A Cold War City

Abstract

system; the party-state had to abandon the assumption of an ‘oily’ socialist economy and instead find more obviously minimalist ways to survive (185). Grace’s account of the inner workings of oil barter in the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation is an interesting and novel contribution to this history, though there is surely more to say about how the ‘self-reliance’ of government officials in the 1970s became a key ingredient of a new catch-as-catch-can capitalism in the 1980s. Grace’s conclusion offers a condensed but suggestive tour of the dramatically different auto world of the 1990s and 2000s: endless snaking foleni ( jams), deadly car crashes, and misafara (quasi-militarized government convoys that stop all traffic for miles and hours). Three decades of cheap oil and liberalized imports (most recently of cheap motorcycle taxis from China) have ensured that urban Tanzania is utterly choked by private transport, while the endless construction projects of the Magufuli administration (2015–21) will only put more wheels on the road. And yet elements of the previous machinic complex remain, from the rough communalism of the minibus (predictably demonized by Western planners) to the general frustration that the rich travel in private, air-conditioned comfort while the poor commute cheek to jowl. Like other recent works, African Motors retrieves the histories of 1970s and 1980s — as well as the deeper histories of African ingenuity — and gives them a new salience. As the planet confronts the limits of endless, petrol-dependent growth, African Motors shows us a different history of automobility, enriching our ability to think the car, development, and even modernity itself otherwise.