Tales from Tanzania

I was supposed to fly out of Dar es Salaam this morning. I have some work in rural southern Tanzania for the next couple of weeks, and I was ready to go. Bags packed — plenty of books, bootleg DVDs, and malaria prophylaxis to keep me company.

I show up at the airport about an hour and a half before my flight, and it’s cancelled. No explanation. No apology. “We’ll put you on tomorrow’s flight.” Just like that.

Air Tanzania apparently has a terrible reputation. As my office administrator put it, “ATC stands for Air Tanzania Company or Any Time Cancellation.” Luckily, I managed to get on the slightly more reliable Precision Air for my flight tomorrow.

Like many companies in the formerly socialist Tanzania, Air Tanzania used to be a fully government-owned company. The privatization process only started in 2002, a fact that surprised me. It’s still heavily subsidized by the government, and the private airlines are generally more reputable. Air Tanzania loses millions of US dollars every year.

Tanzania was a socialist country under its first president, Julius Nyerere, and many people argue that it’s still emerging from that history – its airline being only one example. Nyerere is still universally admired in Tanzania. His photograph graces every store and office building, the words “Baba wa Taifa” beneath it: “Father of the Nation.”

But when Nyerere stepped down as president in 1985, he did admit that his socialist experiment had, in many ways, failed. Most Tanzanians I talk to agree that there are both good and bad remnants of Nyerere’s “ujamaa,” or “familyhood.”

Literacy rates shot up in the post-independence period, and the country made huge strides towards universal, free primary education.

But on the other hand, the traffic jam I experience every day in Dar es Salaam is, in some ways, a result of that socialist past. Under Nyerere, public transportation in the city was entirely government-run. The infrastructure was designed for a city with very few private vehicles. But as commuters faced increasingly frustrating transportation shortages, in 1983, the government allowed for the liberalization of the industry. Dar es Salaam has been growing exponentially ever since, with a both a booming population size and rapidly growing number of private vehicles. A five mile commute can take over an hour because the roads were designed for a much smaller, highly regulated transportation system.

There are many more present-day ramifications of socialist Tanzania — both positive and negative. The nation is remarkably peaceful, and the many ethnic groups are all united under a common language and national identity. But many people I meet — Tanzanian and non — argue that the economy stagnates here while some of Tanzania’s African neighbors have seen incredible growth and innovation.

I don’t know enough about the nuances of Tanzania’s post-independence history to weigh in, but as a traveler in East Africa, I do have strong opinions on one matter: I’ll take Kenya or South African Airways over Air Tanzania any day.