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After a round of dances, speeches and inspections, Nyerere visited a $1,500,000 housing block that the East Germans have been building since last June. In Karume's eyes, the project is a fiasco: the East Germans insisted on importing all building materials-including sand and lime, which Zanzibar has in abundance. They refused to pay the going workmen's wage of 70¢ a day. wound up with a wildcat strike that threw the project far behind schedule.
Next day Nyerere visited the site of a $785,000 secondary school being built by the U.S. Carlucci showed off his Swahili once more, explaining that the school was being built strictly with local materials, by local laborers and contractors, and although started only three months ago, would be open by late February. Nyerere flicked his toothbrush mustache and allowed as how "you are going upesi, upesi [very fast]."
An Admission. All told, it was a good show from the Western point of view. Karume was even moved to declare that "America is not evil"-quite an admission tor a man who not a year earlier had personally expelled the U.S. charge d'affaires and ordered the removal of an innocuous American Mercury tracking station. Karume has proved to be a tough, instinctive politician who is slowly divorcing himself from the Communist-packed Revolutionary Council. But Tanzania's gravest question remains whether he and Nyerere-faced with pro-Communist Ministers and a continent torn by the chaos of the Congo-will be able to hold their precarious balance between East and West, moderation and violence.
In November Nyerere's right-hand man. Foreign Minister Oscar Kambona. produced a set of forged "communications" that purported to show Washington in league with Portugal in a planned invasion of Tanzania. On Zanzibar, Babu's boys laid bare an ostensible Arab "plot" that brought an ebulliently brutal crackdown by the People's Revolutionary Army in which some 300 Arabs were arrested. Five were later executed- allegedly, their hands were lopped off and they bled to death. Even though at present the Red Chinese are not finding it too easy to conduct the Tanzanian combo, the top tune on Zanzibar's Red hit parade remains My Motherland Is in Black Africa, composed-perhaps symbolically-by a pair of Chinese songwriters named Yuan Ying and Wang Chen-ya.