Romancing the frontline: a view from dar es salaam on intimacy and political attachment

Abstract

This article explores the entwinement of inter-racial romance, political mobilization, and public morality using the vantage-point of Dar es Salaam as a relay station for 1960s leftwing exiles. Cleansed from many formal political accounts, romance – and talk of it – loomed large and consequential in the everyday rhythms of life along the transnational networks of political exiles who transited through Dar. Featuring couples whose trajectories connected Southern Africa to Tanzania and the United States, the article revisits the intimate ways that the anti-Apartheid movement, African decolonization, and American campus struggles over racial discrimination were stitched together. But if romantic attachment played a significant role in political mobilization across these geographies, on the ground in Dar it also furnished a powerful lexicon for rank-and-file cadres challenging a leadership class via a critique of lifestyle and consumption. This latter dynamic both made romance a focus for material struggle over the terms of a decolonization-in-waiting and connected Dar’s community of exiles to the vernacular politics of their host city.