Mlimani City is well-placed, though. It is a short drive from the peninsula: the northern end of Dar es Salaam, snuggled against the Indian Ocean. This neighbourhood is largely populated by cars and gated houses and expensive hotels and restaurants: everything the long-term expatriate needs to feel right at home. White people can drive the wide road from their guarded homes to the guarded mall parking lot with a minimum of human interaction.
I live on the opposite end of the city, in an area called Tabata. A meal is about seven times cheaper here because the ingredients and customers are local. There are always plenty of people around the dala-dala stand, selling their wares by candlelight after it gets dark. Walking home, I can easily start a conversation with whoever is walking nearby. Theoretically my home is accessible by car, but I doubt I will ever figure out the route.
Last weekend, I left my home to travel to Zanzibar, a prime tourist destination. Stone Town in particular has been spiced up (so to speak): some sort of tourist police organization ensures that the streets are clean and safe. Much of the town is paved—that is, the government has paved the three or four feet of street which separate any two given buildings. Stone Town looks like the town of Agrabah (in the Disney movie Aladdin) but with tourists. I went to an Italian restaurant (complete with wine in coke bottles), a night club, and a tourist bar. I stayed with friends in town.
On Saturday (Sikukuu, the end of Ramadan), we visited a friend just south of Stone Town. After a wonderful feast of local cuisine, we walked down to the beach. We saw shacks all along the beach: from whatever materials nature had left lying in the vicinity, people have built themselves habitats. The shacks have open doorways and open windows. Walking past the buildings, I could see the people inside through the myriad slits in their makeshift walls. In an effort to preserve the nonexistent privacy of their homes, I pretended I did not notice them.
A few hundred metres out to sea, large, expensive ships were carrying their large, expensive cargoes to and from shiny Stone Town. Less than fifty metres behind us, a European was obliviously swimming at a luxurious beach resort. Less than twenty metres to our right, up a hill, towered an enormous wall, safeguarding the spacious, pristine estate of somebody important.
Through their doorways and windows and walls, the residents of that beach can clearly see that they are surrounded on all sides by an ocean and by oceans of money. Walking beside them, looking up at the obnoxious parade of wealth at the top of the steep hill, I could not help but think of the so-called trickle-down effect. Some optimists theorize that from the top of that hill will overflow a gentle stream of wealth, gradually empowering the underprivileged at the bottom. Staring up from below, though, it is obvious that the wall is too tall, too spiky, and too impermeable. The only things that trickle to the bottom of that hill are rain, garbage, and poor people.