The Very Lost Tribesman

9th April 2010

Video

One of the most noticeable things traveling in Rwanda is the extraordinary density of the population. You try to fight it, but it’s hard not to become a card-carrying Malthusian when you see how many people live here. You simply can’t escape the conclusion that family planning is the sine qua non strategy of development (I’ll leave it to others to debate the legacy of the Catholic Church on this front). Rwanda’s challenge isn’t just lifting up the 10-11 million people it currently has, but the 14 million it will have in 2020. I can’t imagine how significant progress could ever be made on any other front without it. Rwanda is approximately the size of Maryland or New Hampshire with approximately the population of Michigan, and because it is so heavily cultivated the actual area in which people live is tinier still. Rwanda hasn’t even benefited from the one conceivable upside to a genocide; even the mass slaughter of more than one-tenth of the population barely registered as a blip on the demographic upward trend, because of the extremely high fertility rates and because more men were killed than women (for those interested in more on the population issue, and Rwanda’s progress and challenges generally, here’s an NYT blog post on the topic I just came across while finishing this up:

Apparently, the government has been persuaded of the importance of massive family planning campaigns and is pushing initiatives that have begun to reduce the birthrate from a staggering seven children per women, though it is still high. The hope is for the so-called demographic dividend in which falling fertility rates and economic prosperity go hand-in-hand (though it’s not entirely clear which is cause and effect). You do get a glimpse of how, in the complicated mixture of historical, cultural, and economic factors that contributed to the genocide, demography played a role. Conflicts become magnified when large numbers of people are competing for very finite numbers of resources. There is one upside to the high growth rate: within 10 years more than 70 percent of the population will have been born after the genocide.

The driving outside Kigali was a reminder that perhaps we had gone a little overboard in our enthusiasm for Rwanda, or at least a reminder of its challenges. The country is building schools and universities rapidly, but it is clear it will be a long time before it can truly accommodate the full population. There are certainly many stretches where the poverty is at least as visible as in Tanzania if not moreso — children clad in nothing or only in filthy rags, their skin and eyes showing various vitamin deficiencies and other problems. Tanzanians are more sedate and thus rarely beg aggressively; in Rwanda the begging was often extremely aggressive (perhaps a flip side of a more initiative-taking culture). The rich, black volcanic soil is bursting with healthy looking fields, but in the basic dynamic of all of African history, the population reaches the absolute maximum number of people that agriculture can sustain. More fertile soil, more people.