Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (24 page)

There’s a sad little econometric debate about Tanzania’s per-capita gross domestic product. Tanzanian government figures (given foggy population projections and a Tanzanian shilling with an exchange rate that varies 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 complete fairness and perfect equity—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. Number produced domestically: zero.

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 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 it 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 the things. 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 800 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 overhopeful, 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 backwoodsy 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’s
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 archeological 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. But I was watching CNN, and something would have been mentioned. 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 must 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 young inside. 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 smoked, 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.