Imagined disease and racial segregation: multiple dreams of open space in Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam

It is strange to encounter an open space in the middle of Tanzania’s congested capital, Dar es Salaam. Similarly, one might wonder why there exists a golf course and a zoo besieged by traffic jams in the bustling city centre of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The key to understanding the intriguing anomalies in the urban geographies of these capital cities lies in tracing back their histories. After the First World War colonial governments in British Dar es Salaam (1924) and Belgian Kinshasa (1931) dreamed of implementing a physical separation between Africans and Europeans. Although the British indirect rule/association, in fact provided an excellent basis to legitimate racial segregation, the British in Dar es Salaam just like the Belgians in Kinshasa, who applied a policy that was greatly inspired by both British and French rule, but was nonetheless overtly racial, felt forced to legitimate racial segregation with a sanitary discourse. In both colonies similar explanations underpinned the sanitary discourse, such as the statement that a physical distance would prevent malaria mosquitos flying over from the African quarter to the European quarter, or that it would prevent the contamination by germ-ridden rats ‘as these are less likely to move from area to area over an open space’ – all explanations which were far from scientifically proven, and were even broadly contested by empirical observations. This shared use of a sanitation discourse thus shows the controversial character of the planned intervention, but also suggests a certain transnational exchange with regard to the implementation of racial segregation in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, a remarkable similarity exists in the place-naming of the separation zones between Africans and Europeans in both capitals: the ‘Neutral Zone’ in British Dar es Salaam and the French equivalent ‘Zone Neutre’ in Belgian Kinshasa. With regard to the ‘neutral zones’ several archival records highlight both in Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa the powerful ...