title: ‘Blackout Blues’: A Socio-cultural History of Vulnerable Electricity Networks and Resilient Users in Dar es Salaam, 1920–2020
Creators: name: Mchome, Emanuel Lukio
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2022

description: Blackouts in African cities have received little attention from historians. Using archival and other written primary sources collected from Tanzania, Britain, and Sweden, as well as oral-history interviews, this study examines the socio-cultural history of blackouts in colonial and postcolonial Tanzania while employing critical infrastructure concepts of vulnerability and resilience in the Global South context. In five substantive chapters, the dissertation discusses the socio-economic, political, and technological factors which shaped the expansion of Tanzania’s power networks between 1920 and the mid-1990s and how such expansion set the stage for persistent blackouts witnessed in the country from the 1980s onward. It also analyses the growth of household electricity usage and consumers’ attempts to circumvent and adapt to frequent failure of power grid in Dar es Salaam from the 1980s to 2020. This study found that the power crises and blackouts which emerged in Tanzania from the 1980s cannot be understood without reference to the historical legacy in the planning and construction of power systems in the colonial and postcolonial periods. While the British colonial government had left electricity enterprises to be run by private companies, the postcolonial Tanzanian government nationalised it because it considered electricity as an important tool for its development and self-reliance policies. It built large, centralised hydropower infrastructure and integrated them to form a national grid using foreign multilateral and bilateral financial and technological assistance. Although foreign technologies and funds enabled the government of Tanzania to build large power networks to modernise and develop the country, the foreign development assistance provided in forms of fund, technologies and expertise was never smooth and without difficulties. The process was influenced by the Cold War, high modernism, and decolonisation politics. Both donors and recipients desired for political and economic gains something which led to overlooking of some vital technology transfer issues and underperformance of power networks. Donors’ assistance also created long-term economic and technological dependency on western technologies and expertise in the everyday operations of electric networks such as meeting growing power demand, repair, and maintenance of infrastructure. Despite that Tanzania’s power networks became more interconnected and interdependent from the 1970s, the technical system vulnerabilities witnessed in form of blackouts since the 1980s were largely due to technological and financial dependency on donors than due to technical interconnectedness and interdependence. Tanzania’s national grid began to face critical failures in the 1980s and 1990s when electricity had become a household and urban technology. Frequent power outages crippled people’s socio-economic and cultural lives. It ruined electrical appliances, created discomforts in homes and reduced people’s productivity. However, such failures and associated impacts on people’s livelihoods influenced electricity consumers to develop distinct socio-technical adaptation measures to reduce the socio-economic consequences of power disruptions in homes. The study shows that households and urban spaces were socio-technical, contested environments in which electricity users innovatively tinkered electric technologies to enhance their resilience to power blackouts. Therefore, even though power networks continued to be vulnerable, electricity users in Dar es Salam were not simply passive and vulnerable consumers but they were active agents who adopted new artefacts and modified working schedules to cope with vulnerable power networks.