The road to the Rift Valley is paved and reasonably smooth from lack of traffic, but it’s only as wide as an alleyway. At Makuyuni (“Place of the Fig Tree”—and there’s not one) is the turnoff to Tanzania’s most important tourist attractions: the Ngorongoro Crater, the Olduvai Gorge, the Serengeti. And at Makuyuni, the pavement illogically ends. We headed west across the Rift Valley on a road that was just a pile of rocks—like driving lengthwise on a New England stone wall. We were slammed so badly inside the van that John steered out into the arid, rutty bush, where we were engulfed in dust, dropped into holes, and launched aloft by boulders. John went back to the road until we could take it no more, then back to the bush. And so we traveled to Ngorongoro, veering from the Scylla of African topography to the Charybdis of the Tanzania Highway Department, a journey of thirty-odd miles that took three hours. In the Rift, the Maasai still live with their livestock inside corrals of piled thorn bush, in flat-topped, windowless hovels made from straw smeared with cow dung and entered through a crawl hole. The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes is said to have slept in a barrel. And supposedly it was a happy revelation to him that he could drink out of his cupped palms and thus throw away one more possession: his mug. But Diogenes had a barrel, a fairly complex piece of technology. Compared with the way some Tanzanians exist, Diogenes was a Sharper Image customer. Statistically, there are poorer countries than Tanzania; that is, countries so chaotic that all their statisticians have been chased up trees—Liberia, Somalia, Congo—and countries which are so reclusive—North Korea—that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. But Tanzania is right at the bottom of the aforementioned barrel, which would probably have to be imported from an industrially advanced nation. According to the World Bank’s 1996 World Development Report, Tanzania is poorer than Uganda, poorer than Chad, poorer than godforsaken Burundi. Haiti is 80 percent wealthier than Tanzania. Papua New Guinea is almost ten times more prosperous, never mind that some of its citizens have just discovered the wheel. Tanzania is so poor that its poverty is hard to calculate. Eighty-five percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, if employed is the word. They grow things. They eat them. This does not generate W-2 forms or register on the stock exchange that Tanzania doesn’t have. (“Money and capital markets” are to come
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