Lars' First Impressions

August 22
Events are conspiring to provide lots of diary-writing and blogging
time – and perhaps also to smooth the edges of transition from
Canadian to Tanzanian rhythms. It's now almost exactly one week since
we took off from Halifax, connecting through the gargantuan mess of
terminals and planes and people called JFK, then landing at Dubai –
which must be the longest linear airport in the world. Full of
modernity and fancy duty-free shops and high-speed free wireless
internet – the very epitome of modernity, with hardly a whitey face
to be seen, as travellers were coming and going from all over the
middle east and on into the orient.
The first hint that Tanzania would be different was in the departure
lounge, where suddenly three quarters or so of the faces were
European – some looked like tourists, some like aid types and a
surprisingly high percentage of clerical collars, presumably headed
for missions somewhere. I guess not too many Tanzanians have the cash
it takes to travel internationally.
And the airport in Dar es Salaam more or less reflects this – at
least the JK Nyerere airport, which probably dates from the 1960s or
1970s, with very little change since. Airplanes must have been a lot
smaller and fewer then – so two tiny baggage carousels may have done
the trick, once upon a time. In my diary, the first day, I marvelled
at the sensually overpowering nature of arrival in Africa – the heat,
the smells, the crowds of closely packed people, line-ups and seeming
chaos, the interminable wait for a trickle of baggage onto a single
small conveyer belt, followed by an explosion into the packed
entrance hall. There waiting for us was the driver from REPOA and the
remarkable figure of Brian van Arkadie – one of the great characters
of post-colonial African development economics sagas.
We rode with him, in jam-packed traffic which had a small semblance
of order, and a lot of languid adaptation to whatever might happen –
a little like the Chinese model, in which the basic rule of driving
is that the other guy does not want to hit you, because that will
damage his vehicle, so asserting one's claim to space on the street
is how one enters, turns and leaves the road. But Dar does not have
the high key intensity of Nanjing or the speed of Beijing. It seems
like there are thousands of people on the sidewalk, buying and
selling and making and just going from here to there – the ambient
chaos of traffic, dust and heat and smells of garbage fires,
amazingly bad local roads and mixtures of every human function by the
roadside – they all combine to overpower the senses of any jet-lagged
intruder from the ordered cleanliness of northern climes.
For both Molly and me, part of it is also a surging recovered memory
of peoples and places that left a huge mark on our hearts long ago –
old cobwebbed emotions surging back as we rattled up the winding dirt
road, past the palatial villas of Tanzania's new elite and the scrap
corrugated iron shacks of their neighbours to "Gharofani wa
mzungu" (the white guy's two story house) perched on the hill-top
looking down to Msasani Bay and the Indian Ocean. It was a
spectacular view, but we had little time for it, as Brian fed us a
much-appreciated beer and regaled us with tales from the old times.
I knew Brian tangentially when I was in Dar in 1968 – he was very
much then the back-room guru of Tanzanian central planning He stayed
on through the hard times of the late 1970s and early 1980s when
Tanzania was resisting the IMF diktats and the crucal shortage of any
foreign exchange meant there was little to nothing in the shops –
today the currency is fully convertible and you are offered the
choice of US dollars or Tanzanian shilling accounts (or both) when
you open a bank account. When we arrived, he regaled us with stories
of how one managed to put life together in the hard times. He has
known just about everyone on the leftie development economist roster
– from my continuing friend John Loxley to 'past influential
radicals' like Hymer and Resnick to mythic figures like the senior
Barack Obama (whom he met in a bar in Nairobi when Obama senior was
returning to Kenya in the late 1960s). And Brian has a lot of
interesting observations on the origins of African development paths
– such as the Kenyatta's anglophilic obsession with creating a rural
hierarchy in Kenya, modelled on the English squires and Nyerere's
roots in Catholic social teaching. I was game to yarn on into the
night, but Molly was sinking into somnolence after 24 hours on the
plane, so off we went to the house we are renting from him.
Our house itself is very much a work in progress – it was started as
the house for Beatrice's mother, who died recently. My impression is
that it was then half-completed (at best) and that the prospect of
renting it to us, and hopefully to subsequent tenants, has energized
a major development project. Workmen are around every day, applying
masonry and tiling the back patio and doing things to the wall that
surrounds it. Bits and pieces have been added inside every day – this
afternoon an ancient washing machine was trundled in, which does not
appear to work, even if it could be connected, which it cannot (but
the ingenuity of Tanzanians means that if one wants to test
something, but has no plug, one just inserts the bare wires into the
socket). Yesterday was the day the mirrors for the bathrooms appeared
and pictures got hung on the walls – the day before that, the fundi
completed a complete rebuild of the sofa and chairs, stripping them
down to the frame on the front porch and, with nothing more than a
hand saw, hammer and nails, rebuilding the frames and reupholstering
to conceal the old packing cases from which it is constructed.
So every day we have had a little progress and we are converging on
the new normal rhythm of life. I had been saying to all and sundry
that I wanted our car to be in our driveway waiting for us (Molly
says she never believed this) – and it did just arrive two hours ago
(but without plates, so we cannot yet drive it). From arrival in the
port August 1 to arrival here August 22 – there were many
intermediate promises from Nelson (our next door neighbour and
Brian's brother in law) of imminent arrival (Wednesday the customs
form had not been processed, Thursday the gate pass was to arrive,
Friday it was blocked in by three cars whose keys had been lost –
but now it is here, and a very nice car it is too.)
And today I also managed to use my cell phone to pay on my
electricity bill using ZAP (the system for electricity is that you
pay in advance, and get a 20 digit code, which advances the amount
remaining on your meter). We got cell phones the very first day we
were here, for the amazing price of $25, and since cell phone time
can be bought in increments of $5 and the recipient of a call does
not pay, cell phone coverage is amazingly high – we sealed our deal
with Temius (the gardener) by exchanging cell phone numbers. I really
think the cell-phone and the accessible banking it enables will be a
transformative technology – most people simply cannot get banking
services at all, much less low-cost instant funds transfer (when I
applied for a bank account I learned that I needed a passport photo
and a letter of recommendation from my employer in order to get one –
since most people do not have an employer, this rules the informal
sector out of banking services from the get-go.
So some things are amazingly modern – but so much has also not
changed in any meaningful way. On the way to the Zain office this
morning was a man cutting grass with a small sickle and piling it to
take for cow feed – and all around our house are charcoal sellers and
we see water carriers pushing heavily laden bicycles up our hill.
Clearly Tanzania is now a capitalist society, in a way that it was
not 40 years ago. And it is African capitalist – aside from the
flight in, we have seen very, very few white faces and the dukas and
shops are no longer the preserve of Asians. There are some Asians in
evidence, along with a huge surfeit of labour of all types, at some
of the supermarkets where we have shopped for starter supplies but in
the maze of streets around Kariakoo and in the small sections for
specific trades and crafts – from bolt purveyors to hubcap providers
– the proprietors are all black, which is a HUGE change from the post-
colonial era.