to 1950. It was then discovered that peanuts wouldn’t grow in Tanganyika. The Tanzanian government budget contains more pages on agriculture than would ever be read by anyone, except a journalist in a hotel room with dysentery and nothing but a copy of The Mill on the Floss. But the only mentions of land ownership in the budget are an admission that buying land entails “lengthy and bureaucratic procedures,” and this weasel sentence: “A new land law being formulated proposes to introduce different structural arrangements.” Julius Nyerere (apologizing again) has said it was a mistake to collectivize the individual small farms, the shambas. But it’s a mistake that hasn’t been corrected. John said, using the same word the Russians use, that farms must be bought “informally.” (Another note from the budget: “ FISHERIES —the sector still faces problems from dynamite fishing.”) I did see one swell coffee plantation, Gibb’s Farm, at the foot of the Ngorongoro Crater. This is run by English people and has thousands of neatly clipped coffee bushes lined in parade file. A smoothly raked dirt road winds up through the property with woven-stick barriers stuck in the drain gullies to hinder erosion. A profusion of blossoms surrounds the main house. The very picture of a Cotswold cottage yard has been somehow created from weird, thorny African plants which need to be irrigated every minute. The English will garden the ash heaps of Hades if hell lets them. I suppose the farms of Tanzania could all look like Gibb’s Farm, but it turns out that Gibb’s Farm doesn’t make any money as a farm but prospers because upscale tourist lodgings have been installed. So there’s tourism. According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Commercial Guide, “Tourism is currently the second-largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania, after coffee.” (Actually, the largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania is foreign aid. But never mind; with Republicans in Congress and 13 percent unemployment in Sweden, foreign aid is not a growth industry.) All the tourists I talked to were voluble in their praise of Tanzania—as soon as they’d recovered enough from their road trips to form words. And Tanzania’s tourist hotels produced $205 million in revenue in 1995. But that’s only 6.7 percent of the country’s GDP. This compared to the 6 percent of GDP produced by Tanzania’s “transport and communication sector.” Tanzania doesn’t have any communication. As for transport, according to the same State Department guide that talks up tourism, “It takes approximately three days to travel by road from the capital, Dar es Salaam, to the second-largest city, Mwanza,” a distance of
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