Gatherings Outside the Workshop

Introduction

In this chapter, I move out of the workshop to follow some of its products, the majiko (cookstoves), into Dar es Salaam cityscapes. Although workers at Mahakama Ya Friji produce different products, including roofing materials, pans, and cooler boxes, among others, the focus of this chapter is on cookstoves because of their important role as the crafters’ main product and in the city’s cooking and dinning culture and associated socialities, as well as due to cookstoves’ contribution to environmental degradation and deforestation. The cookstove assembles urban Tanzanians together in many ways: through food and sociality, in gender identity and roles or forms of masculinity and femininity, as an element of labour, and in conviviality—all the outcomes of labour at the workshop. Furthermore, the chapter explores the cookstoves’ resistance and domination in relation to new technologies and changes. I discuss how cookstoves create and contest gendered space and labour among city dwellers.

The stove is a lens through which to witness how the lives of Tanzanians are connected by and with forms of makeshift technology.

Unregulated e-waste recycling, specifically in developing countries (and Tanzania in particular), needs to be understood and analysed beyond the junkyard spaces where e-waste is salvaged. Ethnography offers us the opportunity to observe processes and practices, networks, relations, and assemblages beyond the chopping, dismantling, salvaging, and burning of e-waste. In this way, I continue tracking e-waste as it percolates throughout wider society.

Ethnography allows us to follow and observe materials and activities beyond recycling centres and dumping places. It allows us to follow where these materials go. What do they turn into and what do they gather along the way? Why are they essential in incentivising ways of handling e-waste that are regarded as unsafe?

Several studies have explored e-waste materiality and agency beyond dumping and recycling facilities (Gregson et al., 2010). Materials salvaged from e-waste can regain or acquire new value. However, ending there does not give a comprehensive picture of what they become. To stay with the materials means relentlessly following them until they are scattered to the wind, if they ever are. In Chapter 5, I explored the ways in which e-waste materials are transformed into other values inside Mahakama Ya Friji workshop and the relations that make this possible. It is also important to follow the thing beyond the confines of the workshop to explore the cookstoves and how they are assembled in Dar es Salaam (Appadurai, 1986).

Cooking and dining are also social and cultural performances. The anthropology of food explores social encounters during food preparation, eating, and dining, and also explores matters of taste. Relationships surrounding food preparations, eating, and matters of taste are phenomenologically meaningful in understanding our relationships to others (Mintz, 1986).

Food preparation and dining experiences reveal underlying social entanglements. Kinship, gender relations, technology, and relations to the more-than-humans all connect to the ways we prepare and eat food.

Charcoal cookstoves are entangled with, and at the same time enhance, the sociocultural activities of preparing food and dining in the fabric of Dar es Salaam. In this way, e-waste becomes more than just a digital afterlife. It is essential and integral to passionate encounters and material value. Cookstoves, gender relations and cooking are part of the broader fabric of the city, cultural performances, and environmental discussions—and all of these are connected to the activities at the Mahakama Ya Friji workshop and to e-waste.

I began to recognise the connection between charcoal stoves and the workshop on a weekend evening on October 28, 2018, when I decided to go out for a drink at Uhuru Peak bar.

I had just started working at Mahakama Ya Friji at the time. Arriving at Uhuru Peak that evening, I was welcomed by loud bongo fleva music, an aroma of roasted meat, banana, and

different mouth-watering soups—cow tongue, cow legs, intestine, and chicken, to name a few.

As usual, when I came to Uhuru Peak bar, which got its name from the highest peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, I sat at a table near the outdoor kitchen. This table is for VIPs only. I used to come here during my master’s fieldwork in 2017, and became close friends with the owners, three brothers from Kilimanjaro. Deo, who is always there supervising the bar, and I became remarkably close. The other two brothers were supervising a clothing shop that they also own.

The youngest, Amani, frequently travels to China to buy merchandise, while the eldest, God, stays at their shop at Mwenge market.

I ordered BBQ goat ribs, kachumbari (guacamole) salad, and a cold Kilimanjaro beer to cool myself. Deo came around to let me know that he would join me after he finished the weekly bookkeeping. I liked coming here for several reasons. First, the bar has an outdoor area under several neem trees, suitable for my discontent with Dar es Salaam’s heat. Second, I enjoyed my conversations with Deo about their (his and his brothers’) business journey from artisan mining to shoe peddling to now owning a business empire, a journey that resonates with the dreams of many workers at Mahakama Ya Friji. And, of course, I enjoyed the goat BBQ prepared meticulously by my favourite chef, Peru.

‘Are you going to play some reggae?’ I asked Deo after he joined me. ‘Ahh no’, he explained as I chewed my juicy ribs, ‘we are playing bongo fleva, you see there are many people today’. I looked around to discover that the place had more people than usual. Deo started telling me about the time when they first opened the bar:

There were so many people coming here, can you imagine, on the weekends we did not have enough room to store the money. On Monday morning, we drove to the bank with money filled in baskets, and those were the days. You know, all the popular people came here, musicians, politicians, army general, lawyers, everybody you care to mention was coming here. Uhuru Peak was the city’s ground. You see these

people, let’s say there were four or five times this number. People were even standing with their drinks. Now, they come because of that legacy, and especially for the food.

Peru was here with us all the time, and people still come for his BBQ.

He continued, ‘Biashara ya bar ni jiko, hatuuzi vinywaji tunauza chakula, pombe unaweza pata kila mahali. Ili watu waje kwako wanafata jiko’ (In the Bar business, you do not sell the drinks, a bar is a kitchen. People come because of the food, not the alcohol we sell).

Although Uhuru Peak is no longer among the most famous bars in Dar es Salaam as it was a decade ago, still, now and then customers who used to come still show up. My conversations with Deo and other VIP members revealed that food from Peru draws them back to Uhuru Peak. Regular customers of Uhuru Peak include a group of lawyers who have an office nearby. Every lunchtime, they come to Uhuru Peak to eat. Although Peru admitted that the number of customers has dropped over the years, he has still managed to keep a good number of them who come regularly.

Deo’s assertion that ‘the bar is the kitchen’ can be seen in every bar in Dar es Salaam.

Most bars in Dar es Salaam are constructed with a kitchen in mind. No matter how big the bar might be, the kitchen is usually filled with several charcoal stoves. Although some bars and hotels have slowly started switching to gas stoves, they have still not completely abandoned the famous charcoal stoves. The charcoal stove holds a vital place in assemblages of vibrant out-of-home dining in Tanzania. Apart from high-end restaurants, it is almost impossible to dine in Dar es Salaam without eating food prepared on a jiko la mkaa (charcoal cookstove).