Around me are the sounds of the city : the buzzing of motorbikes, the shuffling feet of pedestrians, the trundle of buses making their way to the BRT station located just in front. Soon, the person I am waiting for appears: Dhirubhai Chudasama, the priest of the temple, a short, smiling man in a grey checked shirt.
Dhirubhai presides over the first and only Arya Samaj temple to have been built in Dar es Salaam. In , he was tricked into drinking milk laced with shards of glass and died one month later, on the morning of Diwali. Nevertheless, by , a branch had emerged in East Africa, where the South Asian population was rising fast.
Beneath the modern-day temple is a banquet hall called Dayanand Hall, named after the Hindu offshoot's founder. Here members hold weddings, birthday parties, holiday celebrations, often after prayers upstairs. Visitors remove their shoes in this anteroom. Meanwhile the historic Old Boma building, rendered in coral stone by the sultan of Zanzibar in , is less than a kilometre away.
A layered example of colonial architecture, the temple itself β like the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country - resists easy categorisation. Two buildings are housed within its compound. Inside, we pass through a formal entryway and emerge into a large hall painted cream, with colourful chequered floors and more sky-blue doors and window frames.
The temperature is cool, religious icons line the walls and brown leather chairs sit behind a table piled high with tomes in Hindi and Gujarati. Outside this haven, however, it was a fraught period for South Asians in Tanzania. During the Zanzibar Revolution, as Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah was overthrown, they were the target of widespread looting and violence, as were Arab citizens. A few years later β long after Zanzibar and Tanganyika unified to form Tanzania β the government required anyone living there permanently to acquire citizenship.
