and tumble. And Julius Nyerere apologized, which is more than most ’60s icons have bothered to do. When he relinquished the presidency in 1985, he said, in his farewell speech, “I failed. Let’s admit it.” We drove on from Makuyuni to the Tarangire River basin on the far edge of the Maasai Steppe. The Maasai are fit and towering, despite what is—by the standards of Tanzania itself—a life of extreme hardship. They customarily knock out a couple of their children’s teeth so that the kids can be force-fed when they get lockjaw. Administering a liquid diet is easy enough, because Maasai cuisine is nothing but, basically, gravy. It would be food suicide for any other people and may cause even the Maasai a certain amount of indigestion. They call Europeans iloredaa enjekat, “those who confine their farts with clothing.” The Maasai try to avoid pants and other items of Western apparel. They stick to their tartan wraps. From toddler to granny, they possess a martial bearing. No Maasai man goes outdoors without a lance or quarterstaff. As a result of this public dignity, seeing a Maasai engaged in any ordinary activity— riding a bicycle, walking down the road with an upside-down dishpan on the head, drinking a soda pop—is like seeing a member of the Joint Chefs of Staff skateboarding. But the Maasai do know how to wear plaid-on-plaid. So Ralph Lauren is history if the Maasai ever get start-up capital and a marketing plan. This brings us to a question much sadder than, “Why are the Tanzanians so poor?” which is, “Why do we care?” An economist would answer that a Maasai line of Lion Kill sportswear would drive down the price of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and that we, as consumers, would profit. But the idea that the increased productivity of others benefits ourselves is not something most noneconomists understand or believe. It would be nice to think that we worry about Tanzanian poverty out of some ujamaa -like altruism—or maybe not, considering the results of ujamaa. Anyway, altruism toward strangers is mostly a sentimental and fleeting thing, a small check dashed off to Save the Children. Twenty billion dollars’ worth of it is rare. In the cold war days, of course, we were giving money to Tanzania on the theory of: “Pay them to be socialist so they won’t be communist and figure out what the difference is later.” But now, I’m afraid, the ugly truth is that we care about Tanzanians because they have cool animals.
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