The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. New Preface and Epilogue with Updates on Economic Issues and Main Characters, 2nd Edition

14How Small Entrepreneurs Clothe East Africa With Old American T-Shirts

Mitumba Nation

Poverty in Dar Es Salaam is a languid and sultry state that has settled on the city like a heavy wash of paint. Though Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world, the poverty is not one of frenetic wretchedness as one finds in Calcutta or Nairobi, but is instead a peaceful way of being, a slow-moving and purposeful means of navigating life's rhythms: sleep, eat, shop, laugh, smile, sing, be poor. Poverty is the weather in Tanzania. It is just there—there when the Africans go to sleep, and there when they wake up, there every day of their very short lives. Like the weather, poverty doesn't change enough to be a topic of conversation. Poor just is.

Tanzania's socialist dream is in shambles, crumbling like the colonial buildings left by the British. Julius Nyerere, the country's post-independence leader, had a dream for Tanzania of self-reliance: After generations of bowing to slave traders and colonial masters, Tanzanians would produce their own goods, grow their own food, write their own destiny. Nyerere's vision of ‘‘Socialism with Self-Reliance'’ was a road map to escape the past.

Under Nyerere's leadership, Tanzania in the late 1960s was the most committed of the socialist countries of Africa, and Nyerere was a spokesperson not only for socialism but for the poorest of the poor around the world. But like many of her African neighbors, Tanzania found that the socialist road led ...