Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Countries such as Sweden 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 beginning of the 1990s, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were sending Tanzania more than $320 million a year—nine times the amount of American aid.

  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 as underdeveloped as it gets. 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 the same business principles as a Reagan-era savings and loan. And apparently on the same moral principles—because 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 downtown?

  The World Bank loaned Tanzania oodles of money. Further 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. Whatever that government does, we better-off citizens of the world foot the bill. And we’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years.

  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. One more reason that Tanzania is poor is that we’ve paid them to be.

  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 woozy thinking 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 a disapproving economic analysis that’s a combination of marxism and Ross Perotology: “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.”

  I said, “Huh?” 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 Chefs of Staff skateboarding. But the Maasai do know how to wear plaid-on-plaid. So Ralph Lauren is history if the Maasai ever get start-up capital and a marketing plan.

  This brings us to a question much sadder than, “Why are the Tanzanians so poor?” which is, “Why do we care?” An economist would answer that a Maasai line of Lion Kill 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 ourselves 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 not, 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 ugly 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 th
ick beyond consideration of billiard rooms or piano keyboards. This fellow could have delivered ivory bowling balls 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. Africa is not the place to soothe insecurities.

  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 agricultural endeavors, 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 gives rise—as it were—to potency. Like the world needs middle-aged men with extra hard-ons.

  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 the idea 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.” So the primitive economics of nature may have its compensations.

  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.”

  Besides kinky sex, the economics of nature does seem to generate leisure time, at least for some species. On a riverbank meadow in the Tarangire, John and I came across a huge troop of baboons, more than a hundred of them. They were just, well, monkeying around; lollygagging, dillydallying, scratching their heads and other body parts, putzing, noodling, airing their heels, and engaging in constant chatter. About what I can’t say, 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. “Soon as we evolve, we take the natural 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 into a mush on the glories of the natural world. 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 ecoconscious 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 in, of all places, Springfield, Massachusetts. The flavor was of 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. The fly’s devastating effects are similar to those of other known sleeping-sickness carriers, such as the tsetse professor, tsetse boss, and tsetse New York Times op-ed page writer. 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 what our motives are for being 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 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 is 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.