get a picket fence.” The idea was to persuade rural Tanzanians to move to 8,000 “familyhood villages,” ujamaa vijijini, where the government could provide them with water and education, and, by the way, keep an eye on everybody. The planned communities did not come up to plan: The water didn’t arrive; neither did the education, nor the people who were supposed to move there. When persuasion wouldn’t work, force was used. By the end of the ’70s, more than 65 percent of the population in the Tanzanian countryside had been deported to the ujamaa vijijini gulag. But, this being Tanzania, the population just wandered away again and built houses of their own in the bush. Other vaporous ideas were being tried. According to Ideology and Development in Africa, a terribly fair-minded book published by the Yale University Press in the early ’80s, “There was a sharp reorientation of medical outlays away from high-cost, Western-model, curative medicine and toward rural, paramedical, and preventive health care. By 1974 the fraction of the health budget allocated to hospitals had dropped from 80 percent in the late 1960s to 50 percent,” with results such as the hyena hole/fractured spine crisis I overheard on the shortwave radio. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian economy went concave. Tanzanian National Accounts figures indicate that the per-capita GDP has yet to return to its 1976 level. And the purchasing power of the legal minimum wage fell 80 percent between 1969 and 1987. So another answer to the question, “Why is Tanzania so poor?” is ujamaa —they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy. There’s a certain kind of gullible and self-serious person who’s put in charge of foreign aid (e.g., ex-head of the World Bank Robert McNamara.¶¶¶ I rest my case.). This type was entranced by modest, articulate Julius Nyerere and the wonderful things he was going to do. American political- science professor Ali Mazrui dubbed it “Tanzaphilia.” In the midst of the villagization ugliness, Tanzania was receiving Official Direct Assistance (or ODA, as it’s called by the sucker/succor professionals) of $300 million a year in big, fat 1975 dollars. That was twenty dollars a head, and it wouldn’t surprise me if twenty dollars was about what it cost to build a vijijini hovel, catch a Tanzanian, and stick him inside. Countries such as Sweden were particularly smitten, seeing in ujamaa a
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