A tendency to write about the good things pushes aside the bad and they become a bit of a horrid reservoir.
Poverty: there are two kinds. One is the poverty of struggle and deprivation in spite of living in a city of wealth. It signifies itself in slums and dirt, in a river bed, dry except for a tiny trickle, covered edge to edge, from dwellings on one side to the dwellings on the other, with rubbish. Black plastic bags, boxes, broken electronics, cement bags, old bricks, pieces of corrugated iron too small to be any use elsewhere. The birds do not visit, but stay in the trees.
The taxi that we ride, air conditioned, is our wealth, even though in our country we are not wealthy.
The streets on the tight back roads to the airport are narrow and the street drains are surface gullies, storm water conduits that cross the streets are rounded concrete ditches that the vehicle must cross slowly to avoid damage. Power cables tangle above, and the support poles lean towards their guy wires. Pesa payments, using mobile phones to transfer money, are available everywhere. The traffic is dense. Traffic policeman complicate the flow, and drivers boldly cross against red lights.
We reach the airport where the other world begins at the door of a sleek Boeing or Embraer, where the drinks will be free and the altitude will let us look down on the great Kilimanjaro beneath the scattered cloud.
The central parts of Dar es Salaam are fringed by industry that lines the double carriageways full of buses and articulated lorries, budabuda and tuktuk. Budabuda are motorcycle taxis, sometimes carrying two passengers like a mother and child or men going to work. A tuktuk (bajaji) is a motor scooter with a pair of rear wheels and a shelter for two passengers, although sometimes they take four. Tuktuks were invented in Italy by Piaggio and have spread round the world in an attempt to promote heart attacks and violent death. These are a measure of poverty, but not poverty itself: it is a cheap vehicle that travels at nearly 30 miles per hour, far in excess of a safe speed in mixed traffic, frequently on the sidewalk and on the wrong side of the road. In these machines a whole world of poverty exists. It is good enough even when the lights don’t work, the clutch is inadequate and the nominal protection for the passengers remains nominal.
But the seashore is fringed with palm trees. Among them are the classic trees and shrubs of the tropical and subtropical paradise, all of which paint the picture of romance, the bronze-skinned models of holiday brochures and smiling faces, the happy children. Bougainvillea, frangipani, and long needled pine trees are among the acacia, bananas and hibiscus. Romance.
To the north east, the open water and archipelago of islands lie in the blue sea under the white clouds drenched in sunshine. And the smell from the river as we cross it.
The river spreads into this romance, black, slow, smelling of rotten flesh and sewage, unbreathable, radiating a poison so strong we hold our breath to calm our stomachs.
Later on, at the beach near where we stay, bordered by the costume of palm and hibiscus, the tide pool, black and smelling of foetid bathwater is a barrier between us and the sea.
At another place there is a similar tidal pool, and the beach is covered with seaweed and plastic litter. We have a beer and read our books. On the hard sand between the shore and the low surf, a film crew film a man in a white cotton suit posturing his way through a rap song because rap is now the lingua franca of the Tanzanian music business. The camera points across the bay to the Yacht Club and the residential high rises. In the distance a fleet of dinghies scurry to the headland, a larger yacht flies a spinnaker, and in the low surf four motorboats wait to take tourists to the islands. There is not a single seagull, only crows and sparrows and four swallows. A still photograph can’t carry an image of the breeze that blows over the dark stain of the tidal pool.
In the old centre of Dar es Salaam, the past colonists keep their embassies and other diplomatic offices. The grid layout of the area is lined with parking spaces and beautiful flamboyants which, in December, will roof the diplomatic quarter in red. The British High Commission is housed along with the German, Dutch and European Union offices in a modern metal clad building, rather like a well designed factory. I am not allowed to take my Swiss army knife into the building, but I can take my camera bag full of gadgets, although I may not take photographs. The whole building is clad in blast shutters, and while we are there the alarms for Fire and for Bomb are tested. The Deputy High Commissioner feels that the standard of English teaching in Tanzania is not helping the country to move forward. Kenya is way ahead, and so is its command of English. It copes better in international markets. We tend to agree.
One of our teachers at school wouldn’t agree, and he might even suggest that neo-colonialism is Tanzania’s biggest problem. Well - neo-colonialism is, most sincerely, old hat. Monetarism needs the English language to succeed not because it belongs to the neo-colonialists, but because it is the lingua franca of commerce, although some might say that “lingua franca” is a phrase that colonists invented. Tanzania may not need monetarism, but that’s unlikely. The “neo-colonialists” involved in Tanzania are India, China, Japan, the USA, all of Europe including the UK, Ireland, Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil and a lot of others. None of them want a new colony, but they would like to trade for Tanzania’s wealth. That may be similar to colonialism, but it doesn’t involve repopulating or governing the country. What it does do is retain Tanzania's debt to the developed world which has lent it money, and ensure the payment of interest on the debt. Which is a kind of trade, but which ties the country down to servicing its debt instead of building its structures. So trade makes profit, profit is money. The biggest and best game reserves in the world don’t produce enough money to sustain a nation, and taxes don't either: sixty percent of Tanzanians are unable to pay tax.
The government is moving from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma. Dar es Salaam (home of peace) is a real city, full of wealth and bitter poverty. Wikipedia suggests that it has the ninth fastest population growth in the world, and by 2100 will be the second largest city in the world.
Dodoma (it has sunk) “is not a city,” said one of our teachers, “it’s just a town”. But the new parliament building is there and a newish and smart looking but already academically questioned university nestles in striking white buildings on the hillside overlooking the town. The airport runway is being extended, the narrow and interminable main road to Dar is being improved, and the railway, to Dar, is also in line for an upgrade. The links to Dar es Salaam are all being improved, suggesting that although government will relocate to Dodoma, Dar es Salaam will be the nerve centre and the spiritual capital where new cars abound and multistorey banks and hotels hover over the stained romance of the tropical seashore.
Here in Mvumi we are insulated by the rolling hills and peaks and winding rough road. The poverty here is a way of life, not wished for but endured, a subsistence on what the land provides: tomatoes, potatoes, chickens, okra, peppers, goats, cattle, spinach, mangoes and papaya. Please don't believe that that is the entire shopping list. There is much more, grapes in July, bananas and maize in April, rain in January, dust in September, the sun like a clock measuring out the twelve hours of light and twelve hours of dark under a sky of stars and a moon so close you can touch it.
Here there is community, space and a relief from the pressures of growing into the kind of world that others have decided Tanzania should be a part of. The people here, who sweep and clean the immaculate forecourts of their homes each day, may not want new cars or high rise buildings, but they would like to be less dependent on nature’s wilful ways, and more secure in food and shelter.
How this will happen is too long a journey to predict. It is happening. But sixty percent of the population live off the land and the land is vast. They pay no tax because they have nothing to pay it with. This village is in part a microcosm of life as we might have seen it a century or two ago in Europe, but with mobile phones and diesel engines, a fee paying secondary school, a large hospital that serves the whole area for miles around which is building new space for students and creating a new skyline, and at the other end an untended airfield where emergency flights can land.
The closed shop of Dar es Salaam is a like a foreign country. Nothing there equates with anything here in Mvumi where the palm trees follow the dry river bed among cactus and mango, where baobabs stand to mark the centuries, where each year the dust alternates with rain. There are no broad canopies of flamboyant or jacaranda, but on this hill there is the new protection of microwave transmission towers, and the lined up budabuda waiting for clients. Oxen pull carts, tractors are rare, and water can be found at the village square where it is pumped up from the chalk layers deep below the hill, or it can be dug from the river bed down on the flat valley floor. The bus departs at seven each morning, and returns at three, carrying its cargo of supplies for the village. At night the people listen, willingly or unwillingly, to the churches and bars that play hours of simplistic loud music through to the mornings - none of it reflecting the cultural music that you now have to search out in the music shops. There are at least twelve churches here, each preaching a slightly different point of view. There is one mosque. There are blacksmiths and carpenters, tailors and store-keepers, charcoal burners and electricians, mechanics and builders, teachers, doctors and nurses.
Dar es Salaam is a hot, heavy tumble of high pressure life, and seems to set a standard for Tanzanians to aspire to. It isn’t far off the model that seems to be demanded by the monetarist world. Mvumi is a sleepy village, still waiting for a paved road. They are further apart in spirit than the distance in kilometres, but are both of Tanzania.
