Sites of Encounter: Nordic School-Building Project in Tanzania
Paper presented at Building for the Nation Abroad Conference,
Academia Belgica and the Danish Academy in Rome, Italy.
September 21-22, 2023.
Academia Belgica and the Danish Academy in Rome, Italy.
September 21-22, 2023.
In July 1970, a string of urgent telegraphs was sent from the upscale Hotel Kilimanjaro in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania, to Copenhagen, Oslo, London, Washington and New York. The sender—Carl Hammerschmidt, a Danish architect working for the International Development Association (IDA)—was frantically trying to tie loose ends in a global school-building project, a task of Sisyphean proportions at that. The project was conceived in the late 1960s, when IDA, a branch of the World Bank Group, offered a loan to modernise Tanzanian education. In addition to rebuilding 25 existing schools, five new ones were to be constructed. The governments of Denmark and Norway picked up the check and agreed to sponsor 75% of construction costs for the new schools. For the Tanzanian state, this was an opportunity to modernise education with foreign investments and bring up a new generation of workers and advance the ambitious plans of future self-reliance. For the Nordic donors, the project was a chance to consolidate their image of “good welfare states” that could export their achievements in education and school construction abroad. What ensued was a complex multi-lateral operation that involved professionals from five different countries and all walks of life, closely followed by an avalanche of documents, notes, drawings, telexes and telegrams sent across three continents and thousands of kilometres.
By tracing these spatial disputes in the original archival documents, the paper studies the complex negotiation processes that underline this virtually unknown international school-building project. The study is particularly interested in how the Nordic experience with national school-building at home was mediated through international organisations and adapted to the educational and construction realities of the Tanzanian state. Nordic school project in Tanzania then not only amalgamated the interests of the many stakeholders but served as a site where symbolic national identities were constructed, tested and contested.