Saharan Africa. It did fight one brief conflict against Uganda, in the good cause of ousting Idi Amin. But peace has been the general rule since independence. Domestic peace, as well. Tanzania isn’t wracked by tribal conflicts. Julius K. Nyerere, the high-minded and high-handed schoolteacher who ruled the country for its first twenty-four years, opposed tribalism and was helped in his opposition to tribes by the fact that Tanzania has more than 120 of the things. None is large enough to predominate. Besides the well-known Maasai, there are the Ha, the Hehe, the Gogo, etc., etc. It’s silly enough to murder somebody because he’s a Serb or a Croat, but to kill a person for being a Gogo is much too absurd for the sensible and even-tempered Tanzanians. Tanganyika, as it used to be called, did not have a very bad colonial history, as those things go. The Germans arrived late, in 1885, and left early, in 1918, after muffing World War I. Local people fought the Germans persistently—in the Hehe Rebellion of 1891, the Maji Maji War of 1905, and a variety of other spirited (and oddly named) uprisings. The British took over Tanganyika as a League of Nations protectorate rather than as a colony, so the Tanganyikans were spared the influx of wastrel coffee planters, lunatic white hunters, and Isak Dinesen that plagued Kenya. Resistance to British rule was nonviolent and well-organized, and the Brits left in 1961 with a minimum of puling and fuss. Tanzania does have various of the other evils on which Third World poverty is blamed—corruption, for instance. Tanzania has that. But so do Newt Gingrich and Al Gore. The wild, venal jobbery of politicians doesn’t, by itself, make a country poor. Nor does colonial exploitation. Virginia and Massachusetts were colonies, too, and more effectively exploited than Tanzania was. Then there’s socioeconomic lag, the late introduction of the ideas that propel the developed world. Yet Tanzania, or at least its coast and its islands such as Zanzibar, were exposed to science, math, and, technology by Muslims, beginning in the eighth century. That’s 800 years before anybody who could read or recite multiplication tables arrived in North America. True, Arab traders came for the purposes of stealing slaves and pillaging ivory. But the harbingers of civilization rarely go anywhere in order to deliver Girl Scout cookies. The poverty of Tanzania is a puzzle. Lack of education is, of course, a problem. But Tanzania’s literacy rate is estimated to be almost 68 percent. Even if that estimate is overhopeful, the proportion of Tanzanians who can read and write now is higher than the proportion of Europeans who could do so at the beginning of the Industrial Age.
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