Becoming Modern: Households’ Electricity Use and Coping with Power Outages in Post-Socialist Dar es Salaam

Abstract

Since its invention in the 1880s, electricity has been regarded as a pervasive driver of modern
life. As scholars have shown elsewhere, ideas of modernity have influenced the provision and
use of electricity in cities across the globe. By and large, scholars have examined electricitymodernism in terms of the construction of high-tech electric infrastructure by major actors.
Those who have studied power failures. This article examines electricity-modernism from the
perspective of everyday electricity use and the experience of power outages, a lens rarely used
by scholars. It draws from oral history interviews and archival sources to show how ideas of
modernity circulated in residential electricity use in post-socialist Dar es Salaam. The article
argues that the idea that electricity is a tentacle of modernity prevailed in Tanzania’s official
narratives, in residential electricity use, and in households’ power-outage coping strategies.
By so arguing, the article shifts electricity-modernism from sites of electric infrastructure
building to the homes where electricity and its failures are assigned meaning