There’s no garbage on the streets in Dar, no rats, no stray dogs. There are some beggars, but they’re halfhearted. Dar es Salaam has a clunky charm. The International Cashew and Coconut Conference was being hosted February 19– 21. You’d be nuts not to sign up. And you have to love a city with a thoroughfare name Bibi Titi Mohamed Street. Of course, Dar es Salaam has its troubles. The city is out of water. Hundreds of women stand in line at the few open taps, their plastic buckets making brightly colored dots in the pathos. The problem is not drought or depletion of ground supplies. Dar’s water system has a 40 percent leakage rate. The February 19, 1997, Guardian carried a story about corruption—in all senses of the word—at a city-hospital morgue: “Certain persons had raised objections that hospital staff were preventing relatives from picking up bodies of identified persons until they paid either fees or consideration to the staff.” The hospital had been forced by “congestion of dead bodies” to put some corpses “outside the cold room. . . . Nurses, doctors, patients, and passersby were exposed to a choking smell, which invited swarms of flies from all directions.” A photo accompanying the story showed the garbage truck in which the bodies were hauled away. Does poverty lead to this kind of thing, or does this kind of thing lead to poverty? It is a question that economists have never managed to answer. Maybe there’s some inherent cultural failure that is keeping Tanzania poor. But even if that’s so, there are legal and political failures helping poverty abide. We don’t know if we can change culture. At least we don’t know if we can change it for the better. But we do know we can change other things. More freedom and responsibility can be given to individuals. I went to the government of Tanzania to see if it was doing any of that. And here was an odd glimmer of hope. Poor and shabby countries ought to have poor and shabby governments. They usually don’t. There is some misappropriated opulence in Tanzania. The compound where the president lives has a house and grounds that make Bill Clinton’s residence look like Roger’s. But the actual government of Tanzania is run out of the same colonial administration offices constructed by Germany ninety years ago, and they haven’t been mopped since Kaiser Bill.
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