I have been keeping track of the general “plantiness” of my corner of Dar es Salaam. Plantitude? Tree cover. General greenery is what I mean. We often find ourselves living where we do for good pragmatic reasons, especially those who are good at adulting.
I have always liked Dar for self-indulgent reasons: warm ocean, slow pace of life. So many fruits! And vegetables. Samosas, the call to prayer so no need for a watch. Also, for the most part of my life, the city has been bursting with vibrant life. Life that I am watching disappear.
People like to track the health of an ecosystem by butterflies, because they are pretty. I have been watching the lizards, because they have always been abundant domestic companions over here. In the mid- and late 20th century there used to be land dragons in the garden, dudes as thick as my forearm.
Read: Life in Dar es Salaam during Christmas holiday
Once a specimen so large and regal showed up that all the humans shut themselves in the house so we could watch it prowl majestically up the walkway to disappear into a neighbours michongoma. The myth at the time was that if one bit you, you were a goner for sure.
These days? I am lucky if I see a 5 cm wall lizard occupying one of the planters outside hoping to catch a meal. Pathetic.
Because I was complacent- surely Dar would always be rudely verdant- it took me a while to pick up on how fast we have been denuding the place.
Even though I spent time look at lizards and butterflies, I have been surprised lately to wake up at dawn to find that the temperature is already torturous. This is not what I signed up for. Dar is fine when it is “hot” or “very hot,” but whatever is going on this year is something else. I suspect that climate change has slammed into us after all, and there is not very much I can do about that, but we are not helping ourselves with our development plans for the city.
Case in point: The number of car yards mushrooming around formerly residential areas is directly proportional to the disappearance of mature trees.
Read: Kigamboni: Escape from Dar’s hustle
We are literally swapping tree cover for concrete cover, and at a very fast pace. I want to say that it is nice that we have flyovers and tall glassed-in buildings, but I would be lying. Dar’s charm lay in the fact that it maintained a cheerful lack of interest in copy-paste urbanity.
Alas, no more. The modernists have won with their lack of imagination. As we lose our trees, we lose our wild backyards and shrubbery to the straitjacket of paving blocks and cement, and the lizards and butterflies.
This also means we are losing the cover that kept us relatively cool, thus driving up the demand for electricity for cooling systems in a place that already had nature on her side.
There are people who call themselves engineers, who are employed by the city to make the place better, it appears that they are so smart that this bit of logic might have escaped them. But what do I know? I am just a lizard-watcher who wonders how all these car yards get the green light to pave over residential plots and muses publicly about it. Have a merry and hopefully comfortably cool Christmas.
Source: The East African
Share this content: