The suburban frontier: Middle‐class construction in Dar es Salaam. By ClaireMercer, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2024. pp. Xvi + 201. (paperback). ISBN: 9780520402386; (ebook). ISBN: 9780520402393

It is important to begin by noting that Mercer adds a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the rapid growth of the middle class in Africa. By the early 1970s, early discussions of the small African elites which had developed in late colonial and early post-colonial times had been shoved aside by neo-Marxist identification of different forms (bureaucratic, commercial, party-state, etc.) of African bourgeoisie. Widely depicted as tied to the state and subordinated to international capital, these were usually described as corrupt and exploitative, and as a result, were the recipient of minimal sympathy. This was all rather depressing, so it is not surprising that studies of class went into something of a lull from around the turn of the century. Meanwhile, Marxism itself had been forced into retreat and self-examination as from the 1980s onward, global capitalism had gone on the rampage. However, change was afoot, for what The Economist had in May 2000 infamously labelled ‘the hopeless continent’ was by 2010 being hailed as ‘Africa Rising’. In tune, the IMF, World Bank, and related bodies now discovered the ‘middle class’ in Africa, singling it out as both the product and champion of economic growth and ‘development’. Extensive debate now followed, this revolving around issues of how an African middle class should be defined (and counted) and the extent to which notions of class borrowed from Western sociology were appropriate to Africa. Although necessary, such discussions were often rather tedious and, what is more, they were characteristically top-down and based on number-crunching of diverse continental and national statistics rather than on any real-life familiarity with those now deemed to be ‘middle-class’. Thankfully, we are now more or less through that phase, and what we are finding today is that while the IMF was discovering the African middle class, a significant cohort of (often younger) scholars had been aware that it had been there all along. The result has been an impressive flow of high-quality, detailed studies of African middle classes in one country after another (Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe all spring to mind), with Mercer's contribution being a most welcome and highly original addition. Bringing her geographer's gaze to the study of the middle class, Mercer declares the central aim of her book as being ‘to examine the suburban frontier as the place where Africa's middle classes are shaped’, and how ‘investment in property—land, houses, and landscape—is central to middle-class formation in urban futures in Africa’ (pp. 6–7). She justifies this by noting the dramatic rise in Africa's urban population, informing us that Dar es Salaam is projected to grow to over 10 million by 2030 and become one of Africa's five megacities. At the core of her argument is that this growth is unplanned and that most urban residents will make their lives on the periphery of Africa's cities, with much of this urban extension residential in character, ‘peppered’ with many small businesses, industries, and retail outlets, often located in people's homes. ‘This is organic suburbanization, constructed, extended, and improved incrementally’ as numerous thousands of individual cash-based domestic buildings take shape (p. 7). However, this is a process that is highly unequal. Only a minority of urban residents have the resources to build houses that are comfortable, yet as Mercer elaborates in fascinating detail, they must overcome numerous problems to do so. These centre around their precarious access to land, entitlement to which is only rarely legally acknowledged by the state. The core theme of Mercer's book is how the rapid expansion of Dar es Salaam continues to be shaped by ‘the coloniality of space’. Under both German and British colonialism, suburbs were planned as exclusive residential enclaves for Europeans, with separate urban zones being marked out by different building regulations for Indians and Africans. This history has continued to leave its imprint not only on the city's material shape and form, but also on how people think about urban space and their place in it. It endures in colonial land tenure regimes that leave urban residents without title or right to live where they do; it endures in their minds about what is desirable in terms of topography, planning and architecture; and it endures in a hierarchical way of thinking about urban space in which people who are higher up on the social ladder live in more favoured spaces. Crucially, too, as Mercer argues, ‘it is central to middle-class urban imaginaries and urban spatial practices’ (p. 8). After briefly outlining the growth of the middle class in Tanzania (it remains one of the smallest on the continent), Mercer sets out Dar es Salaam's history, expansion and practice against the background of the shifts in the country's political economy, broadly speaking from its initial socialist era under Nyerere (when the middle class was formally frowned upon, but nonetheless grew substantially below the radar), through to the liberalization era under later presidents, when the middle class increasingly came out of the closet. However, even as this middle class became a socioeconomic and cultural force, it remained somewhat difficult to pin down. Tanzania's lack of industrialization meant that its middle classes were not neatly defined by the relations of production, but rather more by their dependence, directly (as public employees) or indirectly, on the state. Yet as she demonstrates, while most middle-class individuals are or have been in formal employment, virtually all have to combine this with running small businesses if they wish to build their dream homes, whether this be engaging household agricultural production, farming on additional properties acquired further out on the frontier, renting out rooms, small-scale commerce or, for women (for middle-classness is also highly gendered), simply cooking cakes for sale to neighbours. All this is explored in exemplary fashion in successive chapters on the expansion of the suburban frontier, the difficulties of obtaining access to land, how the middle class seeks to shape and defend a suitably middle-class landscape, how domestic architecture (which references both local and global styles) becomes a signifier of status and respectability, and how middle-class areas come to be distinguished by the accoutrements of middle class living, such as gyms and small shopping centres. The Suburban Frontier provides a valuable reminder of the staggering pace of change that is happening across the African continent. For all that Mercer is always careful to indicate the specificities of Tanzania, her account exemplifies multi-faceted processes of class formation and reproduction which are happening across one country after another. Nonetheless, although her detailed descriptions of the rapid growth of self-built, would-be middle class areas on the Dar es Salaam urban periphery are recognizable with anyone who is familiar with African cities, she helps us to see these with new eyes: how land is acquired (and previous dwellers dispossessed) by exchange of cash; how ownership of that land is only relatively rarely acknowledged by the state; how, as a result, housing cannot be used as a collateral; and how as land-holders subdivide and areas become densified, they come to be seen as less desirable, and the middle class begins to move out to colonise yet other areas. Furthermore, although she does not use the term, she demonstrates how middle class areas become arenas of class-conflict, as middle class residents band together for security (albeit with variant success), to keep their homes safe from thieves and keep less desirable class elements at bay. Overall, Mercer makes a convincing case that the coloniality of space is central to the contemporary middle-class experience in Africa and throws light on how the middle-class distance themselves spatially and socially from the urban poor. Yet she notes the irony that ‘The middle class are, in effect, the victims of their own success, since their investment in land and housing on the suburban frontier has made it a more attractive place for other aspiring house-builders’ (p. 145). As a result, the middle class will move on, and the suburban frontier will move outwards with them. Mercer always manages to remain the academic. Nonetheless, her analysis betrays a fundamental sympathy with the middle-class which is strikingly different from the searing critiques which were levelled at Tanzania's ‘bourgeoisie’. This points to a widespread issue which, as yet, has been inadequately confronted by those of us who write on African middle classes, how our own middle-classness shapes our thinking. That said, what also comes out forcefully from a reading of Mercer's book is the energy, ambition and unending toil which is going into the making of Africa's middle class. Becoming and staying middle class requires endless struggle! Sharper critique will doubtless come as middle-classness hardens into privilege. Research data are not shared.