardian (although this is surely an over-estimate).83 Leslie, in his survey of the African areas four years later, uncovered further evidence of ‘freedom from parental discipline’. 38 per cent of all children between the ages of 6 and 15 were found to have no father in town, while 29 per cent had neither parent (the proportions were as high as 45 per cent and 34 per cent in the central suburb of Kariakoo).84 Leslie detected signs in Dar es Salaam of ‘the revolt of the adolescent, in age and in culture, against the authority of
78 Up to 1943, o f the 44 boys discharged from the school just 4 had re-offended. Memo attached as App. Ill to PC’s conference mins. 1943, p.13, TNA/61/702/3.
79 SP to PC, EP, 20,h February 1942, TNA/61/3/XVI. 80 PC’s conference mins. 1943, p .13, TNA 61/702/3. 81 Ibid.
82 Extracts from QPR(Tanganyika) in TNA/540/22/3. 83 Labour Dept. AR for 1952, p.41.
elders, of the superior and the supercilious.’ He found successors to the kompaniaya sinzia in ‘the groups and the gangs who occasionally defy administrative authority, and in their lifelong struggle to avoid paying tax are waging an unceasing though usually personal and defensive battle of wits with the Jurnbes and the police.’85 Ironically, it was a combination of both action and inaction with regard to Baker’s recommendations a decade earlier that was contributing to the incidence of juvenile crime. Thanks to the shortage of school places, boys who did not make the grade were leaving school after Standard VI, aged eleven, four years before they could legally obtain employment. According to a 1954 police report, they found themselves ‘thrown on the streets... and for three or four years they are at a loose end with nothing to do but learn the ‘tricks of the trade” .86 DC Harris urged that in tackling delinquency ‘priority should be given to the building of middle schools to receive as many Standard VI leavers as possible.’87 The Assistant Commissioner of Police meanwhile, was stressing the ‘need for a Remand Home in Dar es Salaam for children and young persons who have fallen foul of the law and who, at present, constitute something of an embarassment for all who have to deal with them.’88
Despite the substantial growth of the town and the consequent increase in the number of youths to be found there, however, delinquency did not appear to be the problem it was in the 1930s. ‘Having regard to the size of Dar es Salaam and the absence of social services responsible for neglected juveniles,’ the Assistant Commissioner of Police wrote in 1955, ‘the amount of crime attributable to this class of the community is by no means
* RQ
excessive.’ ‘A number of African youths do come in from the districts in search of work and these men are somewhat of a problem to the Administration’, the same official noted the following year, ‘although this view cannot, as yet, be shared by the Police.’90 In an informal survey in 1956, the probation office interviewed 160 children believed to be of school age who were encountered on the streets and open spaces between 2pm and 4pm over the course of a week. As many as 112 of these children were found to be living with parents (frequently one parent only, though), and a further 38 were staying with their relations. Just 10 were ‘living rough’. Meanwhile, 115 of the 160 were receiving some
85 Ibid., p .112.
86 QPR, Dsm D ist, 1st October-31st December 1954, T N A /90/1011/V ol.I. S7 DC Harris’ comments, 19th March 1955, on QPR(Tanganyika), TNA/540/22/3. 88 Snr.Asst CP, Dsm to DC, Dsm, 8th January 1958, TNA/540/22/3.
form of schooling.91 ‘I am satisfied’, wrote the Commissioner for Social Development in response to the survey, ‘that with the exception of the children found to be ‘living rough’ there is very little child neglect in the true sense.’ ‘[Tjhough’, he added, ‘many children are getting near to the state of being classified as being beyond the control of their parents.’92
It is hard to pinpoint exactly why the situation in Dar es Salaam had improved since the 1930s, or at least had not deteriorated considering the huge increase in the urban population. The Kazima approved school, which by the early 1950s was dealing with a daily average of around 200 offenders ranging in age from 8 to 18, appears to have had some impact on delinquency.93 On their return to Dar es Salaam ‘a good deal of trouble’ was taken over discharged inmates from the school by district officials.94 Often they were helped to find employment to prevent their returning to crime. Within two weeks of their release in February 1947, for example, Ali bin Hassan and Hamisi bin Hassan had, thanks to the efforts of the district office, been taken on as carpenters in the PWD; Mohamed bin Selemani and Rashidi bin Swedi had joined the Kings African Rifles; Selemani bin Hamisi and Juma bin Abdallah had become registered labourers; and three others had been given chits to assist them in obtaining employment. Of the discharged inmates only Saleh bin Selemani, who had been given a trial by the PWD, had proved to be ‘a bad egg’.95 ‘The criterion of any school is the type of boy turned out’, the Commissioner of Prisons noted with satisfaction two years later, ‘I cannot overemphasize how impressed I am with the ex-Approved School boys keenness, good outlook and above all, their spirit of independence and confidence in themselves.’96 Indeed, Kazima’s successes had filtered down to African parents. In 1944 Asmani Juma Muna, a government clerk living in Dar es Salaam, sought to have his son committed to Kazima:
My son Ramadhani Athmani Juma, who is about 15 years, is leading a very notorious conduct. He has the habit o f being away from home... I have instructed him so many times and even punishments but no sign o f changing. Moreover I have taken up the same case with the local Jum be Mohamed Sultani who alternatively took the real advice on this boy but merely he despised o f and ran away as a rascal young chap.
90 Asst.CP, Dsm to CP, 9th March 1956, TN A /90/1011/V ol.l.
91 Cmmr. for Soc. Devt. to TCSS, 15th December 1956, TNA/540/1/78.