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This research was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I would like to thank the Emory University Institute of African Studies, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the Columbia University Seminar on Contemporary Africa for opportunities to present earlier versions of this work. I thank Walter Bgoya, Kathryn DeLuna, Clifton Crais, Derek Peterson, Karin Barber, Lynn Thomas, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for their scholarly generosity and critical feedback. I am especially grateful to Kajubi Mukajanga, Jumaa Mkabarah, Jackson Kalindimya, and the children of Hammie Rajab, Edi Ganzel, and Elvis Musiba for sharing their stories with me.
Sami Kiama lives in a rented room with his lover Atende and their two-year-old daughter in the Kariakoo neighborhood of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Atende longs to be married and for their daughter to be considered socially legitimate, but her father forbids the union, dismissing Sami as a worthless hooligan. Sami's low-ranking government job pays him so little and so infrequently as to be pointless, and he resorts to a life of petty thieving to support his household of three. A testament to their dire material circumstances, Sami and Atende name their daughter Sina, or "I have nothing." Failed by society, and by kin, Sami joins a band of hardened criminals who plan and execute the burglary of the Ismaili Jamat Khan mosque, a prominent institution within the city's Asian Muslim community in downtown Dar es Salaam. Among his co-conspirators, Sami plays the role of the street-smart local with inside knowledge of the city and its networks. It is his job to bribe security guards, arrange for the tailoring of fake police uniforms, and manufacture a counterfeit key to the safe. On the night of the great heist, all goes according to plan except that a night watchman is killed. Several days later, Sami is apprehended by Inspector Sindi, a cantankerous detective known and grudgingly respected in Dar es Salaam's criminal underworld of thieves and con artists. As Sami is being hauled off to jail, he looks off in the distance and sees Atende and their daughter in the crowd and thinks wistfully about the life and the family...