not violent. This is not a violent country.” He paused and thought that over for a second. “These people,” said Nisar, “are so damn lazy.”
Well, not lazy—not when half the teenage girls in the country are walking around with five-gallon buckets on their heads. Five gallons of water weigh forty pounds. But Tanzanians are country. Rural labor is hard and long, not busy-busy. Cassava plants don’t crash on deadlines. Chickens don’t form quality teams. The sun does not take work home at night. And Tanzanians are political but, again, not in a way an American always understands. During the 1995 elections, John had run for the legislature, the Union Assembly, on the opposition NCCR ticket. But he couldn’t remember what the party’s initials stand for. (National Convention for Construction and Reform, incidentally, and I defy you to remember it until the bottom of the page.) Tanzania has been ruled by Nyerere’s CCM Party ( Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Party of the Revolution) since independence . Tanzania is a one-party state but has dozens of political parties, anyway. According to Louisa Taylor, Africa correspondent for the Canadian Ottawa Citizen, “Every party stands for clean government and well-equipped hospitals, good roads, and higher crop yields, and all are equally vague on how they would make it so.” Even when making it so is a simple matter. I was talking to an expat Brit who’d come to East Africa as a colonial administrator after World War II. I said, “That washboard from Mto-wa-Mbu to Makuyuni—all they’d have to do is send a road grader over it.” (The one from Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road seems to be available on short notice.) “Oh, less than that,” said the Brit. “They used to just drag a big log behind a tractor—up and back. The fellow’d get to one end and turn around and go back to the other. Took all the corrugation out. You’d watch for the dust cloud having gone your way and then take off. I’d run my little MG right up to the Ngorongoro rim.” The dysfunction of Tanzania is comic, depending on the cruelty of your sense of humor. Here is an exhibit label from a Tanzanian Museum: The Soda Bottle (ancient) The soda bottle which in use up to 1959. This bottle contain a marble and rubbering which jointly (wished) as stopper for the gas.
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