Claire Mercer‘s The Suburban Frontier examines African suburbanisation and the emergence of middle-class culture through a case study of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over decades, Mercer’s fascinating and significant work challenges Western-centric urban theory and highlights how colonial legacies have shaped middle-class identity formation in Africa, writes Christiane Tarantino.

The Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam. Claire Mercer. University of California Press. 2024.

Picture a self-built bungalow with a red roof at five a.m. on a Monday morning, with clanging doors, bathing water heated in the kitchen kettle, and milk with spices warming for tea. This evocative scene, captured in Salasala, the northern hinterland of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, provides an intimate and immersive insight into a suburban development far from the urban centre. It is central to Claire Mercer’s well-researched book The Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam (2024), which purposefully invites readers inside the home of a civil servant and his wife, a business owner, as they prepare their family for the daily commute to the city centre.

Using the upper-middle-class family’s routine as a symbol of ordinary suburban life, this study emphasises key differences between African and Euro-American suburbs, offering novel insights to the field of urban studies.

Using the upper-middle-class family’s routine as a symbol of ordinary suburban life, this study emphasises key differences between African and Euro-American suburbs, offering novel insights to the field of urban studies. Drawing on photography and interviews, Mercer theorises organic suburbanisation in Africa, thereby significantly expanding the scope of suburban theory, culture, and practice. The difference in scale and government involvement marks a clear point of departure for African suburbanisation, setting the stage for Mercer’s analysis of cash-based transactions and their connection to middle-class culture. 

Structured into six chapters, the book incorporates rich ethnographic data, including observations, stories, and photographs collected over three decades. Her approach is shaped by a decolonising perspective, as she examines land development in the wake of distinct eras of colonisation – first by Germany from 1885 to 1916, and then by Britain from 1919 to 1961. The opening chapters lay the groundwork for this exploration, with Chapter One historicising the impact and long-term legacy of colonial powers, and Chapter Two analysing how colonial systems influenced concepts of land ownership and imposed imperial power structures on African tribal cultures. Together, these chapters establish the connection between physical land and power dynamics.

Middle-class is deeply intertwined with the history of land ownership in the region, a history in which colonial rule imposed sweeping changes on longstanding land practices.

Chapters Three and Four investigate how the colonial legacy continues to shape land rights and create complex legal zones in the 21st century. These chapters examine how middle-class dwellers navigate the legal landscape to claim status within a socially stratified middle-class, while the final two chapters shift the focus to the symbolic significance of the home. Chapter Five explores the material markers of middle-class identity, from architectural choices to domestic arrangements, while Chapter Six considers how the suburban home reflects aspirations of social mobility and cultural belonging. Throughout, Mercer persuasively argues that “the suburban frontier [is] the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped” (6). 

This shaping of the middle-class is deeply intertwined with the history of land ownership in the region, a history in which colonial rule imposed sweeping changes on longstanding land practices. A key point underpinning this book and argument is the absence of a “Swahili concept of private land ownership,” with colonial power bringing sweeping changes to the organisation and control of the land (26), as seen in the German Imperial Decree on Land Matter (1895), which established “the concept of private property, and the bifurcation of land rights along racial and spatial lines” (27). The story told in The Suburban Frontier relates to the creative use made by the aspirational residents of Dar es Salaam who bought, sold, built, sublet, and squatted in and around the township. Native dwellers may have been granted customary land rights by the amended Decree in 1896, but they recognised their rights were not considered equal to the rights of foreign settlers. As a result, domestic dwellers found loopholes in colonial law and used their knowledge of government projects or known natural disaster sites to guide their land selection and settlement. Essentially, they settled and built their modest houses quietly, tenaciously holding onto these homes until long-term occupancy conferred a quasi-residency status if not ownership to the dwellers. 

Mercer’s approach thus reinforces the relationship between the physical landscape and the suburban arena as home to an aspiring and socially negotiated middle class. In this context, the African middle class emerges as a key sociological concept with significant implications, both historical and future-oriented, for aspirational African residents. The middle class on the frontier is composed of residents with generational ties to the land, those who purchased land through cash transactions, squatters, and those relocated from the urban centre. Suburban residents who inherit land can gradually acquire more, increasing their social and physical capital over time. In contrast, those without inherited land often resort to squatting, strategically renovating unclaimed land. Interestingly, squatting on the African frontier is not as harshly criminalised as it is in Western suburban contexts, like Toronto, where squatters in city parks are frequently evicted with the aid of local authorities and police. Due to the legal ambiguities introduced by colonial rule, which racially segregated the land into three zones – “uzunguni” (European), “uhindini” (Indian), and “uswahilini” (Swahili) – squatters are permitted to renovate the land they occupy, provided they do not encroach on another’s territory. There is, however, an active system of self-policing in place, as Mercer’s on-site interviews reveal: those who are forced to relocate due to poor planning are not well-regarded by the African middle class.

The Suburban Frontier is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of suburban life beyond Western norms

This book’s engagement with African history, urban planning, and cultural geography provides an important – and often fascinating – assessment of how African suburbanisation and middle-class culture emerged as a byproduct of colonial influence on the land. While The Suburban Frontier aligns with Euro-American and Australian studies like Richard Harris’ Creeping Conformity (2004) and Ruth Fincher’s Everyday Equalities (2019) that define the suburb as a community on the fringe of the urban centre, it calls for more attention to the distinctive development of African suburban culture. 

The book makes a significant contribution to expanding this growing field of urban study by focusing on the African suburb, offering a wealth of new information and resources. This includes original images of suburban dwellings and construction, showing the before and after images to reveal dramatic changes, along with maps of the studied areas, and charts that guide readers through this African suburban frontier. It challenges Euro-American scholars to reconsider the limitations of their suburban definitions and to question the relationship between suburban built form and culture. Ultimately, The Suburban Frontier is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of suburban life beyond Western norms – shattering the confines of Euro-American urban theory and redefining what it means to belong to middle class on the African frontier.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Robert Harding Video on Shutterstock.

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