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Some assorted Wednesday afternoon musings from Tanzania….
_ If you’re looking for a test of whether a country is moving in the right direction or not, here’s the best quick one I can think of: ask people who live there if, on balance, they are relieved to see the police. I’d say Tanzania is right on the boundary.
I was worried I wouldn’t feel safe here, and fortunately, for the most part I do. There are places to avoid, and we don’t walk around at night, but the house where we live has a guard at night and two huge German shephards who for reasons I don’t quite understand but for which I am very grateful nuzzle up to us with great affection upon every encounter and bark like hell at just about everything else that moves. Still, these things are present because there are things to worry about out there, so I am glad to occasionally see police patrolling (though never after 5 p.m. or on weekends). Furthermore, as someone who doesn’t expect to commit any crimes myself and is more concerned with making sure others do not commit them against me, the reported lack of commitment to procedural due process and civil liberties by the police, to the extent it makes crime that much more unappealing, is not something I view as an unadulterated negative.
On the other hand, I would say there is a major symbolic downside to the fact that police here 1) wear military uniforms and 2) wield very large machine guns. It’s true, this is a country very much obsessed with hierarchy and authority and rank, and I can’t imagine if you asked people here for suggestions for their government they would put toning down police uniforms and weaponry at the top of their list. They probably like the sense of stability it implies. Still, these sorts symbols matter. Another important statisitic for a country, I would argue, is the proportion of encounters with law enforcement that happens at police checkpoints. Here that proportion is very high (and seemingly higher in Zanzibar, where our taxi drivers were stopped twice). You occasionally see patrols in neighborhoods but more commonly it’s on the Arusha highway, flagging down motorists for violations, real or imagined. Checkpoints work for drunk-driving, but otherwise they just seem to encapsulate lazy police work and unreasonable searches and seizures. Unfortunately, here these usually have to do with catching violations of the vehicle fire extinguisher regulations (everyone must have one, plus a license for it; and not surprisingly it is, I believe, the police who sell the paperwork ). Any honest list of threats to motor-vehicle safety would put the absence of fire extinguishers on approximately page 19. Further up the list would be: ludicrous speeding, vehicles without seatbelts, thoroughly overloaded trucks and buses, and cars that drive at night without functioning headlights.
_ The Guardian, one of the English-language dailies, reports on A1 this morning that 43,000 children will die prematurely this year in Tanzania because the food they eat lacks the basic nutrition required to build a strong immune system. Tanzania’s numbers in this category are the third worst in Africa.
The problem is attributed to two factors — the first is that only 13.5 percent of infants are exclusively breastfed. This is a frustrating but complicated cultural problem that will be difficult to fix. The second explanation, which appears about 22 paragraphs into the story, is that unlike almost every other country even in Africa, Tanzanian cooking oil and flour manufacturers are not required to fortify their products with vitamins and minerals. Mandating they do so would save approximately 7,000 children per year, the report estimated.
The reason this fortification is not mandated is not, as one might expect, objections from these industries — in fact they acknowledge that by not fortifying their products they are less competitive in other countries where the fortifications are required Only after the break, on the second page or the article, are we told that milliers were in fact “denied permission to fortify their products because an official standard for the purpose has not been set.” The agency head countered to the paper that the standard has in fact been set, but compliance is voluntary.” The article makes no efforts to reconcile these conflicting accounts. Meanwhile, the official seems unable to produce any explanation for why it was not mandatory and said “perhaps we made a mistake” in not doing so. But never fear, the bureau’s technical committee will meet next month to upgrade the standard to a mandatory one. So, one month… that’s 7,000 deaths attributed to this shortcoming per year divided by 12 months … best case scenario if the new rule goes right into effect in a month and is acted upon…. So only 500 more children will die as a result of implementing this already-agreed-to decision next month instead of immediately. The “perhaps a mistake” quote came in the third to last paragraph of the approximately 30-paragraph story. I hope you’ll excuse my professional narcissism in again highlighting the importance of not only a free press but a non-imbecilic one. I hear it again and again from even the most idealistic people here: Tanzania, for all its virtues, has one problem that is the root of all others — there is simply no culture of accountability.
_ I have been wading through a number of books on African history, which is even more depressing than I expected, but one of the great things about history is that no matter how depressing it is there are always moments where the contingency is just too striking not to laugh at as one ponders a counterfactual course of events.
Take, for instance, King Leopold of Belgium, who claimed the entire Congo as his own personal fiefdom during the 19th century and along with his successors plundered it remorselessly for rubber and helped condemn both it and its neighbors to a century of misery and whose name has become a byword for European colonial rapaciousness. It turns out (from John Reader’s “Africa: Biography of a Continent”) that before settling on the Congo, Leopold had been shopping all over the globe for a territory to provide some breathing room for his small and densely populated European state. Along the way he negotiated with Turkey to buy Crete and with Spain to buy Cuba, with Denmark over the Faeroe Islands and the French over Vietnam. All fell through. But the deal that perhaps came closest was an offer by the fledgling Republic of Texas to sell two tracts of land to Belgium in return for a $7 million loan. Alas, the United States government worked itself up into a Monroe Doctrine frenzy and protested, and Leopold was told the U.S. planned to annex Texas soon anyway. Thus he turned his attention to the Congo, essentially setting in motion the scramble for Africa among the major European powers.
Just picture, for a moment, if the Texas deal had gone through. For one thing, it might well have turned out — it could hardly have turned out worse. True, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which the European powers don’t eventually end up fighting over and dividing up Africa anyway, and perhaps they would have failed just as miserably as they did in actuality. Still, it was certainly Leopold’s ambitions in the Congo that set things off, and the behavior of the Belgians and their monarchs there in the century that followed was by all accounts, against strong competition, in its own category of horror (See Conrad, Joseph). Consider also how central a role the Congo played in the miseries of many of its now neighbors (notably what is now Rwanda, currently a relative success story, but where the Belgians had the fateful idea to divide the population into the then-barely extant categories of Hutu and Tutsi in order to more effectively control them). Considering those factors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion Africa’s chances would have been marginally better if Leopold had carved out an annex for himself in the Lone Star State and let it go at that.
That prospect, of course, is the more amusing counterfactual to imagine: an enclave of Belgium in the middle of Texas (Reader’s book doesn’t mention where in Texas the tracts were or how big they were, but I’d certainly be curious). It’s not inconceivable the United States would have been forced to honor the agreement when it later absorbed Texas. More far-fetched, perhaps, that enclave could have survived in some form until the present, as a colony or a Quebec-like state (Texas, you may recall, still maintains the right to divide itself into up to five states if it ever so chooses. That will probably never happen for reasons including the negative effect on the University of Texas football team’s recruiting prospects. But if it ever did happen it would certainly be highly propitious for the Republican party’s prospects of retaking the Senate). Or perhaps “Belgian Texas” might even persist, Lesotho-like, as an independent state within the U.S. Imagine a stretch of open country populated by proud immigrant Belgians speaking some form of Flemish-Spanish with a Texan twang, wearing cowbody hats, munching on BBQ and chocolate, and living in towns named after Belgian counterparts but now pronounced with hard consonants (“Bruges“ rhymes with “Tortugas“; “Ypres” rhymes with “diapers”). One constant would be you’d still find a Waffle House at every highway interchange — only the waffles would be much fluffier.
_ Finally, on the domestic front, it has been a good week in the war against the ants. A number of ant traps arrived in a package from home, and the insurgents took to the poison readily, swamping the traps and taking the magic potion back to their nests and, we hoped, their queens. After a few days of gouging, we began to see results — the ant activity has been relatively quiet. And yet, perhaps too quiet. I can’t help feeling I will come to regret that, instead of feeling flush with victory, I chose not to take this moment of relative tactical advantage to negotiate from strength, perhaps trading territory for peace. We could probably get by without the living room, though my instincts tell me they would not be satisfied and cannot be trusted. I will not go down as the Neville Chamberlain of the ant wars. Still, I cannot help but fear that when they return it will be as a race of genetically-selected super ants immune to my technological superiority. This is Africa, after all, and I am playing on their home turf.
