Dear Skanderberg,

Thanks so much for the update from Pretoria; I for one always enjoy your insights from various locales and your thoughts re little known battles and other historic events.

It so happens that I am now listening on car CD to The Teaching Company course The African Experience: From ‘Lucy’ to Mandela , delivered by Prof Kenneth P. Vickery of North Carolina State University. The course is here http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=8678.

He tells an anecdote of a visit years ago by Zimbabwe President Robert Mogabe to North Carolina; the occasion was a talk which M was giving to officials and academics at a conference. Asked to introduce the Zim leader, a NC official tried comparing the African nation with the Southern state. Both had warm climates, both produced tobacco, and both had cities named Salisbury.

Of course, by then the African city had already been renamed, and Mogabe bristled. The president went on in his speech to describe the land distribution program which his nation was just then beginning. ‘We are paying market prices from willing sellers,’ he is reported to have said. Then, after a pause, he added: ‘But it wasn’t bought from us.’

I have the course out from local library and it is well worth hearing.

The geographic area is of interest to me because of some family history. Some of my folks – three brothers of my great grandmother – had emigrated in the late 1880’s from Western Lithuania to South Africa. Economically and socially, the Baltic was then becoming less and less tenable for Jewish folk such as mine.
Two areas were to absorb most of those leaving this little village: America, specifically Chicago, and South Africa. Her brothers had made their way to Pietersburg, now known as Polokwane. Her husband set out for Chicago with assurances that he would send for her later.

Instead, in late 1903 came a ‘Dear Gertrude’ letter. They had never gotten along, and she would not like the new city. Find a new husband and a better father for the two girls, he wrote. The oldest was my grandmother. She wrote to her brothers in Pietersburg, who immediately forwarded funds and urged her to join them in Africa.

I can picture my great grandmother sitting at a wooden table in a small home just off the River Jura. Should she take the money and join her brothers in the land of wild animals and easier fortunes? Her youngest brother by century’s end had owned a hotel and a store. Or, should she use the funds to search out an errant husband in the world’s first or second fastest growing city, Chicago.

It is only in recent years that I have learned that it wasn’t the Germans in World War II who had perfected the art of concentration camps. As Wikipedia points out: “The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment

We know, of course, that she chose Chicago, or I would not have existed as an American. Her errant husband was truly that; he continued to reject her. Without funds, without skills, and unable then to speak English, she did what she could: Married a widower whose first wife had just died in childbirth.

Began again in America.

If you don’t debase the currency and ensure that it retains its value, it’s amazing what positive economic consequences flow just from that.

Well, it’s a good thing the Fed has been such a careful guardian of our dollar. I mean, instead of the dollar losing 95% of its purchasing power since 1913 it could have been a higher figure, like 96% or 97%. With a record of success like that, who could object to giving them even more control over the levers of our economy?

The American dollar is Zim dollar on a longer time scale.

If I were dictator I’d require every HS or College student to travel overseas, heck nearly anywhere. I’d think they’d come home with a little more appreciation for what they have and the struggle by our forefathers that came along with it.

I drank a few Windhoek beers out on a 2 week safari in Botswana. A trip of a lifetime. Also visited Soweto, poverty to the extreme. But I’m gonna hire a few of those guys for future sales positions! They knew how to sell their trinkets and wares despite the terrible environment.

I’m grateful for showers, clean drinking water, electricity, mosquitoes that don’t carry deadly diseases… for about two weeks, then I slip every so comfortably back into accepting all common things we take for granted in the USA.

Always enjoy reading your stuff skanderbeg. thanks

BTW, I was discussing politics with a African military officer on by last trip and he asked me “How could America elect a colonialist as its President?” Obama is not as popular in Africa as the NYT leads you to believe.