8 How to Make Nothing from Everything Tanzania
The problem in Russia is how to reform an economic system. The problem in many places is how to get one. The World Bank claims that some two billion of the world’s citizens live on $1 a day or less. These people have livelihoods governed by the plain rules of subsistence. They don’t buy, sell, or trade much because they don’t have much to buy, sell, or trade. They’re poor. And nowhere have people been poor longer or more thoroughly than in Africa. According to World Bank statistics, the ten poorest countries on earth are all African. Not one of the fifty-three members of the Organization of African Unity—not even diamond-infested South Africa or oil-soaked Libya—has a decent general standard of living. And this is the continent where man evolved, where the first great civilization arose. This is the human hometown. I went to Tanzania in February 1997. Probably every child whose parents weren’t rich enough has been told, “We’re rich in other ways.” Tanzania is fabulously rich in other ways. The Tarangire reserve is a thousand square miles of branching river valleys sheltering some of the last great elephant herds in the world. To the northwest, the wildlife-covered Serengeti Plain stretches away forever more, oceanic in its flatness. The only landmarks are the kopjes, wind- and rain- polished bubbles of granite ranging from back porch to state capitol building in size. At night lightning bolts can be seen eighty miles away on the shores of Lake Victoria. The nearby Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed twin of Kilimanjaro, a mountaintop chasm 1,500 feet deep and ten miles across, containing a miniature perfect universe of grassland and rain forest.
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