‘This country is free, but for the few’: Informal labour, class politics, and urban order in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This article explores the relationships between regime consolidation, labour informality, and class formation in African cities. It examines how, as part of broader efforts to build political support, incumbent leaders and their parties manipulate class formation among urban informal workers.

A defining feature of Africa’s rapid urbanisation is the expansion of a large tranche of low-income informal workers. We argue that, in a manner reminiscent of colonial efforts to control a then emerging urban working class, leaders adopt approaches to regulating labour informality—especially workers’ access to space and their symbolic recognition—that then influence class formation. These regulatory interventions either encourage greater unity among workers, or else help divide an incipient ‘urban mass’, introducing hierarchies between ‘respectable’ classes of small-scale ‘entrepreneurs’ and their more unruly counterparts. Having drawn these distinctions, we further theorise how and why incumbent leaders pursue one strategy or another, arguing that they regulate informal workers—and seek to influence their intra-class solidarities—in ways consistent with efforts both to consolidate a ruling coalition and to counter opposition electoral pressures.

We explore this theory further through our case study—Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. This involves contrasting the regulatory approaches adopted by Presidents John Pombe Magufuli (2015–2021) and Samia Suluhu Hassan (2021–), both from Tanzania’s long-time ruling party, CCM. For our empirical material, we combine focus groups, interviews, participant observation, and press reviews. Finally, while our case study involves an authoritarian regime, we use our conclusion to reflect further on commonalities and differences across regime types, democratic or authoritarian, and on the significance of class-differentiated experiences of freedom and repression in the city.