I would have asked my fellow passengers about the graves, but nobody spoke English. People were friendly, and they shrugged and smiled at me, but for four days I couldn’t actually say anything to anybody, and for a yammering mick like myself, this was as bad as AA.
Our route took us along the Amur River plain, and the country opened into an empty paradise. It was land that seemed to have been made for a human habitation and enterprise that never came—ungrazed prairies, unfarmed bottom land, unfished trout streams, unhunted bird covers. In the marshes, acres of wild irises bloomed, fated never to join a bouquet. Plenty of wilderness has been spoiled by man. This had been spoiled by lack of him.
However, beyond the Amur River and for the last 400 miles south to Vladivostok, the countryside has been domesticated. That is, I saw a person every fifteen or twenty minutes. Usually the person was a babushka, one of those Russian grandmothers who look like Boris Yeltsin in a dress. There were babushkas hanging laundry, babushkas chopping wood, babushkas in bikinis weeding their gardens, babushkas riding in motorcycle sidecars. It was Granny Nation. The men I saw were mostly piloting those motorcycles—motorcycles seemed to be the only form of transport. I didn’t even see tractors. Hay was still being cut by hand. There was one ancient bearded fellow, leaning on his scythe and watching the train, who looked too much like Father Time. Russia needs modernizing. I’d rather deal with Father Daylight Saving Time, who wears shorts and shades, and carries a weed whacker.
The land was good. But like so many good things in Russia, nothing good had ever been done with it. And I didn’t see any young people around to bring in Toros and Lawn Boys to replace the grim reaper. I suppose the young people are off in the cities seeking their fortunes.
Well, fortune may be found in Russia, and fame and beauty and truth, and all that. And not just for the young or the mobbed-up or the connected. It could be the best country in the world—richer, roomier, grander than our own. Russia has fine prospects, big possibilities, wonderful potential—everything you could wish for in a future. Also, everything you could dread in a past. The Russians now have the freedom to escape that past and the means to use the freedom. Will they blow it?
Probably. The Russians are, as their history has proven too well, human. Humans can blow anything if they put their minds to it. And there, at the end of my journey, was Vladivostok as an example of things blown.
The great metropolis of Russian Asia occupies a tiara of hills overlooking the Sea of Japan. The headlands embrace one of the finest deepwater ports in the Far East. It is a magnificent site for a city—too bad there’s not one there. Vladivostok is St. Petersburg without the monuments, palaces, and art. It is Moscow without the money, crowds, and fun. Vladivostok looks like, in the words of Russian writer Gleb Uspensky, “what could have happened to San Francisco if the Bolsheviks ever got there.” Fortunately, they were stopped in Berkeley.
Vladivostok should be among the Pacific Rim’s foremost marketplaces for food, fuel, and raw materials, but Soviet military paranoia kept the docks closed to foreign trade until 1990. Now the town is notable only for Chinese border smuggling, Mafia activity, trash on the beach (Vladidumpstok), and a Japanese restaurant with the second-worst-imaginable name: Nagasaki. About half the Russian navy sits in the harbor, out of money to go anywhere. The people who do have money, the New Russians, are building themselves lumpy condominium towers. The only architectural grace notes are balcony railings made from rows of vodka bottles set in mortar.
I had been in Russia for a month, and my ideas about reform had been refined and simplified. By this time, I wanted to enact just one basic and fundamental reform—the one my dissident acquaintances, Donna and Carlos, had attempted in Cuba. I wanted to leave. And here is a change that has taken place in Russia that is unequivocally good. I was free to go.
HOW TO MAKE NOTHING FROM EVERYTHING
TANZANIA
The problem in Russia is how to reform an economic system. The problem in many places is how to get one. The World Bank claims that some two billion of the world’s citizens live on $1 a day or less. These people have livelihoods governed by the plain rules of subsistence. They don’t buy, sell, or trade much because they don’t have much to buy, sell, or trade. They’re poor.
And nowhere have people been poor longer or more thoroughly than in Africa. According to World Bank statistics, the ten poorest countries on earth are all African. Not one of the fifty-three members of the Organization of African Unity—not even diamond-infested South Africa or oil-soaked Libya—has a decent general standard of living. And this is the continent where man evolved, where the first great civilization arose. This is the human hometown.
I went to Tanzania in February 1997. Probably every child whose parents weren’t rich enough has been told, “We’re rich in other ways.” Tanzania is fabulously rich in other ways.
The Tarangire reserve is a thousand square miles of branching river valleys sheltering some of the last great elephant herds in the world.
To the northwest, the wildlife-covered Serengeti Plain stretches away forever more, oceanic in its flatness. The only landmarks are the kopjes, wind- and rain-polished bubbles of granite ranging from back porch to state capitol building in size. At night lightning bolts can be seen eighty miles away on the shores of Lake Victoria.
The nearby Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed twin of Kilimanjaro, a mountaintop chasm 1,500 feet deep and ten miles across, containing a miniature perfect universe of grassland and rain forest.
One dawn I rode a dizzy-pitched, rut-ulcerated switchback road into the crater. Maasai boys were leading a hundred cattle down to a salt lick. The young herdsmen were dressed in pairs of plaid blankets, with one worn as kilt and the other as toga. Beadwork swung at their necks and dangled from the piercings at the tops and bottoms of their ears. Each carried a long stick with the war-lance aplomb young boys give to long sticks. The air was clean and sharp. The clear sky was just beginning to light up. The cowbells plinked like a half-audible cheery tune. There are probably worse things to be than a Maasai boy taking cattle into the Ngorongoro Crater at dawn. Although the usual Maasai diet of curdled milk and cow’s blood wouldn’t provide enough roughage for an American my age.
There is an all-day, all-night rush hour of animals in Tanzania: Cape buffalo jam, zebra lock, and wildebeest backup. Thomson’s gazelles bound about with a suspicious black swipe on their sides—enough like the Nike trademark to raise questions about sponsorship. Warthogs scuttle with their tails up straight in the air, endlessly acknowledging some foul in the game of hogball. Hyenas are all over the place, nonchalant but shifty, in little groups meandering not quite aimlessly—greasers at the mall. Hippos lie in the water holes in piles, snoring, stinking, sleeping all day. The correct translation for the Greek word “hippopotamus” is not “river horse” but “river first husband.” And lions doze where they like, waking up every day or two to do that famous ecological favor of culling the weak, old, and sick. (Do lions ever debate the merits of weak versus old versus sick? “Call me oversophisticated, but I think the sick wildebeest have a certain piquancy, like a ripe cheese.”)
The nation of Tanzania might seem to be a Beulah Land—if you stick to the parks and the game preserves, and get back in your hotel by sunset. It can be done. I have a fatuous article from the March 2, 1997, Sunday New York Times travel section in which some publishing-industry poohbah tells how he and his wife flew in chartered planes to the Ngorongoro and the Serengeti, “and returned dazed by the wealth of wildlife and the vastness of the terrain.”
But, putting the tourist daze aside, Tanzania is a truly poor country. I arrived at Kilimanjaro Airport, near that mountain but not much else. It was evening, time for the overseas flights to land, and mine had, and that was it. The airport is one of those grand, 1970s reinforced-concrete foreign-aid projects now going grim from mildew and falling to pieces. Surely it is one of the few international airports without a visible clock. There are no hustling taximen or begg
ing children outside the door. It costs fifty cents to enter the airport grounds, and they can’t afford it.
A safari guide named John collected me in the minivan in which we’d spend the next two weeks. It was a beaten, slew-wheeled, butt-sprung vehicle. John managed to keep it working (except for flat tires and getting stuck, and a rear hatch that sprang open in a remote corner of the Maasai Steppe with a lion on one side of the road and an irritated mother elephant on the other).
We drove for an hour and a half through the smoky African night. Smoky is not an adjective chosen for artistic, evocative reasons. According to Tanzanian government figures, 90 percent of the country’s energy generation is just plain lighting fires. Virtually all the cooking, heating, lighting, and manufacturing in Tanzania is accomplished by the same method you use with burgers on weekends.
We arrived on the outskirts of Arusha, the principal city in northern Tanzania. Here was another stained and flaking assistance-to-developing-nations structure—the best hotel. No air-conditioning, no screens, and not much happening in the bar.
In the morning we drove to Arusha proper, a low sprawl of neglected stucco buildings, with here and there a large government office made of that inevitable aid-donor cement. Half the businesses downtown had something to do with doing something with tourists, and the rest sold used refrigerators. The thin and sluggardly traffic was made up of colonial-era Land Rovers and large, woebegone trucks with obscure South Asian brand names. A few trucks were full of farm produce. A few were full of people. All the others were broken down by the side of the road, with men lying under them, occasionally working on the truck mechanicals, but usually sleeping. In the center of town, in a traffic circle where one bus seemed to be permanently circling, was a monument to the fact that Arusha is, geographically speaking, halfway between Cairo and Cape Town. This is something that Arusha has never been accused of being, metaphorically speaking.
Outside the small business district, the roads were lined with scrap-wood and palm-thatch stalls, some with signs that overreached the mark—HOLLYWOOD BAR—others selling modest goods, such as scrap wood and palm thatch. Vendors who couldn’t afford sheds sold goods more modest yet: pieces of bicycle tire and strips of rubber cut from old inner tubes. There were a few industrial buildings at the city’s edge, but nothing industrious seemed to be happening in them. An open-air market was busy but looked more full of people than goods. John laughed to point out a Christian revival tent next to a brewery.
The Tanzanian men wore shirts and slacks that had a clothing-drive look, but, if so, they were picked from the Goodwill bin with more taste than most Seattle bands show and more use of detergent, too. The Tanzanian women had on T-shirts or Western blouses, but also kangas—yard-wide, twelve-foot lengths of brightly printed cotton cut in two to make a skirt and shawl. The kangas were spotless, even when the women were working in the fields (something Tanzanian women have an equal opportunity to do; in fact, there seems to be an affirmative-action program in force). It’s not a dirty country—if you don’t count dust.
It’s not a squalid country. There are no droves of the crippled and diseased, no beseeching for alms, no pestering of strangers, no evident public violence. Tanzania is not a nation suffering social collapse, but I’m not absolutely sure I mean that as a compliment. There’s the sad possibility that they just don’t have the cash for booze, drugs, and handguns.
Seeing the people in Arusha going about their business—or lack thereof—should have been more depressing than it was. Describing the English poor of 150 years ago, George Eliot noted “the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.” But with Tanzanians, there was a twinkle in that gaze. The women walked down the roads bearing all the burden of Tanzanian material possessions. These are few enough, but still a lot to carry on your head. And more often than not, the women were smiling. Their kangas swayed and billowed. The printed cloths are embellished with slogans or catch phrases, such as PENYE KUKU WENGI HAKUMWAGWIMTAMA: “Don’t dry the millet where the chickens are.” Children rushed home from school as gleefully as if they were headed for rec rooms full of Sega games and Anastasia videos. (Tanzanian kids all wear school uniforms, in case you think that regulation is the answer to all ills.) Just the names of things in the country are cheerful: the No Competition grocery, the New Toyota Shoe Shine, the Buy-n-Bye minimart, and a long-distance motor coach christened So What. Merchants are nice to the point of chagrin over any commercial aspect of a visit to their stores. One shop had an apologetic sign posted in the window:
You are my friend
Yes
You are my relative
Yes thank you
But my business does not know you
A few weeks after I left the country, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton came to Arusha on a fly-through tour of Africa. The silly young daughter of the President of the United States told an audience at Kilimanjaro Airport that in America “we have a big problem with people not thinking they have a future. Young women and young men…there’s a lot of hopelessness.” The Tanzanians were too nice to pelt her with things.
Beyond the town, people were even poorer. Arusha is green, irrigated by the waters of Kilimanjaro’s smaller companion, Mount Meru, which hulks 15,000 feet over the city. The farmland is lush, but the farms are hodgepodges: a banana tree here, a cassava plant there, here a maize stalk, there a bean sprout, everywhere a chicken (and several children chasing it). Hollow logs hang lengthwise in the branches of the taller trees. Fetishes of some kind, I assumed, but I had the sense to ask John. They’re beehives. One whole chapter in the Tanzanian National Budget is devoted to beekeeping. People can’t afford sugar. Sugar sells for twenty-eight cents a pound.
The average Tanzanian smallholding is less than one and a quarter acres. The homesteads are just shacks topped with sheets of tin or one-room bunkers built from very irregular concrete blocks made, one by one, in wooden molds.
Farther west, the land gets worse, rocky and dry and barren as a stairwell. Goats seem to be the only crop. Here, people don’t have the luxury of shacks. The tiny houses are thatch roofed, with walls made from stick-work lattices, the spaces between the sticks filled with little rocks, and the whole plastered over with mud if—water being scarce—the family can afford mud.
Women sat by the side of the road, hitting rocks with stumpy hammers, making gravel by hand—to give some idea of the value of labor hereabouts. Little boys stood resolutely in the middle of nowhere next to gunnysacks of charcoal that the passing trucks can’t burn and the walkers and bicyclers can’t carry. If you wonder where all the old, fattired, one-speed, backpedal-to-brake American bicycles went, the Huffys and the Schwinns, they’re in Tanzania, complete with reflectors, mud flaps, rocket-shaped battery lamps, and handlebar baskets with little brothers stuffed in them.
The road to the Rift Valley is paved and reasonably smooth from lack of traffic, but it’s only as wide as an alleyway. At Makuyuni (“Place of the Fig Tree”—and there’s not one) is the turnoff to Tanzania’s most important tourist attractions: the Ngorongoro Crater, the Olduvai Gorge, the Serengeti. And at Makuyuni, the pavement illogically ends. We headed west across the Rift Valley on a road that was just a pile of rocks—like driving lengthwise on a New England stone wall. We were slammed so badly inside the van that John steered out into the arid, rutty bush, where we were engulfed in dust, dropped into holes, and launched aloft by boulders. John went back to the road until we could take it no more, then back to the bush. And so we traveled to Ngorongoro, veering from the Scylla of African topography to the Charybdis of the Tanzania Highway Department, a journey of thirty-odd miles that took three hours.
In the Rift, the Maasai still live with their livestock inside corrals of piled thorn bush, in flat-topped, windowless hovels made from straw smeared with cow dung and entered through a crawl hole.
The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes is said to have slept in a barrel. And supposedly it was a happy revelation to him that he could drink out of his cupped
palms and thus throw away one more possession: his mug. But Diogenes had a barrel, a fairly complex piece of technology. Compared with the way some Tanzanians exist, Diogenes was a Sharper Image customer.
Statistically, there are poorer countries than Tanzania; that is, countries so chaotic that all their statisticians have been chased up trees—Liberia, Somalia, Congo—and countries which are so reclusive—North Korea—that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. But Tanzania is right at the bottom of the aforementioned barrel, which would probably have to be imported from an industrially advanced nation. According to the World Bank’s 1996 World Development Report, Tanzania is poorer than Uganda, poorer than Chad, poorer than godforsaken Burundi. Haiti is 80 percent wealthier than Tanzania. Papua New Guinea is almost ten times more prosperous, never mind that some of its citizens have just discovered the wheel.
Tanzania is so poor that its poverty is hard to calculate. Eighty-five percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, if employed is the word. They grow things. They eat them. This does not generate W-2 forms or register on the stock exchange that Tanzania doesn’t have. (“Money and capital markets” are to come “in the near future,” says the Ministry of Finance.)
There’s a sad little econometric debate about Tanzania’s per-capita gross domestic product. Tanzanian government figures (given foggy population projections and a Tanzanian shilling with an exchange rate that varies between worth-little and worthless) work out to approximately $128 a person a year. The World Bank believes it’s about $117. The CIA, in its 1997 World Factbook, estimates Tanzanian per-capita GDP at $650. But this is from the organization that—as late as 1989—thought the Soviet Union’s per-capita GDP was nearly as high as Britain’s. The CIA uses something called the purchasing-power-parity (PPP) method to measure gross domestic product. PPP is supposed to compensate for the lower living costs found in poorer countries. It’s like having your boss tell you, “Instead of a raise, why don’t you move to a worse neighborhood—your rent will be lower and so will your car payments, as soon as someone steals your Acura.”