9 December - Independence Day

We woke up this morning to nothing except the steady irregular beat of the basketball. Two enterprising students make their way each morning, immediately after sunrise to practise their basket shooting and dribbling. I want to go and congratulate them for their commitment and enterprise; but I don’t, I just shout expletives at them under my pillow.

The reason things were so relatively quiet this morning, is that today is a Public Holiday, celebrating independence from the British in 1961. No-one had warned me and there few signs that anyone was celebrating. It’s a public holiday for public servants, salaried and superannuated. For the rest of Mtwara, it was business as usual. Business as usual means coming to grips with mud and poverty. It is appropriate today to reflect on why we’re here, why Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world, and whether any of us believes that the Band Aid culture, of the rich giving a tiny percentage of their surplus to the world’s poor, will ever be a thing of the past.

Tanzania is a large country with incredibly fertile soil, much of it volcanic and rich in minerals. It has a long coastline, with a port offering good access to overseas markets. A railway joining that port to the hinterland was built over a hundred years ago. Since independence in 1961, it has been peaceful – Nyerere’s great success was to build one nation from many tribes. He is universally thought of here as the father of the nation, the teacher, the great uniter. Many of these factors are singled out by Professor Paul Collier in his seminal book, “The Bottom Billion”, as being pre-requisites for sustainable economic and social development. Why Tanzania has fared relatively worse than Kenya, but has fared much better than DRC or Cote d’Ivoire is explained in a coherent, accessible way in this book, written by probably the world’s strongest authority on African economies.

As we cycled home this evening from the beach, I was still wondering what the three white businessmen – one Polish, two American – thought of this quandary. They had spent the evening discussing how bad things are in this country, how corruption and bureaucracy stifle enterprise. At that moment we passed a large piece of land which has been fenced off and we have been wondering whether it is to be cultivated or used to build homes. In fact, it is being used a storage facility for crates of Coca Cola. Two, now three, large containers have dumped hundreds of red Coca Cola crates and a motley collection of young people are moving, stacking and generally looking after them. This is not scientific, I know, but I see everywhere the possibility for progress and rarely the reality, and I don’t know why.

Fortunately, Caroline and I need to focus on smaller things.  Caroline has become an avid washer and ironer of clothes. We’ve been told that clothes can become impregnated with small burrowing ants whilst drying on the line and they must be ironed. Not sure if it’s true, but I like having my underwear pressed.