Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (26 page)

And I would shout, “No kidding!” because the elephant was twenty feet from us, walking across the road without so much as a sideways glance for traffic. It was an enormous solitary bull. His back was powdered with the dust that elephants fling over themselves to ward off bugs, a pink dust in this case, collecting in the deep gray wrinkles and making his hide look like an old actress betrayed by her pancake base. The bull’s tusks were as long as playground slides and thick beyond consideration of billiard rooms or piano keyboards. This fellow could have delivered ivory bowling balls if such a thing were thinkable nowadays. He was the most impressive living creature I’ve seen—for about a minute. Then he got more impressive, growing an immense erection for no reason. (I hoped it was for no reason. A mad infatuation with our minivan would have been unwelcome.) “Fifth leg,” said John. Africa is not the place to soothe insecurities.

The elephant walked off into a forest to strip the bark from the legal-pad-colored fever trees and snap the branches off for snacks. Elephants leave a real mess in the woods. They leave a mess wherever they go. You can see how in a country supported by humble agricultural endeavors, the big browsing animals get killed. And not just by poachers. We love elephants in North America, where they never get into our tomato plants or herbaceous borders, much less destroy the equivalent of our fax machines and desktop computers.

On the other side of the forest and keeping their distance from the tourist track were three more big browsers: black rhinos. There used to be thousands of rhinoceros in Tanzania. Now there are not. The poachers did get the rhinos, as they’ve gotten most of the rhinos in Africa, all because middle-aged men in Asia believe the powdered horn gives rise—as it were—to potency. Like the world needs middle-aged men with extra hard-ons.

The Cape buffalo are still around in droves, however. Their horns don’t seem to do anything for Asians. And it’s harder to kill them. The Cape buffalo is just a cow, but a gigantic and furious one—the bovine as superhero, the thing that fantasizing Herefords wish would burst upon the scene between feedlot and Wendy’s.

Most of the animals were not shy. They’ve discovered that the round-footed noisy things on the roads do not claw or bite, and are not—on their outsides, anyway—tasty. We were able to drive to within tollbooth-change-tossing distance of some young lions lying on a sandbank at a water hole.

“These are stupid young males,” said John in a tone that (he being as fiftyish as I) implied the unlikelihood of any other young male type.

“They are hunting badly. A female would be behind the sand, not on top of it.” The lions didn’t seem to care. They didn’t seem to care about us, either. And they didn’t care about the half dozen other jeeps and vans full of tourists that, seeing us seeing something, eventually gathered around.

A trip to the game lands of Tanzania isn’t a lonely, meditative journey. Everything I saw was also being ogled by dozens of other folks from out of town, and they were reeling off enough videotape to start a Blockbuster chain devoted solely to out-of-focus fauna. But the tourists pay money, and money is what it takes to keep the parks and preserves more or less unspoiled, and to buy the bullets to shoot poachers. If the animals of Africa aren’t worth more alive to rubberneckers than they’re worth dead to farmers, pastoralists, and rhino-horn erection peddlers, then that’s that for the
Call of the Wild.
(Besides, romantic as the idea may sound, how solitary do you want to be in the presence of stupid young lions?)

One of the lions got up, walked a couple of steps away, took a leak, and—with no thought for the grace and style that Western-educated people so admire in African wildlife—lay down again in the piss.

At the next water hole, we saw a pair of lions dozing in the midday heat. A herd of wildebeest surrounded them, evidently thirsty yet mindful of trespassing’s consequences. “But every now and then,” said John, “one of them forgets.”

The male lion was crashed out on his back, immobile. The female was lying prone and panting hard. “They have just mated,” said John. “Lions mate every six minutes and then gradually decreasing until it’s every half hour, every hour, every few hours, and so on for seven days.” So the primitive economics of nature may have its compensations.

John had a variety of information about the sex lives of animals. “Do you know why there are so few giraffes?” he asked at a moment when we had quite a few in sight. “They have no natural enemies,” John continued. “Their hooves are too sharp. Their legs are too strong, not like wildebeest or zebras. But there are wildebeest and zebras everywhere.” He paused. “The guidebooks will not tell you this, but giraffes are homosexual.” John had no more said this than the two giraffes closest to us—one definitely female and the other very emphatically male—began to (and never has this slang term been used with more scrupulous precision) neck.

“You’re wrong about
these
giraffes,” I said. “They’re going to mate.”

“Not yet,” said John. “She has to kick him first.”

Besides kinky sex, the economics of nature does seem to generate leisure time, at least for some species. On a riverbank meadow in the Tarangire, John and I came across a huge troop of baboons, more than a hundred of them. They were just, well, monkeying around; lollygagging, dillydallying, scratching their heads and other body parts, putzing, noodling, airing their heels, and engaging in constant chatter. About what I can’t say, but John told me baboons are a favorite food of the big cats. Baboons aren’t much different than we were in
Australopithecus
days. I wondered if this troop was us four million years ago. If so, the baboons are probably plotting revenge upon the predators. “Soon as we evolve, we take the natural habitat and
pave its ass.
”

But not just yet, I hope. Tanzania has creatures of such breath-catching magnificence that they turn the most hardened indoorsman into a mush on the glories of the natural world. It happened to me when I saw a mother cheetah stretched under a gum arabic tree with four cubs a couple of weeks old. The mother cheetah bore a startling resemblance to my high-school sweetheart from St. Ursula’s, Connie Nowakowski—the same tawny coloring, the same high cheekbones, the same little uptilt of the nose, and the exact, the identical eyes. Connie died in her thirties, years ago, and it would be just like her to come back as a cheetah. She’d love the drama, and the coat looks great. But how any male cheetah got four cubs—or even a hand-job—from Connie Nowakowski is one of the mysteries of nature.

A full quarter of Tanzania’s geography is some kind of conservation area. For so poor a country, this is a remarkable bit of ecoconscious forbearance. It’s not like the big game couldn’t be put to use. “Are wildebeest edible?” I asked John.

“Yes.”

“How about Cape buffalo?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I’ll bet a gazelle steak is nice.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Are warthogs any good to eat?”

“Yes,” said John, “delicious.”

I wasn’t even going to ask about elephants. Lions, anyway, are horrible. I had a lion steak once, at a German restaurant in, of all places, Springfield, Massachusetts. The flavor was of militant liver.

Keeping the conservation areas conserved is not just a matter of Tanzania sucking up to the International Wildlife Fund. Vast sections of Tanzania are infected with sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly. The fly’s devastating effects are similar to those of other known sleeping-sickness carriers, such as the tsetse professor, tsetse boss, and tsetse
New York Times
op-ed page writer. Sleeping sickness does not bother wild animals, but it does kill people and—something that’s more economically important in Tanzania than people are—domestic cattle. The Sierra Club’s travel guide to East Africa says, “A good number of African parks undoubtedly owe their existence not to an animal that humans wanted to preserve, but to one we couldn’t get rid of.” The tsetse is the size of a housefly but manages a bite like an enraged fox terrier. Dozens of them would get in the minivan and hang out behind the dome light and under the sun visors, waiting for their chance. Tobacco fumes seemed to be the only effective repellent. Cigarette packs should come with a printed message: “Smoking may prolong life in areas of tsetse fly infestation.”

If we want to save Tanzania’s wildlife, we’d better do something about its poverty. Otherwise the Tanzanians may give up on safari tourism, spray the Ngorongoro, the Serengeti, and the Tarangire with DDT, and start playing the
Bonanza
theme song. Who wouldn’t rather be a cowboy than a busboy?

In fact, no matter what our motives are for being appalled by Tanzanian poverty, we’d better do something about it. There’s suffering humanity to be considered. And that suffering humanity will be us if we’re not careful. Only a few million of the world’s people are relatively wealthy, but two billion live like the Tanzanians. One of these days those billion are going to figure out that they can buy guns in Florida without much of a background check.

On my last night on safari, I gathered an armload of Serengeti beer and went to sit on the small terrace of my ground-floor hotel room. There was a stretch of flowering shrubs on the other side of a knee-high wall and, beyond that, miles of pitch-dark Africa. I heard a
crunch-crunch
in the decorative landscaping. Then a
crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.
I turned off my room lights. It was a moonless night, but I thought I could see something moving. I got out my travel flashlight, its beam is about as wide as a finger. I shone it this way and that, and then down along the ground, and there was a pair of eyes. They were big, round, red eyes, and they seemed to be very far apart. I shone the flashlight around some more, and there was another pair of eyes. And a third.
Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.
The eyes were coming in my direction. I ran into the room and pulled the screen door shut. As if that was going to help. The glass slider wouldn’t budge. I chugged a Serengeti and thought…I don’t know what I thought. I went back out on the terrace and said, “Ahem,” and, “See here, you animals…” I aimed the flashlight directly into the scarlet orbs and wiggled it vigorously. The eyes kept coming. The crunching got louder.

The eyes came up to within three feet of my wall. Then they seemed to turn away, and in my flashlight beam I saw the enormous head of a Cape buffalo, scarfing the bougainvillea. I switched the room lights back on. Here was the animal “considered by hunters to be the most dangerous of the big game” (said my tourist guide). In fact, here were three of them. And they were acting like well-mannered parochial-school football players in the lunchroom cafeteria line—at the expense of the hotel’s gardening staff. The Cape buffalo were unperturbed, not interested in me, and eating everything in sight. They munched their way next door. I had another beer. It goes to show how even the most wrathful of earth’s residents can be rendered dull and domestic—if the chow’s good enough.

How is Tanzania supposed to get rich? Well, there’s “improvements in agricultural yield,” always a favorite with development-aid types. The British Labour government tried this after World War II in what became known as “the groundnut scheme.” The Labourites decided that Tanganyika was going to become the world’s foremost producer of groundnuts—that is to say, peanuts. They selected three huge sites and cleared the land by running a chain between two tractors, pulling the chain through the bush, and destroying thousands of acres of wilderness. Thirty-six and a half million British pounds were invested, an amount nearly equal to the whole Tanganyikan government budget from 1946 to 1950. It was then discovered that peanuts wouldn’t grow in Tanganyika.

The Tanzanian government budget contains more pages on agriculture than would ever be read by anyone, except a journalist in a hotel room with dysentery and nothing but a copy of
The Mill on the Floss.
But the only mentions of land
ownership
in the budget are an admission that buying land entails “lengthy and bureaucratic procedures,” and this weasel sentence: “A new land law being formulated proposes to introduce different structural arrangements.” Julius Nyerere (apologizing again) has said it was a mistake to collectivize the individual small farms, the
shambas.
But it’s a mistake that hasn’t been corrected. John said, using the same word the Russians use, that farms must be bought “informally.” (Another note from the budget: “
FISHERIES
—the sector still faces problems from dynamite fishing.”)

I did see one swell coffee plantation, Gibb’s Farm, at the foot of the Ngorongoro Crater. This is run by English people and has thousands of neatly clipped coffee bushes lined in parade file. A smoothly raked dirt road winds up through the property with woven-stick barriers stuck in the drain gullies to hinder erosion. A profusion of blossoms surrounds the main house. The very picture of a Cotswold cottage yard has been somehow created from weird, thorny African plants which need to be irrigated every minute. The English will garden the ash heaps of Hades if hell lets them.

I suppose the farms of Tanzania could all look like Gibb’s Farm, but it turns out that Gibb’s Farm doesn’t make any money as a farm but prospers because upscale tourist lodgings have been installed. So there’s tourism.

According to the U.S. State Department’s
Country Commercial Guide,
“Tourism is currently the second-largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania, after coffee.” (Actually, the largest foreign-currency earner for Tanzania is foreign aid. But never mind; with Republicans in Congress and 13 percent unemployment in Sweden, foreign aid is not a growth industry.) All the tourists I talked to were voluble in their praise of Tanzania—as soon as they’d recovered enough from their road trips to form words. And Tanzania’s tourist hotels produced $205 million in revenue in 1995. But that’s only 6.7 percent of the country’s GDP. This compared to the 6 percent of GDP produced by Tanzania’s “transport and communication sector.” Tanzania doesn’t have any communication. As for transport, according to the same State Department guide that talks up tourism, “It takes approximately three days to travel by road from the capital, Dar es Salaam, to the second-largest city, Mwanza,” a distance of about 500 miles.