You are my friend Yes You are my relative Yes thank you But my business does not know you
A few weeks after I left the country, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton came to Arusha on a fly-through tour of Africa. The silly young daughter of the President of the United States told an audience at Kilimanjaro Airport that in America “we have a big problem with people not thinking they have a future. Young women and young men . . . there’s a lot of hopelessness.” The Tanzanians were too nice to pelt her with things. Beyond the town, people were even poorer. Arusha is green, irrigated by the waters of Kilimanjaro’s smaller companion, Mount Meru, which hulks 15,000 feet over the city. The farmland is lush, but the farms are hodgepodges: a banana tree here, a cassava plant there, here a maize stalk, there a bean sprout, everywhere a chicken (and several children chasing it). Hollow logs hang lengthwise in the branches of the taller trees. Fetishes of some kind, I assumed, but I had the sense to ask John. They’re beehives. One whole chapter in the Tanzanian National Budget is devoted to beekeeping. People can’t afford sugar. Sugar sells for twenty-eight cents a pound. The average Tanzanian smallholding is less than one and a quarter acres. The homesteads are just shacks topped with sheets of tin or one-room bunkers built from very irregular concrete blocks made, one by one, in wooden molds. Farther west, the land gets worse, rocky and dry and barren as a stairwell. Goats seem to be the only crop. Here, people don’t have the luxury of shacks. The tiny houses are thatch roofed, with walls made from stick-work lattices, the spaces between the sticks filled with little rocks, and the whole plastered over with mud if—water being scarce—the family can afford mud. Women sat by the side of the road, hitting rocks with stumpy hammers, making gravel by hand—to give some idea of the value of labor hereabouts. Little boys stood resolutely in the middle of nowhere next to gunnysacks of charcoal that the passing trucks can’t burn and the walkers and bicyclers can’t carry. If you wonder where all the old, fat-tired, one-speed, backpedal-to-brake American bicycles went, the Huffys and the Schwinns, they’re in Tanzania, complete with reflectors, mud flaps, rocket-shaped battery lamps, and handlebar baskets with little brothers stuffed in them.
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