sketches of dar, part 2

The continuation. Read part 1 here.

fashion
I hesitate to even write the word. yeah ok, there's some maasai floating around, with their colored wraps and their boss white sandals and their braids and their nickel-sized ear piercings. they used to herd animals, but here in the city they're reduced to directing cars at mzungu-oriented hotels and restaurants, which I find singularly distressing (ooohh honey, a native, take a picture!) everyone else wears t-shirts and jeans, even the president.

education
thanksgiving dinner was at the university of dar es salaam, at the home of a visiting american professor of development studies. in the old days he would have been a professor of scientific marxism visiting from moscow university, and I pointed that out to him, as a joke, and maybe a subtle dig, but he wasn't having it. or even acknowledging it, really, and indeed the mention of this country's leftist past seems to be a taboo subject.

which is too bad, since UDSM was the breeding ground for a lot of righteous independence movements, and there's not a country from south africa to egypt that wasn't at least partially affected and supported by the radical liberation ideology that Nyerere and the academic left cultivated here. and they still carry the torch, some of them anyways, for as late as the mid-2000s ugandan president yoweri museveni was making sympathetic references to the "interlacustrine proletariat."

it's mostly lost to memory and time though, and the modern campus looks like a production still from terminator 4, with all sorts of stray dogs and garbage and discarded razor blades and shit. I'm friends with a couple of visiting graduate students here, and they share between them single copies of well-worn textbooks with names like "State, Culture and Development" or "Gender, Culture and Capital" or "Development, State and Society" and I get a headache just reading the titles.

religion
just a name alone will tell you what religion a tanzanian belongs to, and here's a little handy guide for sorting (these are all real names of people I have met.)

religion: catholic
relevant names: gregory, charity, innocent, polycarp, faustin, revocatus, purity, mary, agnes, emmanuel

religion: anglican
relevant names: charles, diana, godfrey, philip, lily, prudence, cornelia, frederick, henry, elizabeth, helen, bridget

religion: pentecostalist (although a lot of people convert, so this one can be a little dicey)
relevant names: micah, hosea, titus, amos, prosper, moses, absalom, grace, miracle

religion: muslim (sunni)
relevant names: mohammed, ali, mohammed ali, ismail, abdulkareem, suleyman, fatima

religion: unaligned/traditionalist
relevant names: tertula, heri, nisarg, nyangate, uswege, nyakio, bakandonda, elibariki, chabruma

also popular:
obama, osama

crime
there's a crime spree! of vehicle-assisted purse-snatchings, that is, and your correspondent was nearly among the victims. while he was leaving sketches of africa command hq (i.e. that one hotel bar with reliable internet access) and crossing the street with his purse laptop bag, the victim was set upon by a gang of three local hoodlums in a 4-door sedan car of unknown make (later described to the police as "fast" and "gold-colored.") without leaving the vehicle, one of the assailants hooked his arm around the strap of the victim's bag, who gave a startled cry, and reflexively grabbed its handles, which resulted in a three-second tug-of-war until passers-by took notice and the car sped off into the night, unrewarded. your correspondent remains unscathed, and unruffled, and perhaps, just perhaps, a little bit chuffed.

economy
I met with a dude from the bank today. he explained that he prefers to finance importers to local industries, since there is "no way" the africans can ever catch up with asia as a low-cost producer. this means every single thing in the country that is not a mashed-up banana has to be shipped over from china, no matter how little sense that makes, nor if it precludes the development of any indigenous industry. we have the IMF's "structural adjustment" programs to thank for this, since tanzania's only "global strategic competitive advantage" at this point is leopard-oriented tourism. (oh, and tanzanite!)

not that it makes sense to push the dial in the other direction. socialism was a failure here, worse even than eastern europe, and the resurgence of the left in latin america has absolutely zero traction round these parts. and maybe that's good; a grandstanding nationalizer like hugo chavez has more in common with someone like robert mugabe than your average subscriber to The Nation would care to admit.

the middle ground, which we practiced in america for a long time, and what smarter nations around the world do too, is undeniably a form of state-corporate welfare promotion. that's how we got the internet, and the interstate highway system, and big pharma, and exxon mobil, and all the rest. ideology aside, if you just simply trace the flow of cash through a modern, successful economy, what you'll find is taxpayer revenue going toward public infrastructure and scientific research and wars for resources, with the output of those activities being privatized and sold back to the consumers, and then recycled into the scheme through taxes again. china's pulling the same stunt now, singapore got rich off it, and it's rwanda's road map to the future.

the workings of the system have been well-documented of course, and criticized amply, by chomsky and zizek and taibbi and all the rest. but here's the thing: the system works. it's unfair and imbalanced and anti-democratic but it works well, demonstrably well, and the people on the receiving end are visually stimulated and well-fed and healthy and the lights stay on and water comes out of the tap. and maybe that's the single most distressing fact of the 21st century.