One Saturday afternoon, I took a group of my students with neurodevelopmental disabilities for lunch at a restaurant in Dar es Salaam. It was an ordinary outing: students laughed, chose what to order and enjoyed a meal together.
When we asked for the bill, the restaurant owners politely refused to accept payment. The meal, they insisted, was free.
To many people, this may sound heartwarming: an act of generosity and a reminder that kindness exists. I left feeling uneasy.
My students had not been offered a meal because they had won a competition or because the restaurant was hosting a community event. They were offered charity simply because they were disabled. Every one of them came from a family able to pay. Their role as customers had quietly been replaced by the role of recipients.
Another memory comes to mind. One of my students, who uses a wheelchair, was enjoying roasted mihogo at Coco Beach when a stranger approached, smiled and handed them Sh1,000 before walking away.
I have no reason to think the stranger meant harm. They probably believed they were being kind. But what assumption led them to believe that a person sitting on a beach automatically needed money?
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These experiences have left me with a question that remains uncomfortable: why are disability and charity so closely intertwined?
Natural connection
For many Tanzanians, the connection can feel almost natural. We grow up seeing disability alongside the effects of exclusion from schools, work and public spaces. Some public encounters with disabled people occur in contexts of visible economic hardship, including street begging, sometimes alongside a relative or guide.
That picture can falsely make disability seem inseparable from poverty. When it is repeated, charity can become our first instinct. But understandable does not mean harmless.
Compassion and pity are not the same. Compassion recognises another person’s humanity while respecting their autonomy. Pity can begin with good intentions yet put someone in a position of dependence before we have taken the time to understand who they are or what they want.
I have had to confront this in myself, too. As a special and inclusive education specialist, my instinct is often to help. Sometimes support is exactly what is needed. At other times, I need to pause and ask whether I am offering help because someone has asked for it, or because I have unconsciously assumed they need it.
More often than not, the best place to begin is a simple question: “Would you like any help?”
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Many of my students are also called “angels.” People tell them they are especially blessed or that their prayers reach God faster. I know such comments are usually offered with kindness. Yet, in trying so hard to honour disabled people, we may stop allowing them simply to be people.
Not angels. Not objects of pity. Not someone else’s good deed for the day—just people.
Our well-meaning sentiments can set disabled people apart. Instead of being children, teenagers or adults with their own personalities, they become symbols of innocence, inspiration or divine blessing. In trying to elevate them, we can stop seeing them as ordinary human beings.
The same pattern appears in how we celebrate everyday achievements. A blind person graduates from university and people marvel that they did so “despite” their disability. A wheelchair user goes shopping, and strangers applaud their determination. Ordinary moments become extraordinary only because we struggle to imagine disabled people living ordinary lives.
This is one of the quieter forms of ableism: assumptions and practices that treat disability as automatic dependence, tragedy or inspiration. It is not always deliberate discrimination. It can also be an unexamined expectation that disability must limit a person’s choices.
Support without assumption
None of this denies the real barriers many disabled people face. A 2025 assessment of disability inclusion in Tanzania, based on consultations and nationally representative household surveys, identifies difficulties in accessing healthcare, employment, education, transport and social welfare.
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Tanzania’s Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010 provides for equality, community inclusion, education, employment, access to public buildings and services, and participation in public life. When public spaces, transport systems, workplaces and schools remain inaccessible, disabled people are denied equal opportunities. Those barriers can contribute to hardship, and where hardship exists, support matters.
Charity has a place when people face hardship. But disability should not automatically be mistaken for hardship.
There is an important difference between supporting someone because society has denied them opportunities and supporting them simply because they are disabled. The first responds to injustice. The second, however unintentionally, can reinforce it.
Perhaps this is where we need to draw the line. Inclusion is not always about offering free meals or unsolicited donations. Sometimes it is much simpler.
It is accepting payment because the person in front of you is, first and foremost, a customer. It is asking before offering help. It is assuming competence before dependence.
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Disabled people deserve kindness in the same way every person does: not as objects of charity, but as equal members of our communities. As Tanzania works towards greater inclusion, the question is not whether disabled people deserve generosity.
It is whether our generosity allows them to remain customers, colleagues, neighbours, friends and citizens, or quietly keeps them in the role of recipients.
Sometimes, equality looks ordinary: like handing a customer the bill and letting them pay it.
Bijal Lal is a special and inclusive education specialist based in Tanzania. She can be reached at bijal.lal@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
