“Niko njiani…Nimefika” – Transit/Arrival: Women and Being in Urban Spaces

“Niko Njiani…Nimefika” is the project of SMUS 2025 Research-Based Artist (RBA) Alma Simba, a historian, poet and sound artist. Through her work, she presents women’s experiences on different modes of transport in urban Tanzania – namely, motorcycles, boda boda, auto-rickshaws, bajaji and public city buses – Daladala. These modes of movement structure daily life across cities and neighbourhoods and shape how women occupy public space, navigate cities and negotiate safety and community.

The works in Niko Njiani…Nimefika were produced through collaboration and community. Alma Simba engaged women through interviews, group discussions and travel, moving across diverse neighbourhoods and sites: Goba, Buguruni, Tabata, Mikocheni, Stone Town, Ilemela and more. These geographies reflected the varied infrastructures, temporalities, and social dynamics that shape women’s physical movement across urban and coastal Tanzania. Rather than extracting stories, the process centred on exchange and collaboration, where listening, recording, and composing with participants formed a crucial and central focus of the project.

At its core, the project underlined the act of listening as a crucial act. Sound was used as a medium of dignity, attention, social memory, shared expression and evidence of the social structures that women navigate daily in urban space. “Niko Njiani…Nimefika” culminated in an exhibition at the audio-visual collective space of Ajabu Ajabu in Dar es Salaam with over 200 participants that included students, publishers, academics, health practitioners, filmmakers, interested members of the public, as well as the Director of the NGO Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete Foundation and the Director of the Goethe-Institut in Dar es Salaam.