This upcountry town’s only claim to fame is that it sits astride the old Arab trading route that Stanley followed on his quest to discover Livingstone. More recently the Uluguru Mountains that loom splendidly over the town were the training ground for the guerrillas of South Africa’s African National Congress.
One way and another I have an affinity for Morogoro. I first visited it 40 years ago and my chauffeur insisted on driving on the wrong side of the dirt road. It didn’t seem to matter. Now on a fast tarmac road the traffic is thick. Muslim and Christian, Indian, African and Arab coexist without real friction. Sugar cane, coffee, cotton, sunflower oil, millet and maize, along with food processing and small-scale manufacturing put the town on Tanzania’s map, a country now growing regularly at 6 percent a year. It will reach a rather handsome 7 percent next year.
This time I’m back to lead a four-day course for 28 journalists, funded by USAID and organized by Pact, a nongovernmental organization together with the Media Institute for Southern Africa. After showing them “All the President’s Men” and giving them a lecture on multiple sources and fact checking I send them off in groups for a day to uncover what I have never had time to learn.
Here’s a bit of successful postmodernism for you. Women truly rule the roost among the local Waluguru people. All inheritance is through the female. Baby girls are valued above boys. There is no such thing as a housewife. All household tasks are shared. Inheritance goes to the daughter. Men have little choice but to be faithful. Women will quickly divorce them if they are caught out. If divorced, the man loses his right to his house, his land and his children. The only men who have status are the eldest brothers of the women. When my students returned I asked them two questions. Are the men happy? Less and less, they said. They now prefer to marry non-Waluguru women. Is AIDS much lower than the average? That they didn’t know, but now they have two months to prepare a follow up article and find the answer before I return.
Getting at the truth about infant mortality rates is more difficult. Dr. Pascal Mbena, the Morogoro medical officer, says the rate is dropping noticeably, yet regional experts and ordinary people interviewed say the rate is worsening. Angea Ndomba who works for Umati, a local NGO dealing with children and health, is adamant that both infant and mother deaths are growing because of poverty, ignorance of good health practices and poor transport to health centers.
No one doubts that road deaths are up. When interviewed local taxi drivers say too many young drivers are under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. Everyone speaks of police corruption. Police will agree to look the other way when there is reckless driving or driving on worn out tires in return for a bribe. The local bus companies make the 200-kilometer trip to Dar es Salaam in two hours compared with a normal two-and-a-half. I watched them overtake us on blind bends.
Morogoro used to be notorious for its high level of armed robberies. Yet the evidence that the incidence of banditry is sharply falling impressed my reporters. For the first time in my students’ investigations the name of President Jakaya Kikwete, who took office 18 months ago, kept cropping up. He has done much to reform police practices and a constant refrain is how the police have become much more available and open to the public.
The regional police commissioner now publishes his cell phone number, as do all his senior officers.
The incidence of AIDS is falling steadily in Tanzania, but it remains unacceptably high. Bill Gates’ Global Fund is giving grants to the relatives, such as grandmothers, of orphaned children so that they can buy clothes, shelter, stationary and other essentials. 4,686 started to receive these payments last week. Yet the bureaucracy of both city and local NGOS seems to be creaming off too much of the funding and too may agencies crowding in on the work of distribution are leading to a great deal of confusion.
On the business side of Morogoro life there is good news: The economy is humming. Nuisance taxes on traders have been dropped and the rule that businesses have to renew ever year their licenses to do business has been rescinded.
