by MICHAELA COLLORD
In Tanzania and beyond, political elites manage informal workers not by ignoring them—but by shaping their identities, dividing their ranks, and using class to tighten their hold on power.
A friend recently recalled—laughing as she did—her personal clash with the Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner, the most senior presidential appointee within Tanzania’s commercial capital. The friend in question resides in one of Dar’s (in)famous informal settlements, where she organizes with a co-op of wavujajasho—working people, or literally, “those who sweat.”
She had been invited to an official meeting where the Regional Commissioner, as guest of honor, advertised a new government loan scheme to some 300 attendees, all hailing from low-income groups. Such meetings are common and often follow a set script. State officials celebrate a new government initiative to help wananchi, ordinary citizens, and wananchi are expected to respond favorably, clapping on cue.
This friend, though, upset the script. When given an opportunity to speak, she recalled past loan schemes, often unveiled ahead of elections. People were made to pay expensive administrative fees to banks yet never received any loans. It was, she said, the government and the banks who benefited from these initiatives, not the people.
Her words resonated powerfully, triggering a wave of applause, this time spontaneous. The Regional Commissioner quickly instructed journalists present not to report the incident; the stage-managed event must be brought back under control. Even if momentarily, though, the crowd had changed. It broke with its prescribed role and offered its own, autonomous response.
The friend’s story points to a more widespread—yet often overlooked—phenomenon. There is a growing interest in Africa’s urban middle classes and their political relevance. By contrast, the relevance—even the existence—of working-class subjects is more debated. Certainly, urban working-class identities are diverse and are further complicated by criss-crossing religious, ethnic, and gender cleavages.
But as explored in a recent article with my coauthor, Sabatho Nyamsenda, urban informal workers’ collective identities, self-expression, and group solidarities—their class formation—are a focus of political contestation, including top-down interventions. State actors—like the Dar Regional Commissioner in our friend’s story—seek to manipulate this class formation, variously uniting, dividing, and co-opting urban informal workers.
Why? The contrasting approaches of two Tanzanian presidents, John Pombe Magufuli (2015–2021) and Samia Suluhu Hassan (2021–present), help answer this question. Each adapted their approach to urban informal workers to reinforce their broader strategies of urban and national political dominance, as well as their preferred balance of inter-class relations.
Magufuli, the “bulldozer” president, centralized power at the elite level while making populist appeals to classes of urban poor. Following Magufuli’s death, Samia soon broke with her predecessor; she reintegrated excluded elite factions even as she oversaw widespread, violent evictions of informal workers from the streets. Only later, amidst fears of falling popularity, did her government moderate its approach.
What did this look like in more detail? We argue that, in a manner reminiscent of colonial efforts to control a then-emerging “urban mass,” leaders today adapt approaches to regulating labor informality—especially workers’ access to urban space and their symbolic recognition—that then influence class formation.
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