In Praise of the Plastic Shoe

It might be a right of passage, a marker of African childhood that at some point you had a good pair of plastic shoes that were strong and capable in the face of youthful adventures. I can think back to some sandals in the 1980s that might have had some glitter and were worn with socks, which suggests to me that they were a fancy pair probably intended for outings and Church-going. I don't think I liked them much due to the problem of sweaty feet - plastic shoes don't have the absorbency of fabrics and leather shoes and so can make playing a little bit perilous when they get a little moisture on them. Besides, due to hard usage they also break, leading to unwanted inquisitions by parental units. 

That was last millenium and I happily left the plastic shoe thing behind me, associating them with red mud and trouble until recently. There were some slides of course, it might not be possible to go through university or one's twenties without a comfortable pair to slip on thanks to sports or summer or dressing down informally for early morning classes that one isn't quite awake enough yet to attend fully composed. And there are of course the usual house slippers to put on after a long day, the foot equivalent of taking your bra off and letting the day's burdens go. This I don't do much, indoors is for bare feet and I admit that out and obout the garden as well I tend to avoid slippers if I can get on some grass.So plastic shoes fell out of favour with me until recently, due to the rains. 

Tropical rains are like nothing else, hard to describe. In Dar we get varieties but all of them have the ability to soak one properly in a matter of a minute or two. Very rarely are the rains here polite enough for a quick walk to a bus station or shops without getting a bit soaked. Then there are the medium and intense rains that really lean into the word 'precipitation.' Sometimes the drops and huge and spaced out, each one coming down like a bullet to splatter strongly on head, shoulders, feet, a dijointed bucket of water distributed over a large area. Or the mazimum sheeting rain when the full firehose of the heavens opens up and even the eaves of a house are not enough to keep the water out of windows and doorways. These are the rains that have no interest in your fancy footwear, they demand real committment int he form of boots or better yet the not-so-humble yebo-yebo. 

Yebo-yebos are shoes, distinct from the kanda-mbilis or ndalas we all have as a matter of course. They are outside shoes meant to work with and for you in varied and challenging terrains, from hot sticky asphalt to boggy new soils disturbed by grave-diggers to a thunderous downpour that requires you to brave it and the instant puddles it creates. I have even seen them on children in mountainous areas with socks on, grappling rural roads and rocky outcrops. The most famous - and expensive - brand is the Croc, made popular in the West by television chefs as something comfortable to wear indoors during long and dangerous shifts that might involve falling knives or hot stews slipping from the hand. That's for there, over here in the tropics Crocs are expensive and have given rise to a plethora of look-alike and inspired-by designs that can deliver better service than the original. 

I started noticing them in inclement weather when the usual Zanzibar-sourced leather sandals and other footwear were not up to the task of going out of the house. Sneakers got soaked and don't like red soil in the treads, sandals betray and spill you, boots are boots and if you're not gardening or security personnel the likelihood of owning a pair let alone wearing them in the humid heat is slim. It was the young men who tipped me off to the yebo-yebo, they always seem to going somewhere with great gusto no matter the weather. I noticed them were wearing some rather nice grown up plastic shoes in the wet season - some slides, some Croc-alike, a very few even looking like a full shoe with breathing holes in them. These yebo-yebos even started showing up at roadside stalls where we sell second-hand goods. That's when I knew this was a Dar necessity that I should get involved in for safety and transport reasons. 

We have shops these days in Dar and I found one in a mall where I could try the original Croc, thinking I might close my eyes to the price if the shoe fit right. After all, it is an ivestment is it not? The shoes never fit right. There is something about the way Crocs are moulded that fight with my high arches and splayed toes and give me instant blister promises. I rarely wear closed shoes as it is* which makes my feet rather particular about what kind of confinement they can accept. Original Crocs might be fun and heavy-duty investments but they are simply unwearable for me. The cheap stuff, however? Entirelye different story. They are clearly a Thrid World FUBU (For Us, By Us, Made In The Tropics) response to my fellow billions who also live a minimalist shoe life in the hot places. 

Mine were bought at a shop that didn't survive it's time in the mall, they were on sale. Thick, heat resistant plastic with a lot of give, quite comfortable and just high enough to keep my feet dry from the micro-puddles. I figured out when I wore them that this is our equivalent of engaging the Four-Wheel-Drive function for our feet. Many obstacles can be handled by a good pair of yebos, strong ankles and dexterity - urban pothole crossings on the way to work, condolence visits, going to the markets with the shady paving and yucky run-off streams. They have been a revelation, and I am so glad I re-discovered this essential piece of African gear. 

I am careful with them now, the left is starting to develop a tear and I can't bear the thought of them ending up as flotsam at one of the beach clean-ups where our tired and discarded plastic shoes retire to. It is pollution, I know, but something about Dar makes it seem almost fitting to see all the sizes and colours of yebos awash on the shore and the edges of the streams to the ocean, where everything ends up eventually. Here's to yebo yebos, keeping us mobile, agile and third-worlding like bosses through dry and wet circumstances. 

Here is to Hope: Reviving The Mikocheni Report in Interesting Times

Facing the blank page on a blog hosted on Google after a hiatus of one-and-a-hald Tanzanian presidential terms is a good feeling. When I stopped writing in 2018, I was protesting the introduction of fees that would make blogging a commercial endeavour whether or not the writer wanted to monetize their efforts. This was made mandatory by the Tanzanian Communications Regulations Agency and it also came at a time when the crackdown on all media, press and even arts and culture was heightened due to then-President Magufuli's personal feelings about freedom of speech. 

I want to say that the situation has improved in terms of regulations but I cannot be confident of that since I haven't looked into it deeply. There have been one or two posts since the hiatus, when I would check if the blog was still alive on Google servers, and to my delight it is. 

What is definite is another watershed moment in the Freedom of Expression environment that has prompted me to start writing again, perhaps because there is such a dearth of material in the past few months. On October 29th, 2025 the general elections were held in Tanzania. They were accompanied by protests that broke out country-wide and that caused a strict internet shut-down as well as the gagging of the media for a period of roughly five days. 

During that time a lot happened that was atrocious. Initially the number of people believed to have been killed during some violence between protesters and elements of the police and other militias was set between a few thousand people and roughly seven hundred people. However the story is only beginning to be told on the ground in Tanzania and somewhat through international media, and due to the absolute lock-down on movement and on communications it will take a long time to it seems as though the number might be in the high hundreds to a thousand. This Global Dispatches interview with political scientist Constantine Manda about the situation in the first few days gives context, some history and facts from the first week of reactions and I think it will stand the test of time.

It is in this vacuum of news and information and that the need to revive a strong and independent formal and citizen media  landscape with a plurality of voices has become apparent. We are all using the platforms that we have available to us to the best of our abilities and that of the technologies we can muster. There has been no real direct communications from the Head of State, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, since the brief speech at her inauguration. It is a rare vacuum in a conversation that has always been active between the public and the leadership, one that is indicative of the shift that has taken place this year. 

All of which is to say, it seems like a good time to come back to the work of blogging about politics - yes - but also the everyday of life in Dar es Salaam as the Mikocheni Report was intended to do from its inception. If I had little to say in the years of hiatus, the mood and the situation has changed and there is much to be said now to try and craft a link between the past, the present and what the future might hold. Here is to hope. 

Correspondence

All my fuzzy intentions to revive the blog have melted in the summer heat. Every attempt on my part to stoke the flames of passion that were the fount of my writing prior to my “quitting” in protest has fizzled out. Why am I suffering this impotence, what was the underlying issue? After all I write on a regular basis anyways for a different public, and blogging was my refuge and relaxation, my space for meditation on topics at a level that is not possible in an online or print newspaper. Why couldn’t I perform as I did between 2008-2018 on Mikocheni Report?

There is no pill for this lassitude, no quick fix. I have let it lie, having learned over a decade of blogging that one cannot expect to be as energetic as an adult as one was as a younger adult. My energies are split as is my attention, there are a few more demands on my time and while wisdom comes with age it seems to demand the sacrifice of some vigor in exchange. Besides, change has happened too. There is a period of trauma there that has changed me in ways I am still learning about. Not just personal trauma, but the effects of a communal experience during a specific period of time in Tanzania. We are not all traumatized, but many of us are. I think the Zanzibaris might be more truthful about understanding this than we Tanganyikans can allow ourselves to be.

In the event, what could I bring to blogging now? Against the insistence of many I still do not consider myself a journalist in the traditional sense. I am a writer, I write. Blogging comes naturally for many reasons- of independence and editorial control, convenience, lack of pressure. Also: it is just fun. But why should I keep blogging, what for? I am tired, oh. My knees are beginning to creak and what little patience I had once upon a time is fast disappearing as I become more like my precedents in temperament. I am cranky.

I am cranky… unless I am writing, or better yet reading a missive. And that is the key- that is what is going to keep this blog limping along is the lifelong joy of correspondence. Writing is about audience: one can happily write for oneself and many of us do as we journal in some form or other, keep diaries and records. Then there is writing with the reader in mind, what I have been doing since school days and now do voluntarily for a living and sometimes in spite of a living. Truth is, perhaps since the very first notes passed in class and the very first letters received in boarding school, I have been hooked to the type of conversation that can only be had via the written word.

It’s different isn’t it? A letter or  note can be slipped in the pocket and read and re-read infinitely. There is the careful choice of words that went into it. If one is lucky enough to get a hand-written note or letter there is an entire dimension therein: the loops and lines of someone’s actual making. When you write a note by hand you are really drawing a story for them with code, and that’s lovely. As a child I remember looking at the differences between my mother’s neat and rounded vowels and my father’s kinetic overblown consonants with sharp edges and long strokes. Their writing was gendered to my eye! And each seemed imbued somehow with their life energy. Of course I have kept as many letters as I can, that is what collectors do. And perhaps it was those letters and notes and the few pen-pals I had over the years that are truly responsible for the kind of writer I am.

I am a (repressed) poet and an essayist, really. Fiction has declined my invitations to visit and stay a while, at best perhaps a short story or two in my past worked out. But letters? Letters I can write. I’d rather write you a letter or even leave you a voice note than entertain a phone-call most of the time. With technology this habit has gotten even more acute: honestly phones have come to their best form allowing us to ignore the voice aspects, turn on silent and simply text. Text, text, text.

Text. And that is how, and that is why dear reader I think I will continue blogging.

The time of seeking work and trying to attract readers is a little bit past me, I think. I want to go back to the simple days of writing you a letter. So I will, and hope that you write back from time to time.

Hello. How are you doing?

Yours in faithful correspondence,

Elsie.

"City of the Smiling People"- Ongala Festival 2022

"I am sitting at a table during the height of the lunch rush, waiting for someone. A couple approaches the 4-top and asks if they can sit there with me? Against my nature I tell them “I am waiting for someone” because I don’t know if that someone will be okay with company. This does not go down well. They remark to me, surprised, that surely they may sit since I am only waiting for one person? I do not respond, only apologizing for their inconvenience. The woman moves on, already looking at friendlier tables. The man lingers to glare before turning away and grumbling. The entire encounter takes a few seconds and nary a voice is raised.

I smile down at my phone to avert my gaze, aware that I have just violated social rule of generosity, graciousness and conviviality. Not my fault he came at me with just a touch more aggression in his request than was warranted. In the end, a peaceful silence reigns and nobody’s feelings or pride are hurt.

This is Bongo. Dar es Salaam. We are slated to hit a cool 7 million this year which the upcoming Census might verify for us. Fastest growing city on the continent, one of the fastest growing in the world. And we are holding on to our smiles and our particular brand of Utu with both hands.

Many mistake Tanzanians easy-going and low key approach for something else. Shyness or low confidence, lack of language skills, other- whatever they feel they need to project upon us. While any of these might be in play, much of the time Tanzanians and especially those of us who live in the City know that non-confrontation is a choice as well as an art. Dar is a pleasant city to live in because we wish it so: amidst the trials and tribulations of modern life and the grimness of the human experience we not only choose life, we choose to smile. Why fight, when we can love instead? It takes courage, and effort, and commitment to love. Anger is easy, peace is not.

A much older man approaches the table, eyes me and demands: “what are you doing here alone, young lady?” I protest weakly that I am waiting for someone, knowing that I have lost the fight to protect our table. He uses the privilege of age and customership to let me know I am sitting at his table, in fact. He proceeds to sit down and order his meal while I receive a call from my friend and direct him to our shared table.

The two old men know each other, as it turns out. Veterans of the public service system and nearly of an age, they have much in common including people. They exchange pleasantries and proceed to catch up on news of careers, current affairs, thoughts on the President. I eat quietly, piping up with the occasional question, knowing that I am being indulged by my elders in this glimpse behind the curtain of how political sausage is made.

I look around. The only sign that in this bustling, hustling popular eatery that my two old men are of any importance at all is the way the waiters will respond to their calls with a touch more alacrity. This might also simply be because of age: old folks are cranky, trust me, they are really much more manageable if you respond to them quickly. And smile while you are doing so.

The couple found a table in the end, shared. They ate and ended up alone there, talking for a while before they got up and went on with their day. As they glanced over at our table they smiled and she smiled back while his eyes simply widened and he nodded slightly. All is well.

The older man at whose table I sat is finished before us. He pays our bill as well as his and graciously accepts our relaxed thanks before he leaves us to our business. He is smiling as he goes, no longer the stern elder who commandeered a seat, now just another friendly face.

This is Bongo, Dar es Salaam. The City of the Smiling people. Anywhere I go, I know a little ease, a little charm, a little conviviality will make things well. Home."

Wrote this piece fresh for the Ongala Music Festival that begins tomorrow 5th of August and will be running until Sunday 7th of August at the Silver Sands Hotel in Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam. The request was for words about the 'Tanzanian spirit', thought I would share a vignette of what happened yesterday at lunch. 

There will be a wee bit more of my work and that of other writers and poets at the Poetry and Prose Corner of the Festival. Karibuni sana. 

Enjoy. Let's celebrate Remy and the Arts together. 

Social Media, Amirite?

 Y'all, while I was away a lot happened in the Tanzanian social media sphere. Much of it is great, much of it is bad- we are in keeping with global trends in this sphere. So there I was planning to totally blog on the weekend and get things warmed up again. 

But in the back of my mind I had an issue brewing. That of cyberbullying. A friend was going through a very messed up situation and I was quietly meditating on why, what could be done in such circumstances, a whole bunch of factors. 

So on Friday just as I am thinking "Oh, I should select a fun topic for The Mikocheni Report" and going about my day: smack! Got popped right in the face with some Tweets reacting to piece I wrote in The East African a while back. Initially I was pretty open to "dialogue" because I never get feedback on Twitter about the stuff I do on the East African. But then the day and the conversation progressed and I realized this was actually not a good thing. 

Everyone who writes for public consumption gets used to feedback as a part of the job. It is valuable, it is a way to keep a finger on the pulse of things, of finding out how things are going, of getting loads more information and making connections, sometimes even making friends. "Negative" feedback is very important in identifying gaps in your knowledge and 99% of the time it is offered for free by an expert in the field who took the time to write to you and provide evidence, data, articles and so on. Seriously, you would not believe how many experts in various fields a decade of opinion can garner one.  

But there is the other kind of negative feedback: that with malicious intent. Occasionally it is personal: someone just doesn't like you. Which is normal, right? No big. Easily handled. Malicious intent as part of a larger campaign around a controversial topic? Different story. If you're not careful with that stuff you can get dragged by your dreadlox into a very nasty space with no reasonable way out. 

My social media is active, I tend to respond to people who @ me which is not the wisest policy but I feel it keeps the door open. Obviously if you keep the door open anyone can walk in tho. But here's the thing: Mark Zuckerberg is younger than me. Twitter came online in the mid-2000s. I grew up playing video games that had to be loaded of a cassette tape and have learned how to mistype with both thumbs. I might know a thing or two about how to avoid being dragged by my dreadlox into a nasty space.

On the other side of being called a cyberbully, I have to wonder about the whole experience. Evidently it is great fodder for an eventual piece on gender and cyberbullying (it is not a straightforward thing, that) as part of commentary on the changing online landscape in Tanzania and beyond. On a  personal level it was a great check on how well the whole anger management effort is going. Once upon a time I was a chill and easygoing person. And then I was not. Now I am getting back to the Zen zone again and it was nice to get tested on that over the weekend.

Long story short: this is why the first real post on TMR in a long time isn't really a cool piece about something interesting as was originally intended. But it is also perfect because it reminded me that very few of my plans when it comes to blogging ever work out as anticipated. I guess that's just the House Style as it were. TMR may never manage to become a serious, planned out, consistently structured blog... thank God.

Y'all keep safe out there, especially online, y'hear?  

1527 Days: 4 Years, Two Months and a Week.

In my last real blogpost published on May 3^rd of 2018, I said the following:

“Tanzania has passed laws and regulations this year requiring bloggers to register and pay a punitive fee in order to keep offering their content. The flimsy excuse is taxation. The real reason is standard restriction of free speech. The Tanzanian blogosphere is too minute to generate anything worth taxing, but it has punched above its weight lately.

So it is with a clean heart that I announce the icing of the Mikocheni Report. Reader, you already knew it was coming.

I say icing because in truth I have no idea what these regulations actually mean and I need time to see. Also...ten years. I am going to take a break. Maybe new opportunities will come along. Maybe there will be an evolution. There is a lot of maybe right now. Maybe the blog is just...on ice?

What I really want to say is thank you. For reading. It is hard for me to explain how essential writing is in my life. Like...how do you explain bone marrow? Since I was a child the world has been rendered in terms of the word. Word is life.”

I stopped blogging out of protest, having amassed enough of a readership by then to be able to leverage this move as a signal that all was not well with my country. It worked better than I had hoped considering TMR is just one woman’s little corner of the internets. Thank you for that.

So here we are again.

A few months ago, President Samia Suluhu Hassan mentioned in one of her speeches that Hon. Nape Nnauye, the Minister for Information, should look into the laws and regulations on online content to make it easier for more Tanzanians to participate in the online conversation. This should apparently preceed a move to overhaul the current Information Act. Because Mama Samia said it in public, I was assured that this meant an easing of the restrictions that led to my pausing the blogging in the first place. But I did not blog immediately.

A lot happened between 2018 and 2022. I turned 40 somewhere in there, praise be. I have now “eaten some salt” as we might say in Kiswahili. The salt of sweat, the salt of tears? The expression never specifies. In that time I lost several “innocences” as well as trust in Tanzania’s leadership class. So no, I did not blog immediately. These days my position is to be cautious, patient, strategic where possible- all of which is a lot easier in one’s fourth decade on Terra than in one’s second or third.

Instead of firing up TMR, I waited. I asked. And asked again. Then triangulated to be sure. Then waited some more to see what might happen to other bloggers. The scene in Tanzania is a wasteland: everyone is on Medium or a shared platform or social media, or technically located “elsewhere” in the ether of the World Wide Web. No point in taking risks- I had made my point and several platforms very generously offered me a couch to crash on during my self-exile from blogging.

It has been imperative to know for sure whether blogging again on this platform would be okay. Not just safe, but okay and understood. Tanzania is not what it was prior to 2015. It will never be like that again. Our culture of Presidentialism might convince you to put the blame on the shoulders of one deceased man but it is not so. This is a paradigm shift in which we all participated in, one way or another. We all made choices. We live with them.

I am still learning how to navigate these new environs. I move slower in my mind and in my feelings: scar tissue.

Sometimes my sleep breaks in the night and I think of a poem that writes about “floating belly-up from the depths” yet try as I might I cannot recollect it nor who wrote it. Sometimes I don’t know I was dreaming and I laugh easily, only to wake up to another day in 2022. For the longest I simply didn’t get out of bed. Better that way, frankly. And yet, my stubborn soul has cleaved to the promise I made myself when I was a child: live. Live it all, live it to the fullest of your being, live greedy for experiences, live. And in that living, write.

So here we are again.

I built this shelter with my own two hands because material things come and go, as do people. But words? Words. Words are a record and my records give me the comfort of a sense of place: somewhere to go that is mine. A Blog of her own. I had to leave it for a while but I am back now. I am home. The Mikocheni Report is online.  

Hello. Shall we… dance? Cheek to Cheek?

#ThisWritingLife

Loading 2022...

Power up: Good Morning, Author. It is Saturday, 9th of July, 2022 CE.  

Wetware: Running Diagnostics. 

Hardware: Running Diagnostics. Warning: Upgrade recommended. 

Software: Running Diagnostincs. Warning: Retraining recommended. 

Overall Report: Diagnostics ongoing. Main systems appear to be functioning optimally. However, some changes detected in the Wetware and Software due to passage of time. May require further investigation. Recommendation: Start 'er slow, eh. Been in hibernation for a while, she'll need a bit of warm-up time. 

Action: Selection of Topic. 

Action: Software management- run program Music, Jazz.

Action: Idle/Sleep Mode. Engage. 

Power down. 

Tuning. Touching Keyboards. Checking the Dashboard. Trying Not To Cry on the Electronics.

 ...Hello?

Mic check. 

Audio Check. 

Heart Check. 

Maintenance Mode: Engage. 

Cue: Song dedicated to the Written Word. 

Selection: The One and Only Ray Charles. 

Power Down. 

Rest Mode: Engaged

Restart: To Be Determined...