The problem in some places is how to reform an economic system. The problem in more places is how to get one. The World Bank claims that some two billion of the world’s citizens live on $1 a day or less. These people have livelihoods governed by the plain rules of subsistence. They don’t buy, sell, or trade much because they don’t have much to buy, sell, or trade. They’re poor.
And nowhere have people been poor longer or more thoroughly than in Africa. According to World Bank statistics, the ten poorest countries on earth are all African. Not one of the fifty-three members of the Organization of African Unity—not even diamond-infested South Africa or oil-soaked Libya—has a decent general standard of living. And this is the continent where man evolved, where the first great civilization arose. This is the human hometown.
I went to Tanzania in February 1997. Probably every child whose parents weren’t rich enough has been told, “We’re rich in other ways.” Tanzania is fabulously rich in other ways.
The Tarangire reserve is a thousand square miles of branching river valleys sheltering some of the last great elephant herds in the world.
To the northwest, the wildlife-covered Serengeti Plain stretches away forever, oceanic in its flatness. The only landmarks are the kopjes, wind- and rain-polished bubbles of granite ranging from back porch to state capitol building in size. At night lightning bolts can be seen eighty miles away on the shores of Lake Victoria.
The nearby Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed twin of Kilimanjaro, a mountaintop chasm 1,500 feet deep and ten miles across, containing a miniature perfect universe of grassland and rain forest.
One dawn I rode a dizzy-pitched, rut-ulcerated switchback road into the crater. Maasai boys were leading a hundred cattle down to a salt lick. The young herdsmen were dressed in pairs of plaid blankets, with one worn as kilt and the other as toga. Beadwork swung at their necks and dangled from the piercings at the tops and bottoms of their ears. Each carried a long stick with the war-lance aplomb young boys give to long sticks. The air was clean and sharp. The clear sky was just beginning to light up. The cowbells plinked like a half-audible cheery tune. There are probably worse things to be than a Maasai boy taking cattle into the Ngorongoro Crater at dawn. Although the usual Maasai diet of curdled milk and cow’s blood wouldn’t provide enough roughage for an American my age.
There is an all-day, all-night rush hour of animals in Tanzania: Cape buffalo jam, zebra lock, and wildebeest backup. Thomson’s gazelles bound about, each with a black swoop on its side—enough like the Nike trademark to raise questions about sponsorship. Warthogs scuttle with their tails up straight in the air, endlessly acknowledging some foul in the game of hogball. Hyenas are all over the place, nonchalant but shifty, in little groups meandering not quite aimlessly—greasers at the Y dance. Hippos lie in the water holes in piles, snoring, stinking, sleeping all day. The correct translation for the Greek word “hippopotamus” is not “river horse” but “river first husband.” And lions doze where they like, waking up every day or two to do that famous ecological favor of culling the weak, old, and sick. (Do lions ever debate the merits of weak versus old versus sick? “Call me an epicure if you like, but I think the sick wildebeest have a certain piquancy, like a ripe cheese.”)
The nation of Tanzania might seem to be a Beulah Land—if you stick to the parks and the game preserves, and get back in your hotel by sunset. It can be done. I have a fatuous article from the March 2, 1997, Sunday New York Times travel section in which some publishing-industry pooh-bah tells how he and his wife flew in chartered planes to the Ngorongoro and the Serengeti, “and returned dazed by the wealth of wildlife and the vastness of the terrain.”
But, putting the tourist daze aside, Tanzania is a truly poor country. I arrived at Kilimanjaro Airport, near that mountain but not much else. It was evening, time for the overseas flights to land, and mine had, and that was it. The airport is one of those grand, reinforced concrete 1970s foreign-aid projects now going grim from mildew and falling to pieces. Surely it is one of the few international airports without a visible clock. There are no hustling taximen or begging children outside the door. It costs fifty cents to enter the airport grounds, and they can’t afford it.
A safari guide named John collected me in the minivan in which we’d spend the next two weeks. It was a beaten, slew-wheeled, butt-sprung vehicle. John managed to keep it working (except for flat tires and getting stuck, and a rear hatch that sprang open in a remote corner of the Maasai Steppe with a lion on one side of the road and an irritated mother elephant on the other).
We drove for an hour and a half through the smoky African night. Smoky is not an adjective chosen for artistic, evocative reasons. According to Tanzanian government figures, 90 percent of the country’s energy generation is from wood fires. Virtually all the cooking, heating, lighting, and manufacturing in Tanzania is accomplished by the same method Boy Scouts use on hot dogs at campouts.
We arrived on the outskirts of Arusha, the principal city in northern Tanzania. Here was another stained and flaking assistance-to-developingnations structure—the best hotel. No air-conditioning, no screens, and not much happening in the bar.
In the morning we drove to Arusha proper, a low sprawl of neglected stucco buildings, with here and there a large government office made of the inevitable aid-donor concrete. Half the businesses downtown had something to do with doing something with tourists, and the rest sold used refrigerators. The thin and sluggardly traffic was made up of colonial-era Land Rovers and large, woebegone trucks with obscure South Asian brand names. A few trucks were full of farm produce. A few were full of people. All the others were broken down by the side of the road, with men lying under them, occasionally working on the truck mechanicals, but usually sleeping. In the center of town, in a traffic circle where one bus seemed to be permanently circling, was a monument to the fact that Arusha is halfway between Cairo and Cape Town.
Outside the small business district, the roads were lined with scrap-wood and palm-thatch stalls, some with signs that overreached the mark—HOLLYWOOD BAR—others selling modest goods, such as scrap wood and palm thatch. Vendors who couldn’t afford sheds sold goods more modest yet: pieces of bicycle tire and strips of rubber cut from old inner tubes. There were a few industrial buildings at the city’s edge, but nothing industrious seemed to be happening in them. An open-air market was busy but looked more full of people than goods. John laughed and pointed out a Christian revival tent next to a brewery.
The Tanzanian men wore shirts and slacks that had a clothing-drive look but, if so, they were picked from the Goodwill bin with more taste than most Seattle bands show and more use of detergent, too. The Tanzanian women had on T-shirts or Western blouses, but also kangas—yard-wide, twelve-foot lengths of brightly printed cotton cut in two to make a skirt and shawl. The kangas were spotless, even when the women were working in the fields (something Tanzanian women have an equal opportunity to do; in fact, there seems to be an affirmative-action program in force). It’s not a dirty country—if you don’t count dust.
It’s not a squalid country. There are no droves of the crippled and diseased, no beseeching for alms, no pestering of strangers, no evident public violence. Tanzania is not a nation suffering social collapse, but I’m not absolutely sure I mean that as a compliment. There’s the sad possibility that they just don’t have the cash for booze, drugs, and handguns.
Seeing the people in Arusha going about their business—or lack thereof—should have been more depressing than it was. Describing the English poor of 150 years ago, George Eliot noted “the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.” But with Tanzanians, there is a twinkle in that gaze. The women walk down the roads bearing all the burden of Tanzanian material possessions. These are few enough, but still a lot to carry on your head. And more often than not, the women are smiling. Their kangas sway and billow. The printed cloths are embellished with slogans or catch phrases, such as PENYE KUKU WENGI HAKUMWAGWIMTAMA: “Don’t dry the millet where the chickens are.” Children rush home from school as gleefully as if they were headed for rec rooms full of Sega games and Anastasia videos. (Tanzanian kids all wear school uniforms, in case you think that regulation is the answer to all ills.) Just the names of things in the country are cheerful: the No Competition Grocery, the New Toyota Shoe Shine, the Buy-n-Bye Minimart, and a long-distance motor coach christened So What. Merchants are nice to the point of chagrin over any commercial aspect of a visit to their stores. One shop had an apologetic sign posted in the window:
YOU ARE MY FRIEND
YES
YOU ARE MY RELATIVE
YES THANK YOU
BUT MY BUSINESS DOES NOT KNOW YOU
A few weeks after I left the country, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton came to Arusha on a fly-through tour of Africa. The silly young daughter of the president of the United States told an audience at Kilimanjaro Airport that in America “we have a big problem with people not thinking they have a future. Young women and young men … there’s a lot of hopelessness.” The Tanzanians were too nice to pelt her with dirt clods.
Beyond the town, people were even poorer. Arusha is green, irrigated by the waters of Kilimanjaro’s smaller companion Mount Meru, which hulks 15,000 feet over the city. The farmland is lush, but the farms are hodgepodges: a banana tree here, a cassava plant there, here a maize stalk, there a bean sprout, everywhere a chicken (and several children chasing it). Hollow logs hang lengthwise in the branches of the taller trees. Fetishes of some kind, I assumed, but I had the sense to ask John.
They’re beehives. One whole chapter in the Tanzanian National Budget is devoted to beekeeping. People can’t afford sugar. Sugar sells for twenty-eight cents a pound.
The average Tanzanian smallholding is less than one and a quarter acres. The homesteads are just shacks topped with sheets of tin or one-room bunkers built from very irregular concrete blocks made, one by one, in wooden molds.
Farther west, the land gets worse, rocky and dry and barren as a stairwell. Goats seem to be the only crop. Here, people don’t have the luxury of shacks. The tiny houses are thatch roofed, with walls made from stick-work lattices, the spaces between the sticks filled with little rocks, and the whole plastered over with mud if—water being scarce—the family can afford mud.
Women sat by the side of the road, hitting rocks with stumpy hammers, making gravel by hand—to give some idea of the value of labor in Tanzania. Little boys stood resolutely in the middle of nowhere next to gunnysacks of charcoal that the passing trucks can’t burn and the walkers and bicyclers can’t carry. If you wonder where all the old, fat-tired, one-speed, backpedal-to-brake American bicycles went, the Huffys and the Schwinns, they’re in Tanzania, complete with reflectors, mud flaps, rocket-shaped battery lamps, and handlebar baskets with little brothers stuffed in them.
The road to the Rift Valley is paved and reasonably smooth from lack of traffic, but it’s only as wide as an alleyway. At Makuyuni (“Place of the Fig Tree”—and there’s not one) is the turnoff to Tanzania’s most important tourist attractions: the Ngorongoro Crater, the Olduvai Gorge, the Serengeti. And at Makuyuni, the pavement illogically ends. We headed west across the Rift Valley on a road that was just a pile of rocks—like driving lengthwise on a New England stonewall. We were slammed so badly inside the van that John steered out into the arid, rutty bush, where we were engulfed in dust, dropped into holes, and launched aloft by boulders. John went back to the road until we could take it no more, then back to the bush. And so we traveled to Ngorongoro, veering from the Scylla of African topography to the Charybdis of the Tanzania Highway Department, a journey of thirty-odd miles that took three hours.
In the Rift, the Maasai still live with their livestock inside corrals of piled thornbush, in flat-topped, windowless hovels made from straw smeared with cow dung and entered through a crawl hole.
The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes is said to have slept in a barrel. And supposedly it was a happy revelation to him that he could drink out of his cupped palms and thus throw away one more possession, his cup. But Diogenes had a barrel, a fairly complex piece of technology. Compared with the way some Tanzanians exist, Diogenes was a Sharper Image customer.
Statistically, there are poorer countries than Tanzania; that is, countries so chaotic that all their statisticians have been chased up trees—Liberia, Somalia, Congo—and countries which are so reclusive—North Korea—that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. But Tanzania is right at the bottom of the aforementioned barrel, which would probably have to be imported from an industrially advanced nation. According to the World Bank’s 1996 World Development Report, Tanzania is poorer than Uganda, poorer than Burundi, poorer than godforsaken Chad. Haiti is 80 percent wealthier than Tanzania. Papua New Guinea is almost ten times more prosperous, never mind that some of its citizens have not discovered the wheel.
Tanzania is so poor that its poverty is hard to calculate. Eighty-five percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, if employed is the word. They grow things. They eat them. This does not generate W-2 forms or register on the stock exchange that Tanzania doesn’t have. (“Money and capital markets” are to come “in the near future,” says the Ministry of Finance.)
As with Cuba, there’s a sad econometric debate about Tanzania’s per capita gross domestic product. Tanzanian government figures (with their foggy population counts and a Tanzanian shilling with an exchange rate varying between worth-little and worthless) work out to approximately $128 a person a year. The World Bank believes it’s about $117. The CIA, in its 1997 World Factbook, estimates Tanzanian per capita GDP at $650. But this is from the organization that—as late as 1989—thought the Soviet Union’s per capita GDP was nearly as high as Britain’s. The CIA uses something called the purchasing-power-parity (PPP) method to measure gross domestic product. PPP is supposed to compensate for the lower living costs found in poorer countries. It’s like having your boss tell you, “Instead of a raise, why don’t you move to a worse neighborhood—your rent will be lower and so will your car payments, as soon as someone steals your Acura.”
Let’s take the Tanzanians’ own figures—it’s their country after all: $128 per capita GDP. And here we see the fallacy on the bottom line of utopian economic ideas. If theoretic social justice were enacted—if all the income in this nation were divided with perfect equality—everybody would get thirty-five cents a day. This (using the PPP method, by the way) is half a pack of Sportsman cigarettes and nine ounces of dried beans.
I mentioned the thirty-five-cents figure to an American friend, who said, “Christ! You can find that much lying in the road.” Not in Tanzania you can’t. There’s nothing on or near the roads. The things we throw away—broken scraps of plastic, bits of tin sheeting, snips of copper wire—are collected by the Maasai and made into the centerpieces of beadwork necklaces and bracelets. These are sold by old women at the tourist spots for about a dollar apiece. Sell one and that’s three days of per capita gross domestic product.
There are probably better ways to measure extreme poverty than GDP. Tanzania has a population slightly less than California’s and is slightly more than twice California’s size, and Tanzania has 1,403 miles of paved roads. The District of Columbia has 1,104 miles (although, to be fair, our capital has worse potholes than their capital does). Telephone lines for Tanzania’s approximately 29 million people number 85,756. Cell phone service, I was told, was coming “next month,” which is when you usually get a dial tone. Outside the cities, there are no phones, just three shortwave-radio call stations.
I sat in a hotel bar one night, listening to the howling, shrieking distortions of a ham-radio set on which a frantic husband in the Serengeti was explaining that the tour guide’s jeep had gone into a hyena den, and he thought his wife’s spine was fractured. Garbled plans were being made to fly the wife hundreds of miles to Nairobi, Kenya, for medical treatment. At last count, there was one doctor for every 28,271 people in Tanzania, and, I suppose, 28,270 patients were in line ahead of the poor woman with the fractured spine.
Only 260,171 Tanzanian households or businesses have electricity, and that electricity arrives with the frequency and predictability of Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes wins. Speaking of such, the average Tanzanian receives 2.14 pieces of mail per annum. In 1990, the most recent year in which the Tanzanian government has managed to count these things, 3,314 cars, 2,385 four-wheel-drive vehicles, and 6,445 trucks were imported.
Five percent of Tanzania’s teenagers are enrolled in high school (though this is better than the percentage of American high school students actually paying attention). The average Tanzanian family devotes 70 percent of its expenditures to food. In Cuba, where they claimed the American embargo was starving them, that figure was 50 percent. And a U.S. family allots about 14.5 percent of its spending to food—$6,592, which is 1,739 Big Mac meals and a large order of fries, and may explain why Americans are so fat. Tanzanians are not. According to the World Bank, 29 percent of Tanzanian children age five or less are underweight.
Why is Tanzania so poor? The nation is by no means overpopulated. The countryside is mostly dry plains and mild badlands, a sort of tropical South Dakota with seacoast, but it’s not infertile. Tanzania is a net exporter of edibles. Agricultural products make up 75 percent of foreign-trade earnings. Forty percent of the country is meadow or pastureland, enough to supply all the burgers missing from local lunch breaks. And Tanzania has resources: tin, phosphates, iron ore, coal, diamonds, gemstones, gold, natural gas, and nickel, says the CIA’s World Factbook, and salt, gypsum, and cobalt, adds the U.S. State Department’s 1997 Country Commercial Guide. Plus, there’s said to be hydroelectric potential. (I did notice a lot of water running downhill—as water tends to do.)
Tanzania has not suffered the wars, civil and otherwise, that have riven sub-Saharan Africa. It did fight one brief conflict against Uganda, in the good cause of ousting Idi Amin. But peace has been the general rule since independence. Domestic peace, as well. Tanzania isn’t wracked by tribal conflicts. Julius K. Nyerere, the high-minded and high-handed schoolteacher who ruled the country for its first twenty-four years, opposed tribalism and was helped in his opposition to tribes by the fact that Tanzania has more than 120 of them. None is large enough to predominate. Besides the well-known Maasai, there are the Ha, the Hehe, the Gogo, etc., etc. It’s silly enough to murder somebody because he’s a Serb or a Croat, but to kill a person for being a Gogo is much too absurd for the sensible and even-tempered Tanzanians.
Tanganyika, as it used to be called, did not have a very bad colonial history, as those things go. The Germans arrived late, in 1885, and left early, in 1918, after muffing World War I. Local people fought the Germans persistently—in the Hehe Rebellion of 1891, the Maji Maji War of 1905, and a variety of other spirited (and oddly named) uprisings. The British took over Tanganyika as a League of Nations protectorate rather than as a colony, so the Tanganyikans were spared the influx of wastrel coffee planters, lunatic white hunters, and Isak Dinesen that plagued Kenya. Resistance to British rule was nonviolent and well organized, and the Brits left in 1961 with a minimum of puling and fuss.
Tanzania does have various of the other evils on which Third World poverty is blamed—corruption, for instance. Tanzania has that. But so do Newt Gingrich and Al Gore. The wild, venal jobbery of politicians doesn’t, by itself, make a country poor. Nor does colonial exploitation. Virginia and Massachusetts were colonies, too, and more effectively exploited than Tanzania was.
Then there’s socioeconomic lag, the late introduction of the ideas that propel the developed world. Yet Tanzania, or at least its coast and its islands such as Zanzibar, were exposed to science, math, and technology by Muslims beginning in the eighth century. That’s eight hundred years before anybody who could read or recite multiplication tables arrived in North America. True, Arab traders came for the purposes of stealing slaves and pillaging ivory. But the harbingers of civilization rarely go anywhere in order to deliver Girl Scout cookies. The poverty of Tanzania is a puzzle.
Lack of education is, of course, a problem. But Tanzania’s literacy rate is estimated to be almost 68 percent. Even if that estimate is optimistic, the proportion of Tanzanians who can read and write now is higher than the proportion of Europeans who could do so at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Also, illiterate is not ignorant. The most backwoods of Tanzanians speaks a tribal tongue or two, plus Kiswahili and, often, English. At my tourist hotel on the rim of the Ngorongoro, I asked the bartender why Tanzania was so poor. He said “lack of education” and then held forth with a fifteen-minute dissertation on the mathematics of the exchange rate that left me heavily shortchanged and in some doubt about his theory.
One answer is that Tanzania is not poor—by the standards of human experience. Admittedly, these are grim standards, but until creatures from other planets really do invade, we have no others. The World Bank claims that 48 percent of rural Tanzanians and 11 percent of the country’s city dwellers are living in “absolute poverty,” which the World Bank defines as an “income level below which adequate standards of nutrition, shelter, and personal amenities cannot be assured.” But when and where on earth were the poor ever guaranteed three hots and a flop, let alone “personal amenities”? According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Tanzania’s current per capita gross domestic product is something like Japan’s or Brazil’s at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and about the same as that of India or China in 1950.
Tanzanians live the way people usually have since we quit being apes. No, they live better. Tanzanian life expectancy is approximately 52 years. Life expectancy in the United States was 52.6 years in 1911. The infant-mortality rate in Tanzania is 84 deaths per 1,000 live births. The American infant-mortality rate was 85.8 as recently as 1920.
After we had crossed the Rift Valley, John and I drove to the Olduvai Gorge, where Louis and Mary Leakey did their archaeological work, showing just how ancient mankind is. More than a million years ago Homo erectus—who resembled modern man at least as much as Neil Young does—was wandering around here on open savannas very similar to those of modern Tanzania.
The hominid tools on display in the museum at the Olduvai Visitor Center are not reassuring as to the lifestyle of our early relations. You’d have to be an expert to tell they’re tools at all and not just stones that broke funny. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Leakeys were pulling our leg and Ralph Reed is right, and man was created by divine miracle last Wednesday at noon. Anyway, the stuff that Grandfather Erectus was working with in his Paleolithic basement shop gives you a second thought about what poverty really means. I wouldn’t care to be turned loose in the African underbrush with nothing but a couple of sharp rocks—not even for an hour and knowing that John was parked back by the road with our box lunches.
Man was born into a state of nature, and nature, I’m sad to report, is woefully underdeveloped in an economic sense. The wildlife herds were sad reminders that there are only two ways to obtain a thing: either agree upon a price for it or take it by butting heads. Wildebeest depend upon the latter method. Due to a lack of pockets, wildebeest cannot carry cash or credit cards. Among animals, only marsupials have pockets, and then just to keep their babies in. And there are various difficulties, practical and theoretical, with an economic system based on inch-long blind and hairless kangaroos.
No medium of trade is one reason that wildebeest aren’t very productive. No brains is another. About the only thing wildebeest can do to increase productivity—of crap and other wildebeest—is eat more. This they accomplish to the best of their ability, standing around all day with their choppers in the groceries. Leaves and grass aren’t much more nutritious for them than they are for us. Consider how much lettuce and oat bran you would need to gain weight. Consider how much a 500-pound wildebeest would.
Wildebeest also sleep, but not peacefully. A significant minority of creatures on the African veldt aren’t grazers or browsers, or members of PETA. They’re hungry, too. And buff. Running down a 500-pound herbivore is an excellent exercise program. Plus, John said that cheetahs and leopards will kill—as will many a lesser hunter in a duck blind—for fun. So wildebeest wake up a lot in the night, and when they wake up, they eat. They mate, of course. Once a year. Fun-o. They migrate to find other things to eat. They go to water holes, but these are haunted by crocodiles, lions, jackals, wild dogs, hyenas, and minibuses full of tourists waiting to see the violence and strong-language portions of safari. That’s about it for the wildebeest lifestyle. The young ones frisk, but they get over it.
Nature is poor, and the Tanzanians haven’t gotten nearly far enough away from nature. Coming back from the Serengeti, John and I drove by a small airport. There were vultures on the landing strip—never a good sign. We descended into the Rift to the marshy village of Mto-wa-Mbu, which means “Mosquito River,” a name of stunning obviousness, like calling Kansas “Flat State.”
We went to the market, a jolly, if unhygienic, huddle of teetering sheds and precarious vegetable heaps. I was taking notes on food costs. This nosiness might have raised suspicions or hackles elsewhere, but Tanzanians have experienced more than three decades of foreign-aid mavens, development experts, and academic investigators of Third Worldery. They got with the program at once. Three or four helpful loafers showed me into every corner of the bazaar, and merchants gave price quotations with the speed and facility of NYSE specialist brokers.
The market smelled. The whole of Tanzania smells. It’s an odor of smoke and spoiled milk with undertones of compost and beef jerky. Amazingly, it’s not a bad smell. But it’s not the smell of success.
Along the main street, Mto-wa-Mbu resembles a ghost town in the American West—if cowboys had had a marvelous sense of color, and also if they’d stuck around. Mosquito River is fully populated. Its leaning, sagging, dilapidated buildings are made of cinder block. This isn’t usually a “rickety” building material but, with lack of mortar and abstention from use of the level or plumb bob, a tumbledown effect can be achieved.
All the small towns in Tanzania look like hell. The crudity of ordinary things is astonishing: fences, gates, window frames, doors, and let’s not mention toilets. Every place is makeshift, improvised, jury-rigged, askew (and, in the case of toilets, amok). Americans are so querulous about mass production that we forget the precision afforded by machinery. Handmade often means made with ten thumbs. Examine the shelves you put up in your garage. Now take a log and a machete and build them.
Lots of things are started in Tanzania. Not much is finished. Scattered everywhere are roofless masonry walls—literally a few bricks shy of a load. Paint appears on the fronts of buildings but never on the sides or backs. The country seems as if it were built by hippies. And in a sense, it was.
Julius Nyerere was born two years after Timothy Leary. Nyerere, called Mwalimu, “the teacher,” was elected president of Tanganyika in 1962, just when Professor Leary began advocating LSD use at Harvard. Nobody has ever accused Nyerere of being drug-addled. He’s lived an abstemious life (although he does have twenty-four grandchildren). But some of the same generational fluff filled the skulls of both Julius and Tim.
Nyerere embraced the collectivist ideology that ran riot in the twentieth century, and from this embrace was born a particularly spacey and feckless socialism call ujamaa, or “familyhood.” Excerpts from Nyerere’s writing sound like a 1969 three-bong-hit rap from somebody going off to found an organic jojoba bean–growing commune: “Our agricultural organization would be predominately that of cooperative living and working for the good of all … Some degree of specialization would be possible, with one member being, for example, a carpenter.” Dig it. “If every individual is self-reliant … then the whole nation is self-reliant.” Heavy.
The 1967 Arusha Declaration, a government manifesto cataloging the right-on goals and groovy ideals of ujamaa, states that agriculture and animal husbandry are where the Tanzanian economy is at. Industrialization would mean a bummer money trip. In the words of the tuned-in Mwalimu, “We make a mistake in choosing money—something we do not have—to be the big instrument of our development.” Development being something else they do not have.
Issa G. Shivji, a law professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, has written an article summing up ujamaa. He says, “There were two central premises of this ideology: equality of human beings and developmentalism.” Equality is the thirty-five cents a day mentioned earlier. Developmentalism sounds like some even worse offshoot of Scientology. “The problem,” Shivji continues, “was that the ideology of ujamaa was not supported by any explicit social theory,” and that the Tanzanian government “pursued this policy logically and consistently.”
In other words, ujamaa worked as well as rigidly adhered to nonsense usually does. Slogans were coined, such as the Hitlerish “Uhuru na Kazi,” which sounds even more Hitlerish when translated: “Freedom and Work.” Price controls were instituted, lasting until 1986. In 1981 farmers were being forced to sell corn to the government for 20 percent of market value, and that market value was nothing to write to Iowa about. In Mto-wa-Mbu, price-uncontrolled corn now sells for twenty-three cents a pound. Local industries were nationalized, foreign companies were expropriated, and compensation for these takings was, in the words of the U.S. State Department, “extremely slow and ponderous.” Much of commerce met the same ponderous, if not so slow, fate. East Indian and Arab minorities were the targets. The history textbook used in Tanzanian public high schools blandly states, “The monopolistic position of Indian wholesale traders was abolished.”
A program of “villagization” was begun. The idea was to persuade rural Tanzanians to move to eight thousand “familyhood villages,” ujamaa vijijini, where the government could provide them with water and education, and, by the way, keep an eye on everybody. The planned communities did not fulfill the plan. The water didn’t arrive; neither did the education, nor the people who were supposed to move there. When persuasion wouldn’t work, force was used. By the end of the ‘70s, more than 65 percent of the population in the Tanzanian countryside had been deported to the ujamaa vijijini gulag. But, this being Tanzania, the population just wandered away again and built houses of their own in the bush.
Other vaporous ideas were being tried. According to Ideology and Development in Africa, a terribly fair-minded book published by the Yale University Press in the early ‘80s, “There was a sharp reorientation of medical outlays away from high-cost, Western-model, curative medicine and toward rural, paramedical, and preventive health care. By 1974 the fraction of the health budget allocated to hospitals had dropped from 80 percent in the late 1960s to 50 percent,” with results such as the hyena hole/fractured spine crisis I overheard on the shortwave radio.
Meanwhile, the Tanzanian economy went concave. Tanzanian National Accounts figures indicate that the per capita GDP has yet to return to its 1976 level. And the purchasing power of the legal minimum wage fell 80 percent between 1969 and 1987. So another answer to the question “Why is Tanzania so poor?” is ujamaa—they planned it.
They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries have been underwriting Tanzanian economic idiocy for thirty-seven years. There’s a certain kind of gullible and self-serious person who’s put in charge of foreign aid (e.g., ex-head of the World Bank Robert McNamara; I rest my case). This type was entranced by modest, articulate Julius Nyerere and the wonderful things he was going to do. American political-science professor Ali Mazrui dubbed it “Tanzaphilia.” In the midst of the villagization ugliness, Tanzania was receiving U.S. Official Direct Assistance (or ODA, as it’s called by the succor/sucker professionals) of $300 million a year in big, fat 1975 dollars. That was twenty dollars a person—probably what it cost to build a vijijini hovel, catch a Tanzanian, and stick him inside.
Scandinavian countries were particularly smitten, seeing in ujamaa a version of their own sanctimonious social order, but with better weather and fewer of those little meatballs on toothpicks. By the early 1990s, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark together were sending Tanzania more than $320 million a year.
Then there is the aforementioned World Bank, financed by the United States, Japan, and other wealthy nations. Its purpose is to loan money to underdeveloped areas, and I can’t understand why it won’t loan money to me, as I am in many areas quite underdeveloped. The World Bank charges interest rates like your dad does when you borrow a twenty. Thirty-three percent of the projects funded by the World Bank are considered failures by the bank itself. The World Bank thus operates on bad business principles. And moral principles of the same ilk. Villagization was just fine with the World Bank; in fact, it had already proposed something on that order in the reams of busybody economic advice with which international organizations pester the globe. How would we like it if the Organization of African Unity told us to get out of our suburbs and move to Detroit?
The World Bank loaned Tanzania oodles of money. More oodles were loaned by other kindly aid agencies. Tanzanians now have a total foreign debt equal to almost two years’ worth of everything produced in the country. Tanzania is $7.4 billion in hock. The money will be repaid … when Rush Limbaugh becomes secretary-general of the UN.
But don’t worry, the International Monetary Fund is on the case. If a country gets in trouble by borrowing too much from places like the World Bank, then it qualifies for an IMF loan. As long as Tanzania promises to abide, more or less, by free-market guidelines and doesn’t print more worthless paper money than it absolutely has too, the IMF will “help.”
Tanzania has been smothered in help. It’s received loans, grants, programs, projects, an entire railroad from the Chinese government (running 1,200 miles to nowhere in particular), and just plain cash. In 1994, by World Bank tally, foreign aid made up 29.1 percent of the Tanzanian GDP, more than the budget of the Tanzanian government.
Tanzania is said by Africa scholar Sanford Ungar to be “the most-aided country in all of Africa.” In the period immediately after independence, Tanzania was getting half a billion dollars a year in aid. Between 1970 and 1989, the CIA estimates, another $10.8 billion arrived. According to the World Bank, $5.4 billion more was given between 1990 and 1994. This is more than $20 billion, without even trying to pump the figure by adjusting for inflation.
John told me that good farmland in Tanzania sells for a million shillings an acre, about $1,650. Since there are 29 million Tanzanians, $20 billion would have bought each family a larger-than-average farm plot, and everybody could have gone back to doing what they were doing before ujamaa was thought of. The biggest reason that Tanzania is poor is that we’ve paid them to be so.
John and I took the hammering ride back across the Rift. When I got green from being jiggled, John said, “Safari means ‘hard journey.’” Dust devils the size of major league ballparks roamed across the Maasai homesteads. The Maasai didn’t bother to glance at these swirling circles of debris, which hit us with high-speed curtains of dirt and filled our van like a window planter. The Rift Valley is the work of continental drift. Africa is being pulled apart. Some day, Tanzania will float away from Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Uganda. And Tanzanians deserve the move. Tanzanians deserve a lot of things.
Tanzanians certainly don’t deserve what they’ve had since 1961. The scum tide of ujamaa has receded, but it’s left behind such things as the awful road to Makuyuni we were on. Ujamaa has also left the Tanzanian public mind strewn with intellectual jettison. The national budget, in its “Agriculture” section, asserts that the government is encouraging “private sector participation in production,” and, in its “Land” section, claims that the government seeks “to ensure equitable distribution and equal access to land by all citizens.” So you’re encouraged to farm your private plot, and everyone else is encouraged to farm it, too. The high school history book gives the following analysis of economic history: “General Tyre Corporation built one tyre factory for the whole of East Africa in Arusha. But soon after this decision, another corporation, Firestone, built a similar factory in Nairobi. This meant the competition of imperialist capital.” And even John, who was completely sensible, said, “We have lots of bananas, but we don’t do anything with them—just use them for food.”
John did tell me, however, that nobody even thought about trying to put the Maasai into ujamaa villages. Say what you will against the blood sports, people who spear lions for fun are well prepared for political rough and tumble.
And Julius Nyerere apologized, which is more than most ‘60s icons have bothered to do. When he relinquished the presidency in 1985, he said, in his farewell speech, “I failed. Let’s admit it.”
We drove on from Makuyuni to the Tarangire River basin on the far edge of the Maasai Steppe. The Maasai are fit and towering, despite what is—by the standards of Tanzania itself—a life of extreme hardship. They customarily knock out a couple of their children’s teeth so that the kids can be force-fed when they get lockjaw. Administering a liquid diet is easy enough, because Maasai cuisine is nothing but, basically, gravy. It would be food suicide for any other people and may cause even the Maasai a certain amount of indigestion. They call Europeans iloredaa enjekat, “those who confine their farts with clothing.” The Maasai try to avoid pants and other items of Western apparel. They stick to their tartan wraps. From toddler to granny, they possess a martial bearing. No Maasai man goes outdoors without a lance or quarterstaff. As a result of this public dignity, seeing a Maasai engaged in any ordinary activity—riding a bicycle, walking down the road with an upside-down dishpan on the head, drinking a soda pop—is like seeing a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff skateboarding. But the Maasai do know how to wear plaid-on-plaid. Ralph Lauren is history if the Maasai ever get start-up capital and a marketing plan.
This brings us to a sadder question than “Why are the Tanzanians so poor?” which is “Why do we care?” An economist would answer that a Maasai line of “LionKill” sportswear would drive down the price of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and that we, as consumers, would profit. But the idea that the increased productivity of others benefits ourself is not something most noneconomists understand or believe. It would be nice to think that we worry about Tanzanian poverty out of some ujamaa-like altruism—or maybe it’s not so nice to think that, considering the results of ujamaa. Anyway, altruism toward strangers is mostly a sentimental and fleeting thing—a small check dashed off to Save the Children. Twenty billion dollars’ worth of it is rare. In the cold war days, of course, we were giving money to Tanzania on the theory of: “Pay them to be socialist so they won’t be communist and figure out what the difference is later.” But now, I’m afraid, the sad truth is that we care about Tanzanians because they have cool animals.
And they do. John and I spent most of our days together driving around and looking at them. The minivan had a kind of sunroof on legs that, instead of sliding out of the way, popped up to form a metal awning. Thus, while John drove, I would stand in the back and, holding the awning’s supports, be bounced and jiggled around like some idiot of the Raj in a mechanical howdah. Then, John would shout things such as, “Elephant!”
And I would shout, “No kidding!” because the elephant was twenty feet from us, walking across the road without so much as a sideways glance for traffic. It was an enormous solitary bull. His back was powdered with the dust that elephants fling over themselves to ward off bugs, a pink dust in this case, collecting in the deep gray wrinkles and making his hide look like an old actress betrayed by her pancake base. The bull’s tusks were as long as playground slides and so thick that bowling rather than billiard balls could have been carved from them, if such a thing were thinkable nowadays. He was the most impressive living creature I’ve seen—for about a minute. Then he got more impressive, growing an immense erection for no reason. (I hoped it was for no reason. A mad infatuation with our minivan would have been unwelcome.) “Fifth leg,” said John.
The elephant walked off into a forest to strip the bark from the legal-pad-colored fever trees and snap the branches off for snacks. Elephants leave a real mess in the woods. They leave a mess wherever they go. You can see how, in a country supported by humble agriculture, the big browsing animals get killed, and not just by poachers. We love elephants in North America, where they never get into our tomato plants or herbaceous borders, much less destroy the equivalent of our fax machines and desktop computers.
On the other side of the forest and keeping their distance from the tourist track were three more big browsers: black rhinos. There used to be thousands of rhinoceros in Tanzania. Now there are not. The poachers did get the rhinos, as they’ve gotten most of the rhinos in Africa, all because middle-aged men in Asia believe the powdered horn is a natural and organic Viagra.
The Cape buffalo are still around in droves, however. Their horns don’t seem to do anything for Asians. And it’s harder to kill them. The Cape buffalo is just a cow, but a gigantic and furious one—the bovine as superhero, the thing that fantasizing Herefords wish would burst upon the scene between feedlot and Wendy’s.
Most of the animals were not shy. They’ve discovered that the round-footed noisy things on the roads do not claw or bite, and are not—on their outsides, anyway—tasty. We were able to drive to within tollbooth-change-tossing distance of some young lions lying on a sandbank at a water hole.
“These are stupid young males,” said John in a tone that (he being as fiftyish as I) implied the unlikelihood of any other young male type. “They are hunting badly. A female would be behind the sand, not on top of it.” The lions didn’t seem to care. They didn’t seem to care about us, either. And they didn’t care about the half dozen other jeeps and vans full of tourists that, seeing us seeing something, eventually gathered around.
A trip to the game lands of Tanzania isn’t a lonely, meditative journey. Everything I saw was also being ogled by dozens of other folks from out of town, and they were reeling off enough videotape to start a Blockbuster chain devoted solely to out-of-focus fauna. But the tourists pay money, and money is what it takes to keep the parks and preserves more or less unspoiled and to buy the bullets to shoot poachers. If the animals of Africa aren’t worth more alive to rubberneckers than they’re worth dead to farmers, pastoralists, and rhino-horn erection peddlers, then that’s that for the Call of the Wild. (Besides, romantic as it may sound, how solitary do you want to be in the presence of stupid young lions?)
One of the lions got up, walked a couple of steps away, took a leak, and—with no thought for the grace and style that Western-educated people so admire in African wildlife—lay down again in the piss.
At the next water hole, we saw a pair of lions dozing in the midday heat. A herd of wildebeest surrounded them, evidently thirsty yet mindful of trespassing’s consequences. “But every now and then,” said John, “one of them forgets.”
The male lion was crashed out on his back, immobile. The female was lying prone and panting hard. “They have just mated,” said John. “Lions mate every six minutes and then gradually decreasing until it’s every half hour, every hour, every few hours, and so on for seven days.”
John had a variety of information about the sex lives of animals. “Do you know why there are so few giraffes?” he asked at a moment when we had quite a few in sight. “They have no natural enemies,” John continued. “Their hooves are too sharp. Their legs are too strong, not like wildebeest or zebras. But there are wildebeest and zebras everywhere.” He paused. “The guidebooks will not tell you this, but giraffes are homosexual.” John had no more said this than the two giraffes closest to us—one definitely female and the other very emphatically male—began to (and never has this slang term been used with more scrupulous precision) neck.
“You’re wrong about these giraffes,” I said. “They’re going to mate.”
“Not yet,” said John. “She has to kick him first.”
On a riverbank meadow in the Tarangire, we came across a huge troop of baboons, more than a hundred of them. They were, well, monkeying around—lollygagging, dillydallying, scratching their heads and other body parts, putzing, noodling, airing their heels, and chattering all the while. About what I don’t know. But John told me baboons are a favorite food of the big cats. Baboons aren’t much different than we were in Australopithecus days. I wondered if this troop was us four million years ago. If so, the baboons are probably plotting revenge upon the predators. “As soon as we evolve, we take the lion habitat and pave its ass.”
But not just yet, I hope. Tanzania has creatures of such breath-catching magnificence that they turn the most hardened indoorsman mushy about the mysteries of nature. It happened to me when I saw a mother cheetah stretched under a gum arabic tree with four cubs a couple of weeks old. The mother cheetah bore a startling resemblance to my high school sweetheart from St. Ursula’s, Connie Nowakowski—the same tawny coloring, the same high cheekbones, the same little uptilt of the nose, and the exact, the identical eyes. Connie died in her thirties, years ago, and it would be just like her to come back as a cheetah. She’d love the drama, and the coat looks great. But how any male cheetah got four cubs—or even a hand-job—from Connie Nowakowski is one of the mysteries of nature.
A full quarter of Tanzania’s geography is some kind of conservation area. For so poor a country, this is a remarkable bit of eco-conscious forbearance. It’s not like the big game couldn’t be put to use. “Are wildebeest edible?” I asked John.
“Yes.”
“How about Cape buffalo?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I’ll bet a gazelle steak is nice.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are warthogs any good to eat?”
“Yes,” said John, “delicious.”
I wasn’t even going to ask about elephants. Lions, anyway, are horrible. I had a lion steak once, at a German restaurant during “Wild Game Week.” The flavor was militant liver.
Keeping the conservation areas conserved is not just a matter of Tanzania sucking up to the International Wildlife Fund. Vast sections of Tanzania are infected with sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly. Sleeping sickness does not bother wild animals, but it does kill people and—something that’s more economically important in Tanzania than people are—domestic cattle. The Sierra Club’s travel guide to East Africa says, “A good number of African parks undoubtedly owe their existence not to an animal that humans wanted to preserve, but to one we couldn’t get rid of.” The tsetse is the size of a housefly but manages a bite like an enraged fox terrier. Dozens of them would get in the minivan and hang out behind the dome light and under the sun visors, waiting for their chance. Tobacco fumes seemed to be the only effective repellent. Cigarette packs should come with a printed message: “Smoking may prolong life in areas of tsetse fly infestation.”
If we want to save Tanzania’s wildlife, we’d better do something about its poverty. Otherwise the Tanzanians may give up on safari tourism, spray the Ngorongoro, the Serengeti, and the Tarangire with DDT, and start playing the Bonanza theme song. Who wouldn’t rather be a cowboy than a busboy?
In fact, no matter why we’re appalled by Tanzanian poverty, we’d better do something about it. There’s suffering humanity to be considered. And that suffering humanity will be us if we’re not careful. Only a few million of the world’s people are relatively wealthy, but two billion live like the Tanzanians. One of these days those two billion are going to figure out that they can buy guns in Florida without much of a background check.
On my last night on safari, I gathered an armload of Serengeti beer and went to sit on the small terrace of my ground-floor hotel room. There was a stretch of flowering shrubs on the other side of a knee-high wall and, beyond that, miles of pitch-dark Africa. I heard a crunch-crunch in the decorative landscaping. Then a crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. I turned off my room lights. It was a moonless night, but I thought I could see something moving. I got out my travel flashlight, its beam about as wide as a finger. I shone it this way and that, and then down along the ground, and there was a pair of eyes. They were big, round, red eyes, and they seemed to be very far apart. I shone the flashlight around some more, and there was another pair of eyes. And a third. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. The eyes were coming in my direction. I ran into the room and pulled the screen door shut. As if that was going to help. The glass slider wouldn’t budge. I chugged a Serengeti and thought … I don’t know what I thought. I went back out on the terrace and said, “Ahem,” and, “See here, you animals …” I aimed the flashlight directly into the scarlet orbs and wiggled it vigorously. The eyes kept coming. The crunching got louder.
The eyes came up to within three feet of my wall. Then they seemed to turn away, and in my flashlight beam I saw the enormous head of a Cape buffalo, scarfing the bougainvillea. I switched the room lights back on. Here was the animal “considered by hunters to be the most dangerous of the big game” (said my Brant Guide to Tanzania). In fact, here were three of them. And they were acting like well-mannered parochial-school football players in the lunchroom cafeteria line—at the expense of the hotel’s gardening staff. The Cape buffalo were unperturbed, not interested in me, and eating everything in sight. They munched their way next door. I had another beer. It goes to show how even the most wrathful of earth’s residents can be rendered dull and domestic—if the chow is good.
How is Tanzania supposed to get rich? Well, there are “improvements in agricultural yield,” always a favorite with development-aid types. The British Labour government tried this after World War II in what was known as “the groundnut scheme.” The Brits decided that Tanganyika was going to become the world’s foremost producer of groundnuts—that is to say, peanuts. They selected three huge sites and cleared the land by running a chain between two tractors, pulling the chain through the bush, and destroying thousands of acres of wilderness. Thirty-six and a half million British pounds were invested, an amount nearly equal to the whole Tanganyikan government budget from 1946 to 1950. It was then discovered that peanuts wouldn’t grow in Tanganyika.
The current Tanzanian government budget contains more pages on agriculture than would ever be read by anyone, except a journalist in a hotel room with dysentery and nothing but a copy of the current Tanzanian government budget. But the only mentions of land ownership in the budget are an admission that buying land entails “lengthy and bureaucratic procedures” and this weasel sentence: “A new land law being formulated proposes to introduce different structural arrangements.” Julius Nyerere (apologizing again) has said it was a mistake to collectivize the individual small farms, the shambas. But it’s a mistake that hasn’t been corrected. John said that farms must be bought “informally.” (Another note from the budget: “FISHERIES—the sector still faces problems from dynamite fishing.”)
I did see one swell coffee plantation, Gibb’s Farm, at the foot of the Ngorongoro Crater. This is run by English people and has thousands of neatly clipped coffee bushes lined in parade file. A smoothly raked dirt road winds up through the property with woven-stick barriers stuck in the drain gullies to hinder erosion. A profusion of blossoms surrounds the main house. The very picture of a Cotswold cottage yard has been somehow created from weird, thorny African plants, which need to be irrigated every minute. The English will garden the ash heaps of Hades if hell lets them.
I suppose the farms of Tanzania could all look like Gibb’s Farm, but it turns out that Gibb’s Farm doesn’t make any money as a farm but prospers because upscale tourist lodgings have been installed. So there’s tourism.
According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Commercial Guide, “Tourism is currently the second-largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania, after coffee.” (Actually, as mentioned, the largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania is foreign aid. But never mind, with Republicans in Congress foreign aid is not a growth industry.) All the tourists I talked to were voluble in their praise of Tanzania—as soon as they’d recovered enough from their road trips to form words. And Tanzania’s tourist hotels produced $205 million in revenue in 1995. But that’s only 6.7 percent of the country’s GDP. This compared to the 6 percent of GDP produced by Tanzania’s “transport and communication sector.” Tanzania doesn’t have any communication. As for transport, according to the same State Department guide that talks up tourism, “It takes approximately three days to travel by road from the capital, Dar es Salaam, to the second-largest city, Mwanza,” a distance of about 500 miles.
I talked to the manager of a luxury hotel near Mto-wa-Mbu, a Kenyan whom I’ll call Shabbir, and his friend, a Tanzanian named, let’s say, Mwambande, who ran the plush tented camp down the road. Shabbir said it was difficult to get these resorts to work. What was going on in his kitchen right now “was hell.” And at another hotel in Tanzania, I did watch a waiter just arrived from the sticks being utterly confounded by a soda-can pop top. I asked Shabbir and Mwambande if tourism could make a country like Tanzania rich. Shabbir didn’t think so. He was leaving for better opportunities in Vietnam. Mwambande didn’t think so, either, but more optimistically. “Tourism acts as a showcase,” he said. “It helps people come see a place for them to invest.”
They explained that tourism itself isn’t very profitable for Tanzania because so much of what’s spent is “yo-yo money.” The foreigners arrive via foreign-owned airlines in planes built by foreigners. They stay at hotels constructed with foreign building materials, ride around in foreign-made cars, and eat food imported from foreign places. The money rolls in, pauses for a moment, and rolls back out.
Some of the foreigners are, indeed, rich people. “Is the Tanzanian government giving them any incentive to invest?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Mwambande, “if you build a plant here you get a five-year tax holiday.”
“But,” I said, “it normally takes a new enterprise five years to make a profit.” Mwambande and Shabbir laughed. “And what about after the tax holiday?” I said. “What are taxes like then?” Mwambande and Shabbir laughed and laughed.
In a February 10, 1997, story about a Tanzanian crackdown on illegal tour operators, Kenya’s East-African newspaper mentioned these taxes just in passing: “a hotel levy (20%), sales tax on food (15%), sales tax on fresh juices and cakes (30%), stamp duty (1% of turnover), withholding tax on goods and services (2%), training levy (10% on expatriate employees’ taxable income), payroll levy (4% on gross taxable income of all employees), vocational education training agency tax (2% on gross taxable income of all employees).”
Forget about tourism. How about trade? Trade benefits everyone. Anytime I’ve got something you want more than I want it, or vice versa, and we swap instead of steal, the economy is improved. But trade in Tanzania has—surprise—its problems, too. Starting right at the dock. Says the State Department’s Commercial Guide: “The Customs Department is the greatest hindrance to importers throughout Tanzania. Clearance delays and extralegal levies [note diplomatic wording] are commonplace.” And until a couple of years ago, Tanzanians, like Cubans, weren’t allowed to have real money. They had to make do with Tanzanian shillings, which no one wanted.
The current Tanzanian government (which is to say, the same old government after some shady elections to stay current looking) claims to have a “trade liberalization policy.” But that government shows no understanding of what trade is. It talks about local industries “facing stiff and often unfair competition from imports.” That’s the point. Back in the States, we’d be driving DeSotos and browsing the Web with room-size Univacs if it weren’t for the Japanese. The Tanzanian government also claims that “the domestic market is now more or less saturated with imports.” Sure. Until the early 1980s there were only nine computer installations in the country, and a ban on importing computers wasn’t completely lifted until 1994.
Nor does “trade liberalization” seem to be aimed at people doing the actual trading. A story in the Dar es Salaam Guardian began, “Petty traders along Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road … yesterday received a city commission notice to quit the area in five days—and a demolishing grader erased their kiosks a few hours later.” Or if bulldozers won’t do it, a value-added tax is being instituted this year. An exaction of between 14.2 and 17.5 percent will be charged on the sale of most goods and services. Still, trade does happen. I went to the largest and most prosperous-looking store in Arusha. I’ll give it the moniker Safari Barn. It sold souvenirs to tourists. A Maasai warrior in full fig stood sentry by the door, looking as quietly mortified as a Coldstream Guard placed at attention in front of a Victoria’s Secret outlet.
The souvenirs were beautiful: black wood carvings of hippos, rhinos, Cape buffalo, giraffes. (Could America’s unemployed carve squirrels and mice this well?) And Safari Barn also sold the best kangas I’d seen. I picked out one with orange hearts and black wiggle lines like a Keith Haring print. SEMENI MNAYOJUA MSIKAE MKAZUA, said the slogan along the material’s edge. I asked the saleswoman to translate. She blushed, the blood rising in her dark complexion and turning her cheeks maroon. John began giggling. “It means,” he said, “‘Don’t sit down and spread your legs and tell everything you know.’ “ Besides the kangas and wood carvings, there were comely Maasai beads, sparkling “Tanzanite” gemstones, and a terrific selection of masks. Literally terrific, most of them, with gobbly teeth and vexed expressions, and fulsome trimmings of what I hoped wasn’t human hair. “What are these masks used for?” I asked another saleswoman. You can’t come back from Africa without a mask. But I might be shy about having certain ceremonies represented around the house.
“Mostly they’re for dancing,” said the saleswoman.
“What kind of dancing is done in this one?” I said, pointing to a handsome white striped false face with a box for a mouth and nose.
She hesitated: “Dancing … at night.”
I got an antelope mask.
I talked to the man who owned Safari Barn, whom I’ll call Nisar. By his faintly Middle Eastern speech and pallor (and wow of a wristwatch), I judged him to be a foreigner. But, though Europeans are rare, Tanzanians cover all skin-color bases. There is a sizable population with roots in India, Persia, and Oman, plus people of mixed African-Arab and whatever-whichever ancestry. Nisar’s family had been in Tanzania for six generations.
Nisar said Julius Nyerere’s “economics were no good.” The British tradition of understatement survives in Tanzania. Although only sometimes. “I have queued for a loaf of bread for two weeks,” said Nisar. “Under Nyerere, even if I had enough money for a dozen Rolls-Royces, if I drove a Mercedes, I’d go to jail for seven years—languish in jail.” So he hated Nyerere’s guts. No. “Nyerere destroyed tribalism in Tanzania,” Nisar said and claimed he encountered no prejudice for being non-African. He praised Nyerere’s insistence that everyone speak Kiswahili: “It unified the nation.”
Safari Barn was successful, said Nisar, because “I poured money into Tanzania when others were afraid to spend a shilling.” It was hard getting Safari Barn built. Nisar’s description of working with Tanzanian contractors was like Shabbir’s description of work in the hotel kitchen. Nisar had received no tax holidays, no subsidies. To get them, he would have had to go to Dar es Salaam and hang around. “‘The minister is here.’ ‘The minister is there.’ ‘The minister is gone for a week.’ It could take a month to see the right guy. I’m a one-man show here.” Then, Nisar said (without a but or a however or an even so), “Tanzania is the best country in Africa. And I have traveled all over. If there is a food shortage in Tanzania, people won’t riot. There has never been that tradition here. They will get through it. They will share, help each other. They will organize to complain. They will have meetings. They are very political. But not violent. This is not a violent country.” He paused and thought that over for a second. “These people,” said Nisar, “are so damn lazy.”
Well, not lazy—not when half the teenage girls in the country are walking around with five-gallon buckets on their heads. Five gallons of water weigh forty pounds. But Tanzanians are country. Rural labor is hard and long, not busy-busy. Cassava plants don’t crash on deadlines. Chickens don’t form quality teams. The sun does not take work home at night. And Tanzanians are political but, again, not in a way an American always understands. During the 1995 elections, John had run for the legislature, the Union Assembly, on the opposition NCCR ticket. But he couldn’t remember what the party’s initials stand for. (National Convention for Construction and Reform, incidentally.) Tanzania has been ruled by Nyerere’s CCM Party (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Party of the Revolution) since independence. Tanzania is a one-party state but has dozens of political parties. According to Louisa Taylor, Africa correspondent for the Canadian Ottawa Citizen, “Every party stands for clean government and well-equipped hospitals, good roads, and higher crop yields, and all are equally vague on how they would make it so.”
Even when making it so is a simple matter. I was talking to an expat Brit who’d come to East Africa as a colonial administrator after World War II. I said, “That washboard from Mto-wa-Mbu to Makuyuni—all they’d have to do is send a road grader over it.” (The one from Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road seems to be available on short notice.)
“Oh, less than that,” said the Brit. “They used to just drag a big log behind a tractor—up and back. The fellow’d get to one end and turn around and go back to the other. Took all the corrugation out. You’d watch for the dust cloud having gone your way and then take off. I’d run my little MG right up to the Ngorongoro rim.”
The dysfunction of Tanzania is comic, depending on the cruelty of your sense of humor. Here is an exhibit label from a Tanzanian Museum:
The Soda Bottle (ancient)
The soda bottle which in use up to 1959. This bottle contain a
marble and rubbering which jointly (wished) as stopper for the gas.
Then you take a swig of the locally produced purified water and notice brown, gelatinous things floating in your own bottle (modern).
John and I visited a high functionary of the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, Arusha branch.
“What does the Chamber of Commerce do?” I asked.
“Our main activity is getting new members,” said the functionary.
“Is the Chamber doing anything to attract business to Arusha?” I asked.
“We haven’t reached that level yet,” said the functionary. “I think Arusha has everything to attract business.”
“Except telephones,” I mentioned.
“Telephones will be privatized next year,” he said. “Arusha has two million people in the whole town.” He thought about that. “Arusha has three hundred thousand people. It is second to Dar es Salaam in importance. If all goes well, it might become first important.”
“Do you have any brochures?”
“We used to have the newsletter, but of recently, we have not done any printing.”
“But what does the Chamber of Commerce actually do?”
“We are a pressure group,” said the functionary with emphasis.
“Have you been a successful one?”
“We have! To some good extent. The Chamber of Commerce played a big role in formulating the budget. We were invited to Dar es Salaam to give our opinion. We complained about the postal-service box rent going from three thousand shillings to fifty thousand shillings.”
“Did they change the rate back?”
“No.”
The Chamber of Commerce office was located in a long, tin-roofed shed adjacent to the former headquarters of the East African Community, or EAC. The latter building is of a truly stupendous international-donor type, featuring not only discolored concrete but also oxidized aluminum, rust-stained stainless steel, and a row of empty flagpoles all bent at different angles. The EAC was an attempt by Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda to form a common market, and it fell apart when Kenya’s president, Daniel arap Moi, started getting huffy and Uganda’s dictator, Idi Amin, started eating people. But nothing in Africa that receives foreign assistance ever really goes away, and the EAC continues to exist in the guise of East African Cooperation. In the parking space reserved for the EAC’s deputy secretary was a BMW. In the executive secretary’s parking space was a new Mercedes sedan. These plenipotentiaries are members of what Kiswahili-speaking Africans call wa-Benz, “People of the Fancy German Cars.” So the comedy of errors has a happy ending—for some folks.
And not for others. When John isn’t guiding, he and his wife live in northwestern Tanzania, on an informally purchased farm near the Burundi border. They have two grown sons and did have two young daughters, but the five-year-old girl had died a couple months before John and I met. She had malaria. John took her to the local dispensary, where she was injected with a massive dose of something, and she went into a coma. When the girl had been unconscious for five days, medics at the dispensary said she needed a tracheotomy. The nearest surgeon was a hundred kilometers away. John told the medics to radio ahead and hired a car. The drive took all day. By the time John and his daughter arrived, the surgeon—the only surgeon, in fact the only doctor—at the hospital had left. “Oh, the doctor goes home around five,” said the hospital staff. “Go get him!” said John. And they said, “We don’t know where his house is.” John hired another car and searched for hours. Meanwhile, his daughter died.
I flew to the capital of Tanzania, wherever that may be. “In 1973 it was decided to move the capital city from Dar es Salaam on the coast to Dodoma in the center … a dry and desolate area,” says the East Africa Handbook. The move to Dodoma is “anticipated around the turn of the century,” says the Globetrotter Travel Guide to Tanzania. “Dodoma is now the official capital of Tanzania, displacing Dar es Salaam,” says the Brant Guide to Tanzania. “Some government offices have been transferred to Dodoma,” says the CIA’s 1997 World Factbook. And an article in the February 20, 1997, Dar es Salaam Guardian begins, “Dodoma branch members of the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture have asked the government to clarify a minister’s statement that Dodoma is not the country’s legally recognized capital.”
Anyway, I flew to Dar es Salaam. A jolly soldier rummaged through my carry-on baggage, airily dismissing my pocketknife as a possible weapon and telling me that the woman operating the metal detector was his sister. I was ushered into the “boarding lounge” for the requisite two- or three-hour wait before anything airplane-like happens in Tanzania. Warm soft drinks were for sale by a young lady with no change.
As I walked to the tired prop plane, John was on the roof of the airport, shouting good-bye. He’d been waiting the whole time outside in the heat to see me off.
The plane flew over Mount Kilimanjaro. Hemingway begins “The Snows of Ditto” by noting that there’s a frozen leopard carcass at the top. “No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” writes Hemingway. A clean, well-lighted bathroom is my guess.
In Dar, as knowing travelers call it, I was met by a driver named Nzezele (pronounced “Nzezele”). Dar es Salaam is a seaport without the bustle and sin that implies. Probably due to lack of ships and sailors. A few rusty tubs are moored in the harbor. Much of the commerce with nearby Zanzibar is still conducted in sailing dhows. Goats graze in the main rail yard.
Dar sports some stucco buildings in the art deco style but with Arabian embellishments: horseshoe arches and crenellated roof lines, all in a poor state of repair, as if a sheikh had come to Miami Beach with the District of Columbia’s public school system maintenance staff. The dusty moderne, however, is being supplanted by dusty glass boxes. Here and there are signs of history, or history’s ugly half sister, politics: a squatty palace built by the sultan of Zanzibar when he ruled the city and a small, tile-roofed, half-timbered Lutheran church, a misplaced molecule of Bavaria, from before Tanzania was Tanganyika, when it was German East Africa. The predominant tint of the city is beige, a color with a bad name for being middle class and bland, but Africa can use some bourgeois dullness. And there is a nine-hole golf course right downtown.
Traffic dribbles around unimpeded by many stoplights, none of those being at the busier intersections. Buses and taxis bear pictures of Bob Marley. Pedestrians wear T-shirts emblazoned with Rastafarian slogans. BACK TO AFRICA is—confoundingly—a popular slogan in Tanzania.
There are some nice houses up on Oyster Bay, but not ridiculously nice. There are some slums out in Kariakoo, but not horribly slummy. The neighborhoods where Nzezele told me to lock the car door wouldn’t make a New Yorker button his wallet pocket. A Swedish expat told me that he’d been robbed once. The big wad of Tanzanian shillings that it takes to amount to twenty dollars had been picked from his jeans. A crowd chased the thief, who dropped the money. Bystanders picked it up and brought it back to the Swede, asking him to count it, to make sure it was all there. The crowd chasing the thief caught him and beat him to death.
There’s no garbage on the streets in Dar, no rats, no stray dogs. There are some beggars, but they’re halfhearted. Dar es Salaam has a clunky charm. The International Cashew and Coconut Conference was being hosted February 19–21. You’d be nuts not to sign up. And you have to love a city with a thoroughfare named Bibi Titi Mohamed Street.
Of course, Dar es Salaam has its troubles. The city is out of water. Hundreds of women stand in line at the few open taps, their plastic buckets making brightly colored dots in the pathos. The problem is not drought or depletion of ground supplies. Dar’s water system has a 40 percent leakage rate.
The February 19, 1997, Guardian carried a story about corruption—in all senses of the word—at a city-hospital morgue: “Certain persons had raised objections that hospital staff were preventing relatives from picking up bodies of identified persons until they paid either fees or consideration to the staff.” The hospital had been forced by “congestion of dead bodies” to put some corpses “outside the cold room … Nurses, doctors, patients, and passersby were exposed to a choking smell, which invited swarms of flies from all directions.” A photo accompanying the story showed the garbage truck in which the bodies were hauled away.
Does poverty lead to this kind of thing, or does this kind of thing lead to poverty? It is a question that economists have not answered. Maybe there’s some inherent cultural failure that is keeping Tanzania poor. But even if that’s so, there are legal and political failures helping poverty abide. We don’t know if we can change culture. At least we don’t know if we can change it for the better. But we do know we can change other things. More freedom and responsibility can be given to individuals. I went to the government of Tanzania to see if it was doing any of that.
And here was an odd glimmer of hope. Poor and shabby countries ought to have poor and shabby governments. They usually don’t.
There is some misappropriated opulence in Tanzania. The compound where the president lives has a house and grounds that make Bill Clinton’s Pennsylvania Avenue residence look like the place where Bill grew up. But the actual government of Tanzania is run out of the same colonial administration offices constructed by Germany ninety years ago, and they haven’t been mopped since Kaiser Bill.
The buildings are on the harbor in a line along the Strand (renamed Wilhelms Ufer by the Germans, renamed Azania Front by the English, renamed Kivukoni Front by the Tanzanians). They are substantial train-shed-like wood and stucco structures with a few architectural flourishes—arabesque lintels and tile-roofed porches—indicating a Germanic attempt to go native.
I went to the Bureau of Statistics, President’s Office, Planning Commission at 3:30. Just too late. Everyone had gone home, although there was one man left in a large, dusty room stacked with copies of government publications and pamphlets, many of them yellowing and dating back to the ‘60s. These were for sale, but for some reason, the man couldn’t sell them to me. But he showed me several that he said would be excellent for me to buy, including the Tanzanian Statistical Abstract (most recent available: 1994), the Tanzanian Budget (most recent available: 1994), and the National Accounts of Tanzania from 1976 to the Present (the present, in Tanzania, being 1994). He then gave me a heartfelt speech about current politico-economic conditions in Tanzania, of which I didn’t understand much. As the American accent tends to flatten most vowels into an uh, the Tanzanian accent tends to flatten most consonants into a sound somewhere between an l, n, t, d, and r. He did wind up, however, by saying, “Until that, you can pour aid in, and all you’ll get is …” He pantomimed a fat man.
There was exactly such a fellow at the bar in the Sheraton that night, in the very largest size of Armani clothes, with a great deal of jewelry. It’s rare to see a stout Tanzanian, but, now that jail time for driving a Mercedes is no longer the practice, it happens. And when Africans use the phrase “big man,” it’s not a metaphor. The big man had his cell phone, his Filofax, his double Johnnie Walker Black, and a pile of U.S. dollars on the bar in front of him and coolly left them lying there as he made frequent trips to the pay telephone, because Tanzania didn’t have cell phone service yet.
I went back to the Bureau of Statistics at 9:30 the next morning. Just too early. No one had arrived yet. I wandered unchallenged through the offices, a dark bafflement of low warrens and vaulted passageways with broken tile underfoot and crazed and damp-stained plaster on the walls. It gave a sinister impression until I noticed that the place was furnished with beat-up Ikea-modern furniture and bulletin boards covered with photos of kids, cutout newspaper cartoons, and postcards from vacationing pals. The government offices of Tanzania look like what would happen if Franz Kafka designed the national PTA headquarters.
I found the correct person to sell me the Statistical Abstract and national accounts summary, but he explained that what I really wanted was the Rolling Plan and Forward Budget for Tanzania for the Period 1996/97–1998/99 Volume I. “Stacks and stacks of them have just been printed,” he said. He didn’t have any, however. He sent me, with Dungeons and Dragons directions, through the building to an office with its number Magic Markered on the door. Here, another bureaucrat did have the budget. His desk was covered with copies. “Stacks and stacks of them,” he pointed out, but he wasn’t authorized to sell me one. “You should go to the planning commission,” he said. Although that’s where I thought I was.
I got in the car and told Nzezele that we needed to go to the planning commission. He drove me the thirty feet there. At the planning commission a puzzled security guard, a puzzled secretary, and someone else who was puzzled considered my request, and after a closed-door consultation with a boss, they pointed me down a long hall containing several motorbikes and a lot of automobile tires. I emerged into a courtyard with extraordinarily grimy paint. Something good was cooking nearby. I climbed a couple of flights of creaking, swaying stairs, crossed a shaky breezeway, and found myself in the office of the head of environmental planning. A rattling air conditioner was creating a dank environment. He told me he had “only a very few” budget copies. I told him—just between ourselves—about the fellow in the next building who had stacks and stacks of them on his desk. He made a note. I may have set off an enormous turf war within the Tanzanian bureaucracy.
Anyway, the head of environmental planning said that he couldn’t give me a budget. I looked disappointed, and he immediately offered to loan me his personal copy on the condition that I bring it back the next morning. So I spent a festive night at the Sheraton copying Tanzanian budget information into a spiral notebook.
Not that I was missing much. The nightlife in Dar es Salaam consists of a few tourists being robbed of their running shoes on the downtown beach. Besides, contained in the Rolling Plan and Forward Budget were further glimmers of hope. Right on page 2 the document states, “The government is being reoriented to play the role of facilitation of development other than continue being seen as ‘provider’ of development.” The English may have gotten out from under them, but this is still a clear explanation of what government should do. Compare it to the Republican “Contract with America.” And for brevity and bluntness, it tops anything that’s come out of the Oval Office since Nixon yelled “Fuck” on the Watergate tapes.
There are lots of honest admissions in the Tanzanian budget: about civil-service reform “launched in 1992–93 against a background of grossly overstaffed, underpaid and barely performing workforce,” and about poverty—“The living conditions of the majority of the people, particularly in rural areas, are quite alarming.” And no easy, It Takes a Vijijini solutions are proposed. The budget says “poverty-borne problems” must be “tackled,” but “this needs to be achieved under conditions of macro-economic stability.” Which may be translated as, “Curing poverty equals allowing people to get rich.” This very simple equation has eluded some of the deepest thinkers of the world’s advanced nations.
Naturally there is also claptrap in the Tanzanian budget—the mealy mouthing about property rights that I mentioned before and scary sentences such as “expenditure management control system will be enhanced by setting up five additional sub-treasuries, bringing the total to 10.” But taken as a whole, as an example of a government going on public record, the Rolling Plan and Forward Budget might almost be called refreshing.
The Tanzanian government has an idea, a slight inkling of what to do—or, rather, what not to do. Often, the most important government action is to leave people alone. That brings us to what we prosperous Westerners should do for Tanzanians. We should leave them alone, too.
Not the cheap, easy kind of leaving them alone. There are plenty of charities and causes in Tanzania that could be supported—and lavishly, if we’re the kind, decent folks we like to think we are. Individuals can be helped. But can you “help a nation”?
Official Development Assistance has funded disasters and fostered attitudes of gross dependence. Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, says his country “needs just two things. We need infrastructure and we need foreign investment. That is what we need. The rest we shall do by ourselves.” This is the “if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs” philosophy. Or as Nzezele put it as I was leaving Dar after having given him a large and not very well-earned tip, “When you get back to America, if you find that you have any extra money, could you send me a wristwatch?”
Delivering our cash to a dictatorial and silly government was bad, but even worse was delivering our big ideas about centralization, economic planning, and social justice to a country that had 120 university graduates at the time of independence. Not that the Tanzanians didn’t understand our big ideas; they understood them too well. They just had no experience with how bad most big ideas are. They hadn’t been through Freudianism, Keynesianism, liberalism, www.heavensgate.com, and “Back to Africa.” They don’t have ten thousand unemployable liberal arts majors sitting around Starbucks with nose rings.
There’s even some evidence that getting ahead in the world comes from a lack of big ideas. Call this the Bell-Dip Theory. The United States is arguably the most successful nation in history, but not—by any argument—the smartest. Japan, even in a recession, is an economic powerhouse, but we’re talking about a people in love with Speed Racer, whose most sophisticated art form is the haiku, an itty-bitty poem on the order of
An old pond.
A frog leaping in.
Sit on a pickle.
Tanzania is one of those places called “developing countries,” as if the Family of Nations had teens, as if various whole geographical regions were callow, inarticulate, clumsy, but endearing—you know, going through an awkward phase.
And that’s about right. Every twenty-four hours of Tanzania is like a crib sheet on adolescence. There’s the dewy-aired, hopeful dawn. All is beautiful. All is fresh. Then, as the day goes on, the dust rises. The noise builds. Everything is seen in a too-vivid light. The glaring inadequacies of life are revealed. Enormous confusion develops. There’s a huge stink. And just when you’ve really had it—when you’re ready to call for the International Monetary Fund’s equivalent of “grounding,” when you’re about to take away the keys to the goat or something—the whole place goes to sleep for eighteen hours.