Also, illiterate is not ignorant. The most backwoodsy of Tanzanians speaks a tribal tongue or two, plus Kiswahili and, often, English. At my tourist hotel on the rim of the Ngorongoro, I asked the bartender why Tanzania was so poor. He said “lack of education” and then held forth with a fifteen-minute dissertation on the mathematics of the exchange rate that left me heavily shortchanged and in some doubt about his theory. One answer is that Tanzania’s not poor—by the standards of human experience. Admittedly, these are grim standards, but until creatures from other planets really do invade, we have no others. The World Bank claims that 48 percent of rural Tanzanians and 11 percent of the country’s city dwellers are living in “absolute poverty,” which the World Bank defines as an “income level below which adequate standards of nutrition, shelter, and personal amenities cannot be assured.” But when and where on earth were the poor ever guaranteed three hots and a flop, let alone “personal amenities”? According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Tanzania’s current per-capita gross - domestic product is something like Japan’s or Brazil’s at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and about the same as that of India or China in 1950. Tanzanians live the way people usually have since we quit being apes. No, they live better. Tanzanian life expectancy is approximately 52 years. Life expectancy in the United States was 52.6 years in 1911. The infant-mortality rate in Tanzania is 84 deaths per 1,000 live births. The American infant-mortality rate was 85.8 as recently as 1920. After we had crossed the Rift Valley, John and I drove to the Olduvai Gorge, where Louis and Mary Leakey did their archeological work, showing just how ancient mankind is. More than a million years ago homo erectus —who resembled modern man at least as much as Neil Young does—was wandering around here on open savannas very similar to those of modern Tanzania. The hominid tools on display in the museum at the Olduvai Visitor Center are not reassuring as to the lifestyle of our early relations. You’d have to be an expert to tell they’re tools at all and not just stones that broke funny. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Leakeys were pulling our leg and Ralph Reed is right, and man was created by divine miracle last Wednesday at noon. But I was watching CNN, and something would have been mentioned. Anyway, the stuff that Grandfather Erectus was working with in his Paleolithic basement
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