Graduate Research
Alicia Houser | A Year in Tanzania
PhD Candidate, Alicia Houser, examines how women across different economic spectrums have constructed their lives and reconstructed the city of Moshi, Tanzania since its independence from British rule in 1961. Houser recently received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award, allowing her to spend a year in Tanzania conducting research. 365 days, 17,000 miles traveled, and a wealth of experiences later, Houser captures what research and life in Moshi was like.
Tell us about arriving in Moshi.
I had very little idea of what to expect when I arrived in Moshi. Though I have been going to Tanzania, in East Africa, regularly since 2017, before my Fulbright, I had only every experienced Moshi as a weekend getaway. I entered my field work with the goal of letting topics and central themes come from the women I met. The most accessible women were those selling on sidewalks in the center of the city, so my work will dive into the informal economy more than I had planned, requiring me to tackle a whole new literature while in the writing phase! In a chance encounter, I met the granddaughter of a local chief. I attended a commemoration event honoring the lives of the 19 area chiefs hanged by German colonizers on March 2, 1900, her grandfather being one of them. While waiting for the event to begin, I stood in the shade of a tree and danced to some of the music. The granddaughter was sitting nearby enjoying shade from the same tree. She liked my dancing, and Swahili, and the fact that I wore locally made clothing and then she kind of adopted me. In her 70s and not having any children—a rarity in Tanzania—she was eager to tell me about her life and share her family photos with me. Her older brother had held a fairly high up government position and built the house she lived in. As a girl, her father had not paid for her to continue education beyond the minimum requirement. I think she found in me a captive audience after being accustomed to the men around her getting more attention. I found it really meaningful and more interesting frankly to work with such a personal archive and would like to seek out more of those in future work. I am much more drawn to individuals and their stories than I am to the random assortment of documents housed in national archives.
The original iteration of a place called Moshi sat higher up on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The location of today's city came about in 1912 when German colonizers funded an extension of the railroad from the coast to the present-day location of Moshi.
After shutting down for some years, the government revived the route to Moshi in 2018. I interviewed three women who set up small food kiosks to serve passengers.
This produce market was my first research site. My host introduced me to a woman who sells tomatoes, potatoes, and onions.
With that one introduction, I came to be a known entity around the market and women I did not know started wanting me to come greet them, sit with them, and buy them sodas.
Unlike some other parts of Tanzania, markets in this area were historically exclusively female spaces. Those gendered divisions have weakened some today, but women still vastly outnumber men as produce sellers.
So much of your work involved maintaining relationships with the people of Moshi could you tell us how these relationships impacted your research?
My research is the relationships I developed. There is no separating them. In Research is Ceremony, Dr. Shawn Wilson writes that “reality is relationships or sets of relationships. Thus there is not one definite reality but rather different sets of relationships.” My everyday reality in Moshi started and ended in relation. I lived communally with a multi-generational extended family. I stepped out my door each morning to two young mothers preparing for the day, initially with a baby strapped to one of their backs and by the end of the year to that baby running around saying my name when he saw me. In town, I went from one friend to another to sit and observe them at work. Even on coffee shop days, I knew the servers and we chatted about the news. In late afternoon, I returned to my neighborhood and made the rounds greeting everyone out and about.
I ended most days by visiting the local hang out spot—a couple of benches set up outside my friend’s shop where an animated shoe repair man had his stall. There were always people around to sit with and to watch the day come to a close. Another way to illustrate the impact these relationships will have on my research – of the 39 people I worked closely with, my host only introduced me to two of them. The rest I met on my own, and their lives will be the story I write.
Women's Shop & Railway
The print on the wall says, "No business allowed outside the mosque." Various buildings around town posted this same message, and yet they all had people set up outside them doing business each day.
Is there an experience that captures the spirit of your project?
Making the rounds during my last weeks in Moshi, I was struck by the things women remembered about me. It felt affirming to know that our time together was not only me gathering information from them, but also me sharing myself in ways they held onto. One woman I met early on and then did not see again for many months remembered how much I love pilipili (spicy sauce, literally “pepper”). Another remembered that in the United States I don’t eat meat. These seem like small, incidental recollections. But for me they signified the work I had put in to really getting to know women and not having my research be unidirectional. I shared myself with them too. I loved answering their questions. They wanted to know if the U.S. has poor people, Black people, mean people. Do people sell used items in the U.S.? Do they sell outside sitting on sidewalks? What kind and quality items do they sell? The goal of incorporating oral methods into my research was to cede over some power of myself as the researcher, and I think I managed to do that in my small way.
If you had to distill your time in Tanzania into a single image, moment, or sentence – what would it be?
Sitting in a blue plastic chair, on a patch of bare ground outside my friend’s shop, separated from the main dirt road by a bush that I enjoyed watching mice play in, as part of a circle of women from different generations, drinks in hand, watching the world go by and talking about our days as the youngest generation ran in and out of our circle playing with their cousins, friends, and neighbors.
