When I worked for three years in the 1980s in the East African country of Tanzania, I was outraged by the quite unnecessary state of impoverishment and pauperism to which the policies of the long-time president, Julius K. Nyerere, had reduced the population. These policies – collectivisation of agriculture, destruction of commercial farming and the elimination of incentives for peasants to produce anything, one-party political control over every detail of daily life – were so obviously counterproductive of Nyerere’s repeatedly stated aim to develop his country economically and lift it from its poverty that I long concluded that he must be some kind of fool or intellectual incompetent. But it was I who was the fool.
One day, the not very difficult thought occurred to me that Nyerere’s stated aim was not the real aim, that the aim of his policies was not the economic development of the country or anything like it, but rather the maintenance of himself and his cronies in power. Once I made this simple assumption, I could see what should have been obvious to me from the first: that far from being a miserable failure, Nyerere was a brilliant and outstanding success. Not only had he maintained himself in power for more than twenty years with very little challenge, apart from an early attempt at a coup by the army, but he had successfully managed to present himself to the world as a man of outstanding principle: indeed, there are even now moves afoot by the Catholic Church, to which he was more attached even than he was to Kim Il Sung, to canonise him, notwithstanding his imprisonment of political opponents and his forced removal of the peasantry from where it was living into collectivised villages. One of his miracles was to have extracted huge sums of aid money from the willing dupes of Scandinavia and elsewhere, which disappeared in Tanzania as water through sand but was so essential to him in the maintenance of his power.
If the aim of politicians is the attainment of power, Nyerere was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century, and very far from the fool or incompetent that I had thought him.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Brexit Doesn’t Mean Brexit”, Law & Liberty, 2019-04-15.
October 17, 2022
QotD: Julius Nyerere
March 6, 2019
The “grandmother hypothesis”
Jonathan Lambert on the theory for why, almost alone among species, human females live on well past their reproductive years:
Killer whales, Japanese aphids and Homo sapiens — they’re among the few organisms whose females live on long past the age of reproduction.
Since the name of the evolutionary game is survival and reproduction, the phenomenon begs explanation — why live longer than you can reproduce? In the 1960s, researchers came up with the “grandmother hypothesis” to explain the human side of things. The hypothesis is that the help of grandmothers enables mothers to have more children. So women who had the genetic makeup for longer living would ultimately have more grandchildren carrying their longevity genes. (Sorry, grandfathers, you’re not included in this picture.)
Two studies published Thursday in Current Biology take another look at this hypothesis and add new insights into the role grandmothers play.
The first hard evidence for the grandmother hypothesis was gathered by Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah who was studying the Hadza people, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania. Hawkes was struck by “how productive these old ladies were” at foraging for food, and she later documented how their help allowed mothers to have more children.
If our long post-reproductive lives evolved because of grandmothers, we should be able to find fingerprints of the benefits of grandmothering in many cultures. But the circumstances of modern life differ drastically from those we faced at the beginning of our evolutionary story.
The studies in Current Biology turned to the detailed records of two preindustrial populations, one in what is now Quebec and the other in Finland. The researchers mined these rich databases to quantify the reproductive boost that grandmothers provide and to help us better understand the limits of their help.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
