Peter Bauer and the third world.

• Author: Daniels, Anthony

I am deeply honored to be able to speak to you tonight, but feel slightly guilty that I am here under false pretenses. I am not one of the preeminent scholars, as the program has so generously suggested, and among whom I now find myself, or indeed a scholar of any description, but rather a mere part-time scribbler. My sole qualification for speaking is that I was a friend of Peter Bauer's, a man of whom, above all other men whom it has been my privilege to meet, can it truly be said that to know him was to love him. When I think of him, I recall Dr. Johnson's beautiful tribute to his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds: "Sir Joshua Reynolds, sir, is the most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom if you should quarrel, you would find the most difficulty how to abuse."

I don't think Peter's wonderful character was entirely irrelevant to the development of his ideas. In an age that often has difficulty in distinguishing earnestness from seriousness, and lightheartedness from frivolity, he was upright, honest, fearless, and fun-loving, which are not qualities, need I tell you, that always or even often go together. He did not think that life was inevitably, or ought to be a grind, or that all enjoyment must be deferred until the world be made right. And he was fundamentally optimistic in the sense that he believed ordinary people were perfectly capable of creating decent lives for themselves in the here and now, if only we--that is to say, the intellectuals of the world--would get out of their way and stop filling their minds with poison.

Nyerere's Anti-Bauerist Policies

I first met Peter after I had returned home from a country long ruled by a man whom I might call, by analogy with the anti-Christ, the anti-Bauer, the man whom Peter called St. Julius. This man, of course, was Julius Nyerere, Mwalimu or Teacher to his friends, the president of Tanzania. By calling him St. Julius, Peter--with his un-usually well-attuned antennae for the detection of humbug among the intelligentsia--recognized that this deeply pernicious man had undergone secular canonization long before his death, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he had produced an economic catastrophe of considerable proportions, and was moreover a tyrant who pretended to hate the West. The Western press, however, treated him hagiographically, as if it were in deep need, for dishonest reasons that Peter also understood, of an African political hero.

Nyerere had obviously read the works of Peter Bauer and decided to do precisely the opposite of what he recommended with precisely the results that Peter would have predicted. Nyerere had, for example, removed by force about seven-tenths of the peasant population from where it was living into semicollectivized villages, to the hosannahs of the Third Worldists of the world, and with aid funds provided by the Scandinavians, of which Nyerere's Tanzania was the largest recipient.

All agricultural produce had to be sold through government organizations, or perhaps I should call them disorganizations. The prices paid were set by the central...