Tanzania: Battle of the Minis

In Dar es Salaam’s sprawling Kariakoo market, a screaming mob halted buses and dragged off African girls wearing tight dresses or miniskirts. The girls were beaten and some had their clothes ripped off. With fine impartiality, the mob also beat up youths wearing tight-fitting satiny pants. It was “cultural revolution,” African style.

As an unabashed admirer of Mao Tsetung, President Julius Nyerere has decreed that Tanzania shall copy Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, with its rejection of all things foreign. As their first order of revolutionary business, Nyerere’s “green guards” (so called for the color of their uniforms) set out to do away with miniskirts.

Get Lost. It was an unhappy choice. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Tanzania’s style-conscious girls are staging a vigorous cultural counterrevolution. At the University of Dar es Salaam, a group of youths paraded placards declaring “Minis for Decadent Europe.” In retaliation, coeds donned their shortest minis and routed the green guards with a chant of “Get lost.” Girls at a youth hostel unanimously voted that “men should not decide what women will wear.” One secretary defended her mini, explaining that it made it easier for her to move around the office and push through a crowded bus. A women’s leader, who is also a Member of Parliament, backed up the miniskirted girls, assuring them that “you can go naked—we won’t object.”

Nonetheless, the Tanzanian Youth League is determined to press on with its “Operation Vijana (Youth),” and so is 46-year-old President Nyerere. “It is foolish to wear clothes that show legs,” he declared last week. “It would be better for people to go unclothed if their intention is to expose their legs.” The Youth League has also called for a ban, as of Jan. 1, on everything symbolizing the “cultural enslavement of the African.” Besides miniskirts, the ban includes wigs, tight pants for men or women, and chemicals used to bleach skins and “dehumanize the African people.” Hair-straightening devices, lipsticks and other cosmetics have already been condemned. Beauty contests, the “exploitation of female flesh,” are taboo. Green-guard girls wear thick skirts well below their knees.

In their zeal, Tanzanians have turned up some curious threats to their cultural independence, and sparked a lively debate. Football, declared one letter to an editor, is “a degrading product of colonialism and elite European boarding schools. African culture never produced such a clownish performance.” On the other side, an upholder of law and order wrote that “the Wall Street mob of American society that watched a busty woman is more desirable than the unruly mob that besieged terrified girls in the Kariakoo market.”

For the elders, President Nyerere’s sackcloth socialism has produced an official austerity seldom matched in Africa. Members of Parliament are forbidden to own shares in businesses, cannot be corporate directors, and must forfeit their salary of $160 a week if they have any outside income. Only beer is served at government receptions, and the swiftest way to political oblivion is to be a wa-benzi, or the owner of a big car like a Mercedes-Benz.