Snapshots from Tanzania (published in part at Sidney, BC in Seaside Times, 2012)
When you spend any length of time in this land and engage yourself with its people and its geography, you are going to have strong feelings stirred. You will be awed by the expanse of the Great Rift Valley. You will be humbled at finding school children who came with their tribal language, switched to Swahili in primary school and then to English at secondary scool. And, at some point, you may also become very angry.
Geography alone will do that. Oh, it will inspire and amaze you as well with that sudden swell of red and orange sunrise into a crystal blue sky, but it will also annoy the hell out of you. Why can’t someone here build a decent road? There’s no frost to heave the pavement, so it should stay put once it’s down. Why doesn’t someone just put some down instead of putting up with this rutted, eroded monstrosity of a cattle track that even the herders won’t use for their cattle any more?
You bounce and slide along in a 4X4 vehicle gripping the handholds with one fist and holding a cloth over your mouth and nose with the other as you drive through clouds of dust raised by other vehicles, or by your own wheels when the wind is behind you.
The Japanese have built some roads in Tanzania, but they can’t build all that are needed. The Chinese are also actively engaged in providing such infrastructure in return for trade agreements. Some economists fret that such contracts will be a "road to ruin", but global economics is not the consideration here (nor in government back rooms, I suspect).
Those roads, whoever builds them, must be built well. There may be no frost heaves but this is a land of dry red dust for months on end and also of tropical deluges in the rainy season. That condition, in concert with earlier, simple, bulldozed roadbeds lacking proper reinforced ditches, will create ugly erosion channels across the fields. And it has.
Politics can also anger you. You can’t listen to the rhetoric, even at the distance of a reporter interviewing displaced citizens, without getting a deep revolutionary’s anger. Who profited from the Tanzanian-Canadian partnership that turned great tracts of grazing land into wheat fields, all without asking the nomadic pastoralists who roamed those lands where their ancestors’ burial mounds stood and which were ploughed under by CIDA-funded Canadian machinery?
So many countries, Canada among them, still give "tied aid" to developing nations whereby the monies given to a country must be spent in the purchase of material and advisors from the donor nation. Beverly recalls the frozen-shut louvered window shades in CUSO schools of 1974 Jamaica which hadn't worked for some time. Aluminum corrodes easily in the tropics and seizes up. Back to Tanzanian wheat.
The project was abandoned after the realization that the eating habits of a people cannot be suddenly shifted to wheat, but there are still some wheat fields under cultivation, and there is still a prohibition denying the Barabaig pastoralists access to their grazing lands and water holes. They have refused to go quietly into extinction however, and some are now sending their children to school.
Tanzania came to nationhood as an integrated society without the tribalism that has cost other African states so many lives, and these people, when they gain a legal voice, will ask for justice. Anger may yet be diverted from bloodshed into courtroom challenges; let the nation listen.
At some point in your travels, that anger will cave in to a deep surrender to sadness, a soul’s grieving for a long history of atrocities and the seeming hopelessness of daily conditions even now. It may come as it did for me at the old slave market in Stone Town, Zanzibar, all the academic knowledge of historical events and consequences proving completely inadequate to support equanimity or emotional distance. In the holding pens under the present church of David Livingston with feet dangling in the sluice channel where tidal waters once carried off the bodies of the dead, I wept.
Tears are one final expression of the realization of our own inhumanity, our so-easy drift into evil whenever we neglect to take a stand for compassion. I wept for the brutality of the slave trade, for the cruelty and degradation it brought and continues to bring generations after, and I wept for my own too-often failure to stand against the drift of complacency in a far-too-often desperate world.
There are other realizations that may not come to visitors and that concerns the lived experience of the citizens of this land. On a safari, the focus is on the visual, the viewfinder, the zoomed-in apprehension of some animal or shrub or pile of rocks. Those who support the experience – the cooks, servers, cleaners, drivers – all have a different point of view. Most of them will sleep in more crowded accommodation, use a much less elegant toilet, eat a much simpler diet and work longer days than any of us, their guests. They will have children who, if they go to school, will learn in a class of 60 or more, crowded into concrete-floored, brick-walled classrooms with some donated posters and the teacher’s voice the only lesson aids.
Our safari hosts described one from an earlier group who, at a school visit, was found sitting head-in-hands, weeping in an empty classroom. The awareness of the life conditions behind the happy, singing faces of the children had come home to him. We who are teachers volunteering in this country can ourselves be too focused on the work of lessons to let that awareness overwhelm us, but the forces that produce those conditions are never far away.
If we commodify education or health care or shelter so that only the wealthy can have them, our nation would soon devolve into scenes such as that in a Tanzanian village. We are witness to that kind of erosion in the US and must know that similar forces are at work here in Canada.
Anger and grief are not the only strong feelings of course. There will be outrageous laughter and full-hearted admiration. People will steal your heart with their persistent courage, tenacious dedication and straight-faced or thigh-slapping humour.
On one hand, people will compliment you with a straight face for being nice and fat. On the other, you will learn that kids from a Maasai village will walk 17 kilometres to school and back every day. Girls will keep coming to school even though they are boarding at a place far from home where they may not be fed enough and may be sexually molested..
It’s just that sometimes the realization gets in that some kids can’t walk the distance to school because they haven’t enough to eat to give them the strength to do so, and there’s no help for the pregnant girls. That’s when the grief and the anger rise. Those feelings are especially strong when babies are the victims.
Violence against children is abhorrent, especially the often socially-countenanced violence of genital mutilation, whether in males or females. In societies where such mutilation is condoned, practitioners will cite religious or ethical, even psuedo-medical reasons for the continuance of such violent aggression. How could such a practice ever have come into being?
In a small outdoor museum at Manyara National Park I came across a brief note on child mutilation – female genital mutilation and male circumcision – which made more sense than any other explanation I had heard for the existence of those practices.
The author wrote about human sacrifice in ancient times, specifically the sacrifices of children to appease nature gods. I knew this had been the case also in Peru where children would be taken at an early age and raised specifically for such sacrificial purpose to prevent earthquakes or drought or carry messages to the gods, and so it made sense that other societies had also used children which could be deemed pure or pre-sexual as advocates to their deities.
The "Ice Maiden' of Peru was a girl whose frozen, preserved body was found by archaeologists and examined in great detail. Her story briefly is this:
As tribute payment, Inca rulers ordered boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 16 to sacrifice. Archaeologists have discovered that coca (the primary source of cocaine) and alcohol were commonly found in the children's systems. Although archaeologists are unsure of why drugs and alcohol were used, some suggest that it was to put the chosen children in a stupor prior to death.
Children were selected as they were considered pure beings and worthy of giving to the Inca Gods. Once sacrificed, these children were believed to become messengers to the gods and act as negotiators for the people.
The author of the note at that Manyara exhibit in Tanzania wrote that the only recourse a mother in those societies had was to mar the child in some way to render it imperfect to the inspection of the priests so that it would be spared. This explanation is not consistent with opinions from experts, however, and one summation is presented here as complimentary information.
“Genital mutilations always exist within a complex of other social institutions that provide for the socially sanctioned expression of adult sadism and destructive aggression towards the infant and child with unconscious motivations aimed at destroying or damaging the capacity for pleasurable emotional/sexual bonding between mothers and babies, and between young males and females.” [DeMeo, James. The Geography of Genital Mutilations. The Truth Seeker. 9-13, July/August 1989.]
The Tanzanian note made sense to me, however, because of the direct link it posited between mutilation and life preservation. Adult sadism and destructive aggression are possibilities but seem remote; saving a kid's life is pretty immediate. I wrote this in response to the Manyara explanation.
Covenant
Precious, precious one, more loved than life,
come here, Sweet One,
(I would not hurt you but I must)
before the priests arrive
to catalogue your attributes –
age, height, your sex,
(I must, you see, and you will live to see)
what marks distinguishing
what blemishes
upon your perfect skin.
My child adored, the best of me,
come here, Beloved, know
I would not hurt you, but I must.
This rough blade now
must alter outer you
though we will always know
the dear heart held within.
A hopeful quick incision --
yes!
I’ll try to make it quick --
and all is done.
The bleeding we can staunch
with poultice herbs and pressure so,
now only intimates will know
the price we paid to keep you
from the altar and the knife.
Oh blessed child, My Heart,
hold me as I would you, nor look
such horror on me, such betrayed surprise
that screams its stifled anguish
down the brutish ages yet to come.
These priests will never take you now,
but choose another with unblemished skin
to satisfy our hungry god’s desire
for perfect, virgin blood;
and know,
as I have done, this do ‘til we,
in covenant with spiteful life,
from such unholy gods
are free.
And let's all of us remember to drive with an awareness that school is back in now, and kids may be more excited than cautious on their way to classes. Our roads have their own challenges.