Approved School had been underestimated by as much as five years. See Court Circular N o .9 o f 17th November 1944 and the list o f offenders, T N A /28692/V ol.l.
features if we raise the age to 18 or 20 years.82
The age was indeed raised by the Native Tax Ordinance of 1934; rendering it payable to ‘every native of an apparent age of eighteen years.’ However, evasion remained common throughout the British colonial period, particularly amongst young Africans, and the burden of taxes on Africans of all ages resulted in not only labour migration but also a flow of defaulters to towns in general and to Dai- es Salaam in particular.
Tax evasion in Dar es Salaam
Non-payment of taxes first came to the fore as an issue of concern in the late 1920s. At their conference in 1929, Senior Administrative Officers drew attention to the interconnected problems of African migrancy, mobility and evasion in Dar es Salaam. They bemoaned the great difficulties in collecting tax from ‘the floating population of labourers, stevedores, motor drivers etc., who are immigrants from upcountry or from neighbouring territories.’ The trouble with these people was that
(i) They are naturally glad to evade tax.
(ii) They seldom, if ever, have the amount o f it (usually ShslO/-) at any one time.
(iii) Usually they dispose o f their cash earnings as soon as received by purchasing
trade goods and depositing them with an Indian on the box system.
(iv) They have no fixed abode.
(v) They frequently go by names adopted for work purposes, which they change at
will, and not by their own names.83
Causing particular concern were those jobless defaulters who drifted in from outlying districts in Eastern Province. ‘[Frequently’, DC Fryer complained in his annual report the following year, ‘there have appeared before the Tax Officer fifty or a hundred natives, eighty per cent of them youngsters, all without work, from Rufiji, Kilwa, Bagamoyo and Morogoro Districts, and they are all loafing round town waiting for the time when they can safely return home without being worried for tax.’84 In researching his social survey the following year, Baker also found that young immigrant defaulters were numerous in the town:
Early in March I spoke with a group o f over a hundred men who had been called up by the
82 Sec Min, 13th August 1931, TNA/19925. 83 Conference Mins., Dsm, 1929, TNA/54.2. 84 DAR for 1930, p.8, TNA/53.4.
Jam be as they had failed to pay their Hut and Poll Tax. Some o f them were in employment and others not, but only one o f them lived in the township and one other in the plantations nearby. The remainder were youths who had, according to their own statements, arrived in Dar es Salaam within the previous three months many o f them having come in only a few days before. On the same day another town Jum be told me that he had rounded up a group o f tax defaulters which he estimated at 150 all o f whom were strangers and had come into the township during the previous three or four months.85
Meanwhile, even residents of Dar es Salaam district itself provided grounds for concern. According to Fryer, by 1931 the position was being reached where there was in the district ‘instead of a small percentage of passive resisters a large percentage [who] do not pay.5 ‘For fifteen years’, he complained, ‘we have administered Tanganyika Territory and we are as lacking today in effective measures for dealing with tax defaulters as we were fifteen years ago.’86 More coercive methods employed in the collection of tax the following year, however, had the desired effect:
The Police have been used for house to house or hut to hut visits when those occupants who had not paid anything were ordered to go to the Tax Collector to show the cause why they should not be made to work as Tax Defaulters. It was surprising and instructive to find what a large percentage had the money and paid up without further argument.87
Evasion of taxes remained common nevertheless, particularly so during the depression years. In 1933 it was estimated in the district report that at the close of the year three quarters of the assessed number of taxpayers were in default. This did not even include the town’s floating population, who were distinctly less inclined to meet the fiscal demands of the state than more permanent residents. In these recessionary times people were hard pressed to obtain the ShslO/- required for house or poll tax, citing as reasons for non-payment
(i) drought
CO low prices for produce
(iii) damage by wild animals
(iv) reduced rates o f wages
(v) abuse o f the instalment system
(Vi) no money being in circulation88
‘Much of this is true’ commented the District Commissioner. The following year, the Municipal Secretary was highlighting the difficulties encountered in collecting tax from casual dock labour:
85 Baker, ‘Social Conditions’, p.88/9. 86 DAR for 1931, p. 17, TNA/53.4. 87 D A R for 1932, p.6, TNA/53.4.
To station tax collectors at the wharf in order to make collections from the labourers as they leave with their daily pay is sufficient to ensure that no labour will be offered for further work until a definite assurance has been given that the collectors have been withdrawn. To approach these same labourers after they have arrived at their homes is to find them without the means to pay.89
Meanwhile, ‘[t]he announcement of a tax baraza to be held by an AO5 was observed in the 1937 district report to be £a general sign for all defaulters to disappear from the locality’; the phenomenon of ‘the young unmarried man who immediately makes for the township as soon as tax pressure is making matters difficult for him’ being a particular problem90; adding further to the already ‘large number of tax defaulters both in the township and in the surrounding district.’91
In a memo the same year Acting Municipal Secretary Huggins described tax affairs in Dar es Salaam as being in a parlous state. No proper poll tax registers were kept; many Africans were paying the wrong taxes; there was no ‘real system for controlling tax defaulters’; and with no reliable population statistics it was not even possible to make a proper estimate of African tax receipts.92 He advised that a comprehensive tax register should be compiled. The following year an attempt was made to do this when the town was broken down into six separate sections, and further sub-sections based on streets, both for tax and administrative purposes.93 District Office staff subsequently compiled Native Tax Registers which by November 1938 had been completed. The District Officer responsible, however, was not happy with the results:
I regret I am unable to agree these registers are completely satisfactory. It would appear that the present system o f town headmen need to be altered so that they are in closer touch with the native population and until this has been done the compilation o f accurate tax registers will be almost impossible.94
No solution was found to counter the shifting and impermanent nature of a large proportion of Dar es Salaam’s population. It remained a perennial problem for those responsible for collecting taxes. In 1941, Provincial Commissioner Baker complained
88 D A R for 1933, p.2, TNA/53.4. 89 MS, ‘Township affairs’, p.5. 90 DA R for 1937, p.3, TNA/53.4.
91 DO, Dsm to PC, EP, 28th May 1938, TNA/61/577. 92 MS, ‘Administration’, pp.7/8.
93 DO, Dsm to PC, EP, 20* June 1938, T N A /61/207/V ol.l. 94 DO Pike to PC, EP, 27th November 1938, TN A /61/207/Vol. 1.
that ‘the frequent movement of tax payers from one area to the other either for economic reasons or in a deliberate attempt to avoid payment of tax’ obstructed ‘the collection of Native Tax in the township and district.’95 That year an amendment to the Native Tax
Ordinance was passed conferring 011 tax collectors the power to arrest without warrant
‘persons whom they suspect upon reasonable grounds of wilful neglect to pay tax.’96 According to the explanatory memorandum which accompanied the amendment:
The persons whom this provision is intended to effect are those who have no settled area o f residence and who are frequently unknown to local authorities. It is considered necessary that collectors should have this power to enable the tax to be collected from this class o f natives who would otherwise escape with impunity.97
The new legislation had negligible impact on the floating population of defaulters in the territorial capital, however. Nine years on, the problem remained the same; it had simply been exacerbated by the rapid growth of the urban population. The District Commissioner complained that:
Collection o f tax in a town this size is far from easy. A fair percentage o f the population is a shifting one, with a goodly collection o f spivs included who move their lodgings from place to place overnight. Assessment roles are out o f date before they are completed and are in fact quite useless. ...It is the bird o f passage... who flits from lodging to lodging, changing his job and his address a dozen times a year who creates the problem.98
These difficulties persisted up to the closing years of colonial rule. In 1957, Leslie observed that there was no possibility of keeping tax registers up to date, when up to a quarter of the ‘younger people’ in town were moving house every three to four months, and there was no registration system or restrictions on movement into the town. As a result, he concluded, tax was far more easily avoided in the town than elsewhere.99 Ironically, the territorial capital -where more officials were in closer touch with a large concentration o f Africans than anywhere else in Tanganyika - was acting, as it had throughout the British colonial period, as a sanctuary from the fiscal demands of the state for significant numbers of Africans.
95 PC Baker to CS, 25,h July 1941, TNA/30263.
96 Explanatory Memo, to Native Tax (Amendment) Ordinance 1941, PRO C O /691/181/42003. 97 Ibid.
The extent of evasion
It is hard to construct a statistical picture of the extent of tax evasion in the town throughout the period. Existing records are patchy and unreliable, and, being cobbled together from different sources, are unsystematic as comparative indicators. Nevertheless what information has survived does tend to confirm the impression that tax evasion was common in Dar es Salaam, even amongst those who were registered to pay tax in the town. In late November 1936, for example, 48 per cent of the district’s estimated tax yield for 1935 was still outstanding and 62 per cent for 1936 itself.100 Evasion was likely to have been considerably more widespread than this appears to indicate, as the amount of taxes due were usually underestimated by district officials;101 meanwhile, the bulk of Dar es Salaam’s floating population would not have been factored into the estimates. Another indication of the extent of evasion can perhaps be gleaned from the number of defaulters employed on labour tickets. The totals were surprisingly small, however. Use of defaulter labour appears to have been adopted as something of a last resort. In 1936 just 716 defaulters were employed on labour tickets in the whole of Dar es Salaam district, working a total of 21,480 days (an average of 30 days per defaulter) on forestry and the upkeep of stations and roads. Judging by the number of defaulters employed, the extent of evasion in the district may have risen considerably over the next two years, as by 1938 the total had grown to almost 2,000, working 39,520 days on road maintenance (around 20 days per defaulter).102 In part this can be accounted for by the high rate of S h s.il/- demanded of those liable to taxation in the district. By the early 1940s the district office had, according to Pike, acquired ‘a tremendous accumulation of arrears of nearly £50,000 which was hanging like a millstone on the Native Administration’.103 People’s difficulty in paying the S h s.il/- tax was acknowledged as an important causative factor. In 1942 the arrears were wiped off by central government. Meanwhile, the rate in the rural areas of the district was reduced to Shs.9/- in an attempt to induce payment. In Dar es Salaam town, the rate remained unchanged in order to discourage rural-urban migration at a time of rapid urban growth.104 Thanks to the changes, 1,217
99 Leslie, Siwvey> p.250,
100 MS, ‘Administration’, pp.7/8,.
101 R em iniscences o f life as a DO 1947-64 by T. Mayhew [hereafter: M ayhew, ‘R em iniscences’], p.18, RH/M ss.Afr.s.2089.
102 Info, in TN A /61/14/12.
103 DAR for 1942, p.3, TNA/3/XVII/A. 104 PAR for 1942, p.20.
more taxes were paid in 1942 than 1941105 and a full tax collection was achieved in the rural areas. In the town, on the other hand, evasion continued.106 It remained common throughout the decade. By 1950 the District Commissioner estimated there were 3,000 defaulters in the Municipality alone. Whilst he was confident that many of these would be caught in time, he concluded that even a 90 per cent tax collection was ‘merely a pipe dream5.107
Raids carried out by the police in conjunction with the Native Administration and tax collectors, which became increasingly common over the final decade of colonial rule, brought to light more and more defaulters in the course of the 1950s. A single raid in November 1952 resulted in the arrest of 676 African ‘spivs’ and tax evaders. Meanwhile, in 1954, 1,574 defaulters were apprehended as a result of campaigns against undesirables in the course of the year.108 Continuous raids briefly appeared to be having the desired effect. The amount of tax collected in the first nine months of 1954 far exceeded that for the whole o f the previous year.109 However, whilst it may temporarily have resulted in enhancing collection, it seems that few defaulters were persuaded to mend their ways as the number of tax-evaders caught in raids the following year actually -a t 1,576- just exceeded the 1954 total.110 Two years on, the Provincial Commissioner was complaining that the collection of tax had been ‘even more difficult than in previous years.5 ‘Despite a seven-fold increase in prosecutions,5 he wrote in his 1957 annual report, ‘collections were the lowest for some years and investigations reveal that at least 6,000 persons avoid their tax liability.’111 Partly as a result of this state of affairs, the campaign against undesirables was intensified yet further. By 1958 raids had become a daily occurrence. The statistics resulting from these raids reveal how widespread tax evasion had become by the late 1950s. Of the 930 persons screened in the first quarter of 1958, 761 were found to be in default; the proportion remained at similarly high levels throughout the year. The annual total of defaulters apprehended as a result of raids in the whole of 1958 exceeded
112
4,000. O f these, 1,563 were eventually prosecuted for non-payment (the remainder
105 PAR for 1942, p.20.
106 DAR for 1942, p.3, TNA/3/XVII/A. 107 DAR for 1950, p.4, TNA/61/504/1/II/56.
108 QPR, Dsm Dist., 1st October-31st December 1954, T N A /90/1011/V ol.l. 109 Ibid., 1st July-30th September 1954.
110 Ibid., 1st October-31st December 1955. 111 PAR for 1957, p.23.
paid up after their arrest).113 The position continued to deteriorate in 1959. In round-ups which took place in the latter half of February that year at Bugurani, Kinondoni, ICipawa, and Keko Juu, as many as 1,400 individuals were arrested for tax evasion.114 At a March meeting of the Legco, Rashidi Kawawa, the TANU politician (former unionist and ‘film star’) elected as Dar es Salaam’s representative in the first territorial elections of 1958, attacked ‘the present system of checking tax-defaulters in the towns’ which ‘was causing unnecessary hardship to law abiding citizens.’115 Despite the scale of apprehensions, though, action against defaulters was not resulting in an enhanced collection of tax. The total amount of personal taxes collected in Dar es Salaam Municipality declined from 24,704 in 1958 to 23,584 the following year. In 1960 it dropped more dramatically to just 17,173. Such high levels of evasion at the end of the colonial period are an indication of the declining legitimacy of the colonial administration in the face of the nationalist challenge. Certainly the Native Administration was anxious about ‘the less responsible members of TANU... suggest[ing] that ‘Uhuru’ would mean the end of taxation.’116 By 1959 tax officials appeared to be losing the stomach for the fight. In that year only 284 prosecutions for non-payment of taxes were made. In 1960 it declined yet further to just
1 1 7 • *
185. Raids for tax collecting purposes appeal’ to have been abandoned. In his report for
1960, Durdant-Hollomby recorded that:
Tax was collected by purely administrative means and AOs in charge o f Wards gave priority to the matter. Arrangements were made for broadcasts, newspaper handouts and a poster campaign. Street Elders with detailed knowledge o f their immediate neighbourhood were used and a full scale publicity exercise was launched by the Minister o f Information Services.118
These initiatives failed to arrest the slide in taxes collected, however, the total for 1960 declining by over 25 per cent. Durdant-Hollomby held that ‘unemployment, industrial unrest and the railway strike can be blamed to some extent for the poor response’. He also reported ‘there was a feeling in some quarters that as taxes were likely to be reduced as soon as the present [TANU] Government took office, there were good reasons for delaying payment.’ As an explanatory factor, though, the suspension o f campaigns against defaulters was likely to have been most influential. As we have seen, at their
1,3 DAR for 1960, p.5, RH/Mss.Afr.s.937.
114 See TS reports, 27th February 1959, 5tl1 March 1959 and 19th March 1959. 115 TS, 19th March 1959, p.5.
110 PAR for 1959, p.23.
117 DAR for 1960, p.5, RH/Mss.Afr.s.937. 118 Ibid.
height they were responsible for picking up over 4,000 defaulters annually; around 7.5 per cent of the male population of the town, from whom it was considerably easier to extract taxes than the ‘uncaptured’ majority.
Tackling the defaulter, 1941-1961
Campaigns against tax-evaders became a perennial feature of life in Dar es Salaam township in the last two decades of colonial rule; their frequency increasing as the scale of evasion became ever more apparent to urban officials.119 Diverse departments of the colonial administration would be mobilised -the Township administration, tax collectors, and most importantly the police- in order to apprehend defaulters. The first major raid of this type took place in October 1941. A Tanganyika Standard editorial provides the background to events:
We have been informed on good authority that tax defaulters among Dar es Salaam Africans are far more numerous than in most other districts, and casual enquiry seems to confirm that the number o f Africans who have not only not paid this years tax, but also the tax for last year and the year before, is very considerable. The causes for this would be pointless to seek at present. The effects are clearly that any action taken now would have to be drastic to be useful, and, if drastic, would round up a very large number o f local Africans. This is apparently exactly what happened.120
Indeed, the intensity of action was such that the editor was forced to criticise officials for o ver-zealousness:
Correspondence that we have now received alleges not that law has merely been applied arbitrarily, but in fact that it has been far overstepped.
...V iew in g the events o f last week -again, we speak as laymen- with their wholesale rounding up, arrests, detentions and incarcerations, it seems doubtful whether provisions [o f the law] were not in one case or another exceeded, and the excesses were for more than could be explained or made tolerable by the circumstances -a great deal o f tax default, and