Report from Tanzania

My good friend Allison Dempster, another JHR trainer and CBC journalist, has sent in this essay about how this conflict is affecting Tanzania. She also writes about how the tribal tensions that are flaring here right now have got her thinking about the role of tribes in Tanzania.

I'm hoping some friends in Uganda and Rwanda will file reports from their stations soon.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's Alli:

While more reports come in from Kenya on the numbers of dead and displaced, and the International Monetary Fund sounds the alarm about the effect of the post-election violence on East African economies, I made a trip to the Village Museum in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

I learned about tribes I had never heard of: how they build their houses, prepare their food and celebrate rites of passage. There are more than 120 tribes in Tanzania and I felt a little ashamed that I knew so little about them. It occurred to me that while I've lived in Tanzania for almost six months and I probably could have named just as many, if not more, Kenyan tribes as Tanzanian. And I've only been to Kenya once for a long weekend.

It's not a good excuse for my long overdue trip to the museum, but many Tanzanians have told me that tribes aren't really a big deal here. Sometimes they add the comparison, '...at least not the way they are in Kenya'.

I've even come across safari companies in Tanzania that have managed to work the country's history of being generally free from tribal conflict into their sales pitches. Against an animal print backdrop, one company's website boasts, "Thanks to its political stability and ethnic unity, 'tribalism' or tribal conflicts have never been a problem. Christians, Muslims and other religious denominations co-exist peacefully."

As Tanzanians watch Kenyan democracy flail, bloggers, editorialists and sidewalk newstand commentators here muse on tribalism. They are talking about what fuels it and what transcends it. This almost always leads to a discussion about 'Baba ya taifa', the 'father of the nation', Julius Nyerere, who led the former British protectorate of Tanganyika to independence in 1961. He became its first Prime Minister, later its first President.

Nyerere's African socialist experiment with community-based farming collectives may have failed economically, plunging the country into debt, but he is widely credited for bringing Tanzanians together with a national ideology that went beyond tribal allegiances. With so many tribes to unite over signifcant distances, this may have been a politically pragmatic move, as much as an ideological one. Nevertheless, described as a 'skilled nation-builder' Nyerere is championed for fighting tribalism, rather than using it to his political advantage.      

Tanzanian writer Godfrey Mwakikagile puts it this way:  "We may not have conquered tribalism in Tanzania, but we have been able to contain it effectively. And that's no mean achievement; a rare feat on a continent where the idea of nation as a transcendent phenomenon in a polyethnic context remains a nebulous concept."

Tanzania is now host to hundreds of Kenyans who have crossed the border to escape the post-election violence. One report estimates 1,000 people have made the trip.

The Kenyan conflict is putting Tanzania in the economic choke-hold that land-locked East African countries are experiencing, but debate is stirring over whether the Dar Es Salaam port can handle some of the Uganda and Rwanda-bound goods and fuel that would normally leave from Mombasa.

Back at the village museum, tourists wander through a display of traditional houses made out of different combinations of mud, clay, bambo and elephant grass.

There's also a baobab with a placard explaining the tree's spiritual significance to different tribes in Africa. Some leave offerings and prayers at the foot of baobab trees; even political leaders will pay them a visit to try to get in the good graces of their ancestors. Here's hoping Kenyan leaders find grace soon.