14 MAY 1977, Page 8

Letter from Tanzania

Taking the socialist road

Shiva Naipaul

'You will like Tanzania,' the Asian girl had said. 'You will find it totally different from here in almost all respects.' Here' was Kenya, a sister East African state which President Julius Nyerere had, not long before, in an untypical outburst of irritation, condemned as a 'man eat man' society. The girl described herself as 'committed' to Tanzania. Knowing she had recently returned from a pilgrimage to Cuba, I was not surprised by her attitude. (Tut if she's so committed,' an unkind acquaintance of hers said to me later, 'Why does she come all the way to Nairobi to buy her underwear? Why isn't she content with the Chinese underwear they must sell in Dar es Salaam?') Uganda apart, Tanzania arouses, as perhaps no other black-ruled African state does, definite emotional responses. Everyone has an opinion about it; everyone is either for or against its experiments in an allegedly African-style 'socialism': In East Africa you soon discover that anyone with a glimmering of political consciousness is either a Tanzanophile or a Tanzanophobe.

In the land of Ujamaa — the name given to an indigenous version of the Chinese peasant commune which has become the symbol of the Tanzanian 'revolution' — it is virtually impossible to obtain an unbiased assessment of what is actually happening. People, as they always have done, see what they want to see. Even a definition of `ujamaa' is not easy to come by. One version stresses the collective and ethical aspects of the undertaking — the remodelling of Man and Society according to socialist precepts; another stresses the simple 'coming together' of a scattered peasant population in villages, which makes possible the provision of elementary services — schools, health clinics, piped water and so on. But at this point someone intervenes to warn against confusing the ujamaa with the 'development' village. You ask what a development village is; and you are told it is a sort of half-way house, not quite ujamaa, not quite private enterprise, not quite cooperative, not quite anything, designed to accommodate those not quite ready for the ujamaa or any other — ideal. So, you say, let's try to get this clear. Tanzania is divided into ujamaa and development villages. . . Well, not quite. In some parts of the country traditional patterns of land tenure have been retained and these cannot be classed in either category. And, to complicate the picture further, there are the state farms and the surviving private estates. All right, you say. All right. Is itor is it not the policy eventually to transform everything into ujamaa? Some say yes — it is the policy to transform every

thing into ,ujamaa; some say no; some say yes and no; some say nobody knows. You ask next what proportion of the population has been `ujamaaised'. The estimates vary from as little as fifteen per cent to as much as seventy-five per cent. Once more the discussion trails away into semantic dispute. In Tanzania words are not used to depict existing reality: they are used to confound it.

'To the peasants of Tanzania,' runs the dedication of one of the scores of academic treatises devoted to the country's socialist endeavours, 'whose livelihood and environmental situations have become the laboratories for some intellectuals and the theatre for some politicians.' (Predictably enough, the author then proceeds to write a book far beyond the comprehension of any Tanzanian peasant.) The writer (he is C. K. Oman; his book Strategy for Rural Development was first published in 1976 by the East African Literature Bureau) makes a good point. For, if the Highlands of neighbouring Kenya stimulated to fresh life outmoded and frustrated aristocratic longing in a certain type of European (Karen Blixen is the exemplar of the breed) who settled there, then, and with much the same justice, it could be said that independent Tanzania has stimulated the fantasies of a certain type of outmoded European socialist, men and women of a somewhat pastoral and utopian turn of mind, whose socialism fades imperceptibly into a kind of benevolent patronage of the backward and deprived. They are different sides of the same coin. For both it is like going back to the beginning of the world. The African soul is a blank slate on which anything can be written; on to which any fantasy can be transposed.

Much of the blame must rest with Nyerere himself. Over the years he has adopted something of the character and style that Nehru affected in the first years of Indian independence, claiming a special place in the moral firmament for himself, his policies and, by extension, his country. Tanzania stands for all that is Right and Just and Virtuous. But there are other, more down-to-earth reasons for the esteem in which Nyerere is held: with the possible exception of Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia — and that's not a very convincing exceptionhe is just about the only African head of state one can contemplate without immediate sensations of outrage or embarrassment. After Field-Marshal Amin, Emperor Bokassa, Sese Mobutu and Dr Hastings Banda, after the gross corruptions of Nigeria and Kenya, after the genocidal manias of Ruanda and Burundi, one turns with relief to Julius Nyerere. Here, at least,

is a man with intellectual pretensions. He has translated Shakespeare into Swahili; and his collected speeches fill three fat volumes. Even confirmed Tanzanophobes Wil pause at his name and dole out ritual praise. Nyerere is a good man. Nyerere is a sincere man. Nyerere does not feather his nest. See how simply he dresses. See how simPlY.he lives. He soothes and reinforces falterniS faith; he makes it possible to believe — if only for a little while — that Africa can be taken seriously. Nyerere, poor but proud, is the wideeyed learner. The appeal he makes to the heart — if not the head — is irresistible. I-1,e has something to 'learn' from everyone. Flisi attitude to the Chinese in this respect is we'. known. But, as a glance at his most recent volume of 'writings and speeches' (FreedoM and Development, Oxford University Prey will show, he casts his net fairly widely. In June 1968 he visited North Korea. 'You are reported to have said,' he observed to fYll. Kim Ii Sung, "Fertilisers mean rice and nee means socialism." I was very struck by the truth and profundity of this statement.' In September of the following year he w, as paying generous tribute to 'Canadian attitudes'. A week later he was telling the Russians that Tanzania hoped to learn much from their 'socialist experience'. 10 January 1970 he was opening the Kilian° Nordic Centre and lauding the 'recognition by the Nordic peoples of the unity of man ' Later that month he informed President Tito that Tanzanians were watching 11 sympathy and interest' Yugoslavia s attempts to build socialism. In August he was learning again — this time Ir0111 Hungary; and in September he was telling the Rumanian president that Tanzanians and Rumanians both 'know that they are human beings . . .' Such fine sentiments rouse the conscience. In response to the the philanthropists pour in.

In 1795 the Scottish explorer Mango Paricf went out to West Africa in the hope °A discovering the source of the Niger anu charting its course to the sea. His progress, was slowed not so much by the natural impediments of climate and terrain as bYci the all too human hazards of customs an excise. One tends to think of Africa, before the full-scale imposition of Europe°, administration, as an essentially borderless, place. That is not altogether true. African; have known about borders andthel. possibilities for a long time. Park's accouill, of his travels is, by and large, a chronicle °; frontier tribulation; a sad tale of a gradnat but unremitting dispossession. Through°, his journey he was harassed by the bordel 'officials of the petty chiefdoms through Which he passed. At the end of it all, he had nothing left. Something of that eighteenthcentury atmosphere of rapacity persists at the border posts of the modern states.

I travelled by bus from Mombasa to the en Kya-Tanzania border town of Taveta. We had left Mombasa at dawn and it was Past noon when we arrived at Taveta, a dustY, disordered collection of mud huts and wooden shacks roofed with corrugated iron, scattered across a plain ringed by volcanic hills. We crowded off the bus with our luggage and were shepherded into a small brick building housing Immigration Control. The officer in charge ordered me to take off my hat—in deference,! suppose, to

Portrait of Kenyatta hanging on the wall

uehind him. He barely glanced at my Passport. 'Do

You?' you have any Kenyan currency on

I said I had two hundred shillings.

'Show me your wallet,' he said. I handed over my wallet. He took out the

o hundred shillings, turned the wallet ugside down and shook it vigorously. Satiss tied that there was nothing more to be had, rive returned the wallet, carefully folded the

'enYan notes and put them in his shirtPocket.

, I protested. I was intending to return to kenya and wished to keep a hundred shillings with me. 'It is a crime to take Kenyan currency out 13,f the country,' he said. 'A serious crime — rn't you know that? If I reported you, you eould be in a lot of trouble.' He handed me hiyo hundred Tanzanian shillings. 'If you bay any any Tanzanian money when you come uack I'll change it for you,' he said. There was nothing! could do. I was aware that Kenyan currency was in great demand 'n Tanzania: on the black market it was itlossible to get twenty Tanzanian for fifteen enya shillings. When I came back through "2 would give me the unfavourable black wa,rket rate. A painless profit. af_,1 stood beside my suitcase in the white v'ernoon glare awaiting customs examina22m. That, however, proved to be a _mercifully brief and desultory episode. I e

`_yas nearly last in the queue and the

s_ arches of the customs officer which, I had nt,oticed with dread, had been ominously zneeirough to begin with, gradually lost their st as his energy flagged in the intense heat.

'Coming back this way?' I nodded.

He smiled happily as he scrawled Is chalk across the canvass. e_ We climbed back into the bus and set off Tr the Tanzanian post a few hundred yards ilirther

at on. The building, though an just counterpart of the one we had

iriulst left, was shabbier and dirtier. Once lut3re we crowded out of the bus with our erg gage. An official pointed to a high conb e,te Platform and directed that we haul our :longings up on to it. The passengers — earlY all of them Tanzanian peasants — looked visibly tense as they carried their boxes, baskets and cloth-wrapped bundles up on to the platform. There they began opening them up for inspection. Gathered anxiously about their possessions, they looked for all the world like a group of refugees who had no idea what their fate was to be. I could sense that customs inspection on this side of the border was no mere ritual. Were these cowering individuals 'the People' so often invoked, so often wept over, by the ideologues of the Tanzanian Revolution? Were these peasants, staring about them with the frightened eyes of children, the same peasants to whom Mr Oman had dedicated his book?

Hat in hand, I went over to the Immigration Office, where there were not one but three official photographs, Nyerere (his photograph, admittedly, slightly larger than the other two) flanked by his lesser luminaries of state.

When I returned to my luggage on the platform, the officer in charge of the operation was about half-way down the line. Those who had been cleared were busily repacking. The officer stooped to examine the bundle of an old peasant woman, which seemed to contain mainly clothes. He lifted up each item, held it up to the light, went through the pockets, fingered the seams. What was he looking for? The woman stared dazedly at him. He said something to her in Swahili. She put a hand into her bosom and brought out a knotted handerchief and undid the knot. Within were a few crumpled banknotes and some coins. He returned the handerchief and its contents to her. For a moment, the woman hesitated: she seemed afraid to take it back; to be offering it to him. He pushed her hand away and moved on. He hand delved into a

cardboard box. He took out a cooking-pot (he removed the lid and peered inside), a bottle of cooking oil (which he uncorked and smelled), a packet of detergent (he opened it and shook out some of the blue powder into his palm) • . . nothing escaped his scrutiny. Then it was my turn. With a small grunt of triumph, he fished out from my suitcase the half-bottle of whisky I was carrying.

'And what is this?' He squinted at me rhetorically.

'Whisky.'

He revolved the bottle in his hand. 'You cannot take this into Tanzania, bwana.' 'Why not?'

'It is not allowed. It is illegal to smuggle spirits into Tanzania.'

'I wasn't smuggling . . I gazed at him indignantly.

'That's nothing to do with me, bwana.' He shrugged. '!only do what the law says I must do.' He handed the bottle to a colleague.

The bus driver appeared at the foot of the platform. He shouted, tapped his watch and pointed at the bus.

`Go,' he said. 'I don't want you to miss your bus.'

Some days later I picked up a volume of Nyerere's speeches and read, with the greatest interest, a charming little disquisition — delivered at a state banquet in Peking — on 'The Supremacy of the People'.

Words, words, words . . . They can, when handled too promiscuously, gradually begin to take the place of reality. They can, in the course of time, become a complete substitute for it. In Tanzania, where performance consistently negates intention, where every

commodity butter, meat, milk, cheese, fish, chocolate, knives, forks, spoons, cups, saucers, baby diapers is in short supply, the 'socialist' revolution is being built with words. 'We are at war,' the Minister for National Education declares. But at war with whom? With capitalist exploitation, of course, With imperialism. With neoimperalism. With fascism. (But not with Rhodesia: the 'Liberation Struggle' too is a war of words: to call yourself a 'front-line' state and be called by others a 'front-line' state is satisfaction enough.) A party official looks at the beautiful volcanic peak of Mount Meru and what does he do? He renames it Socialist Peak. That is war. The English-born marine biologist displays the child to which his young American wife has recently given birth. You ask the name of the tiny, wrinkled creature lying asleep on its mother's lap. 'Yenan,' he says, the name derived from the caves where Mao lurked during his guerrilla days. 'I thought it would be an appropriate way of commemorating Mao's death,' he adds solemnly. Yes, you reply, trying not to look too astonished. Highly appropriate. A most moving contribution to a revolution being built on words.

As befits such a revolution, the academic analyses, foreign and indigenous, pour off the presses. 'Book production is part and parcel of the struggle by workers and peasants to construct a socialist society and to break away from the grip of world capitalism . . . let us produce books!' So exhorts a book supplement published by the state-owned Tanzania Daily News. Abstraction is linked to mindless abstraction. The formal, faceless universe of socialist algebra takes shape on the messily printed pages: symbols symbolising everything in general and nothing in particular. The would-be writer must identify with 'the

People', . he must understand clearly our policy of Socialism and Self-Reliance. . . A writer who . . . has not dialectically examined his society . . . will serve the people better if he does not write at all !' The Party must maintain vigilance and suppress all products of 'cultural imperialism'. Tanzanian books must reflect 'the struggle of other oppressed peoples, linking these to the world-wide struggle against oppression.' In accordance with these principles, lengthy analyses of the Tanzanian 'class-struggle' have been written. A major problem faces these theorists: there are no classes to speak of (i.e. in the Marxist sense) in Tanzania and hence no class struggle worth talking about. There are peasants, party and state officials (the two are indistinguishable) and aid workers. Class struggle, since it does not exist, has to be invented. downtown Dar es Salaam. When she arrived, the street was lined with the stalls of fruit and flower-sellers. She went into a store. 'I came out a few minutes later only to see most of the fruits and vegetables gone and caught a glimpse of the sellers disappearing down the alley across the street. A few seconds later, a van full of police pulled up and about five uniformed men jumped out and with much laughter began throwing all the remaining food into their van.' The police moved up the street. 'There a young boy was selling peanuts and magazines. Upon spotting him, the police surged out of the van and started chasing the young boy.' 'Meanwhile, two other policemen 'with smirking faces' began throwing 'all the vendor's cones of peanuts into the van, tore up his magazines and smashed his small table to pieces. I want to know why this happened . . . is it because these people are supposedly economic exploiters?' Alas, yes. The Tanzanian dream must not be sabotaged, not even by little boys selling peanuts to earn a few shillings. Saboteurs rear their ugly heads in the most unlikely places. There was, for instance, the controversy over beer it was alleged that the state-owned breweries were unhygienic. The Junior Minister for Industries sprang to the attack. The allegations made against the breweries were, he said, 'a war being waged by capitalists against socialists . . . to discredit industries in the developing world. The imperialists are not happy . . . because we have already been able to make a special beer brand for export.'

The peanut vendor was guilty of waging capitalist war against socialist society. If he were caught by the police who chased him,

Spectator 14 May 1977 he would, in all probability, have been driven out of town back to a regenerating peasant life: while I was in Dar es Salaam the police carried out swoops on the city s unemployed and carted them off to the countryside. That, after all, is what the Chinese would have done; and Tanzania, as everyone knows, cites 'the Chinese experience' as the ultimate justificationfcit revolutionary fervour. The trouble is the the 'Chinese experience' has no relevance, to anyone but the Chinese and people ol similar cultural background. The Chinese renaissance is a national renaissance. Its true springs lie not in Maoist ideology which amounts to little more than technique of mass mobilisation but in the Chinese sense of history. It is a reassertion of a natural importance by a people of high, civilisation; a reassertion of preordaineu destiny. Chinese communism is a gleans and not an end in itself. When China sends out labourers and technicians to build railway in Africa; they are not 'exporhilgh socialism; they are not trying to teac anyone anything though, in order to plaY up to their audience, they might say theY are. The Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tallici zam) was designed to proclaim to the wort China's grandeur. Of all the misconceptions and illusions underlying the Tanzania° 'socialist' revolution, this, perhaps, is the greatest: that the 'Chinese experience' cari be utilised by Tanzanians. Nothing further from the truth. could be The Masai girl lay huddled under a greY blanket. She had given birth two days Pte. viously and was exhausted. Her cl°sei cropped hair emphasised the gauntness her face. The baby slept on her bosom. bed was without either sheet or pillow: we clinic did not run to such refinements. Thne room, like the bed, was elemental n" curtains, no table, no chair; just a bare concrete cubicle with a bed in one cornefi When we entered, the girl drew the up to her chin she was naked under 1" having no clothes suitable for the occasion and stared impassively. The German volun (The *clinic was staffed entirely by

teer, a trained nurse, smiled cheerfullY

vo %le teers, not one of whom was Tanzanian. w‘, can't get them to come,' I was told. Iller't just don't seem to be interested in this sort of thing.') The volunteer asked a couPle. 1°,5 questions in the local dialect. The kirte murmured replies were barely audlu Mother and daughter were, a rfine as could be expected. This was the VP t the volunteer reckoned she was a ,c)itlie twenty years old third confinement. Olt two previous children, one had died. `Tommorrow she will have to leave. 1"d • volunteer picked up the sleeping baby looked at it. 'She shouldn't really. As .47 can see, she's still far too weak to fee° aii" But somebody else needs the bed. What,c,,r PParently., we do?' She returned the baby to its r0 The girl smiled. I thought of Yenafl' What, I wondered, did this child ct" memorate?