• March 19, 2024

Month: May 2011

News This Week

Dutch treat

“The devil shits Dutchmen,” complained Sir William Batten in 1667 as he watched the English fleet burning in the Thames estuary. The famous British naval administrator was exasperated by Dutch challenges to English rule in the Read More

News This Week

Witchcraft

In addition to the rising cost of production, unclear property rights and limited access to capital, the tobacco grower I visited this morning had to deal with another challenge recently—witchcraft. After several of his Read More

News This Week

In a nutshell

After visiting a commercial tobacco farm and several leaf merchants, the story that emerges is as follows: Zimbabwe tobacco production used to be dominated by a small number of large-scale tobacco farmers. The majority of Read More

News This Week

Table topics

I had dinner with three fellow guests at York Lodge—a Belgian diamond trader, a Brazilian AIDS consultant and a member of the Danish embassy in Zambia. The diamond trader was in Zimbabwe to help Read More