The Slipway Hotel is located on the Msasani Peninsula in Dar es Salaam, eight or so kilometers from the center of the city. Each morning since my arrival here I’ve sat on a bench facing the water of the protected harbor and watched fishermen patiently, silently, at work, untangling their nets and preparing their boats for the day’s labors. Crows, a truly irrepressible nation of birds, keep up an endless, swooping screech. The Indian Ocean has its special tidal rhythms that feel obscure to my Atlantic-Caribbean imagination. The waters recede, return. But perhaps it’s the constancy that matters, the permanent repetition of this circular motion, with all the familiar indifference of the sea anywhere. This sea too is history, I assume.1 I’ve long wanted to visit Dar es Salaam, and now here I am.2
In September 1974, Julius K. Nyerere, then president of Tanzania, paid a four-day official...
