a name of stunning obviousness, like calling Kansas “Flat State.” We went to the market, a jolly, if unhygienic, huddle of teetering sheds and precarious vegetable heaps. I was taking notes on food costs. This nosiness might have raised suspicions or hackles elsewhere, but Tanzanians have experienced more than three decades of foreign-aid mavens, development experts, and academic investigators of Third Worldery. They got with the program at once. Three or four helpful loafers showed me into every corner of the bazaar, and merchants gave price quotations with the speed and facility of NYSE specialist brokers. The market smelled. The whole of Tanzania smells. It’s an odor of smoked, spoiled milk with undertones of compost and beef jerky. Amazingly, it’s not a bad smell. But it’s not the smell of success. Along the main street, Mto-wa-Mbu resembles a ghost town in the American West—if cowboys had had a marvelous sense of color, and also if they’d stuck around. Mosquito River is fully populated. Its leaning, sagging, dilapidated buildings are made of cinder block. This isn’t usually a “rickety” building material but, with lack of mortar and abstention from use of the level or plumb bob, a tumbledown effect can be achieved. All the small towns in Tanzania look like hell. The crudity of ordinary things is astonishing: fences, gates, window frames, doors, and let’s not mention toilets. Every place is makeshift, improvised, jury-rigged, askew (and in the case of toilets, “amok”). Americans are so querulous about mass production that we forget the precision afforded by machinery. Handmade often means made with ten thumbs. Examine the shelves you put up in your garage. Now take a log and a machete and build them. Lots of things are started in Tanzania. Not much is finished. Scattered everywhere are roofless masonry walls—literally a few bricks shy of a load. Paint appears on the fronts of buildings but never on the sides or backs. The country seems as if it was built by hippies. And in a sense, it was. Julius Nyerere was born two years after Timothy Leary. Nyerere, called Mwalimu, “the teacher,” was elected president of Tanganyika in 1962, just when Professor Leary began advocating LSD use at Harvard. Nobody has ever accused Nyerere of being a “head.” He’s lived an abstemious life (although he does have twenty-four grandchildren). But some of the same generational fluff filled the skulls of both Julius and Tim. Nyerere embraced the collectivist ideology that has run riot in our century,
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