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 and would love to go along. 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 goodbye. 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 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 ran the place and a small, tile-roofed, half-timbered Lutheran church, like a misplaced molecule of Bavaria. 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. There’s a 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 name 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 never managed to answer. 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 residence look like Roger’s. 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…,” and 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 Johnny 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 phones 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 two 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 macroeconomic 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-deserved 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 dictorial 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 10,000 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, of course—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 the keys to the goat or something—the whole place goes to sleep for eighteen hours.
HOW TO MAKE EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING
HONG KONG
How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly overpopulated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.
Hong Kong is the best contemporary example of laissez-faire. The economic theory of “allow to do” holds that all sorts of doings ought, indeed, to be allowed, and that government should interfere only to keep the peace, ensure legal rights, and protect property.
The people of Hong Kong have been free to do what they wanted, and what they wanted was, apparently, to create a stewing pandemonium: crowded, striving, ugly, and the most fabulous city on earth. It is a metropolis of amazing mess, an apparent stranger to zoning, a tumbling fuddle of streets too narrow and vendor choked to walk along, slashed through with avenues too busy and broad to cross. It is a vertical city, rising 1,800 feet from Central District to Victoria Peak in less than a mile; so vertical that escalators run in place of sidewalks, and neighborhoods are named by altitude: Mid-Levels. Hong Kong is vertical in its building, too, and not just with glossy skyscrapers. Every tenement house and stack of commercial lofts sends an erection into the sky. Picture Wall Street on a Kilimanjaro slope, or, when it rains, picture a downhill Venice.
And rain it does for months. Hong Kong in monsoon season has a climate like boiled Ireland. Violent air-conditioning wars with humid heat in every home and place of business, producing a world with two temperatures: sauna and meat locker. The rainwater overwhelms the outgrown sewer system, which fumes and gurgles beneath streets ranged with limitless shopping. All the opulent goods of mankind are on display in an air of shit and Chanel.
It is a filled-in city, turgid with buildings. The Sham Shui Po district of Kowloon claims a population density of more than 425,000 people per square mile—eighteen times as crowded as New York. Landing at Kai Tak Airport, down one thin skid of Kowloon Bay landfill, you fly in below clothesline level, so
close to apartment windows that you can watch women at bathroom mirrors putting on their makeup. You can tell them that their lipstick’s crooked.
There is no space in Hong Kong for love or money, at least not for ordinary kinds of either. A three-bedroom apartment in Central rents for $1,000 a month, but there isn’t room in any of those bedrooms to even have sex with yourself. The whole home will be 700 square feet, less than ten yards long by eight yards wide, with windows papered over because, outside those windows, a hand grab away, are the windows of the apartment next door. And anything you’re going to fix in the kitchen had better be something that can be stood on end—like a banana. This is how middle-class people live. Poor people in public housing will have three generations in a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room.
But when they come out of that room, they’ll be wearing Versace and Dior—some of it even real. Hong Kong is a styling city, up on the trends. Truly up, in the case of platform sneakers. You can spend an entertaining afternoon on Hollywood Road watching teens fall off their shoes. Over the grinding hills, in the blood-clot traffic, men nonetheless drive their Turbo 911s. The S-class Mercedes is the Honda Civic of Hong Kong, and for the soccer-mom set, a Rolls and a driver is a minivan.
Jesus, it’s a rich city. Except where it’s Christ-almighty poor. Hong Kong is full of that “poverty midst plenty” stuff beloved of foreign correspondents such as myself who, when doing a Hong Kong piece, rush from interviews with day-laboring “cage men” in barred flophouse partitions to dinners in the blandly exclusive confines of Happy Valley’s Jockey Club, where I could sample the one true Hong Kong luxury—distance between tables.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics Page 24