Example of paying the bill/gratuity during the inflationary heyday in Zimbabwe (Photo Credit: Keri Peardon)
The Zimbabwe Dollar a few a years earlier was almost equal in value to the United States Dollar. Inflation was raging, but this was before the large denomination bills had begun to be printed by the German Printing Company Giesecke & Devrient. By the time the larger denomination bills were printed, shipped to Zimbabwe and circulated, inflation had spiraled beyond the practical use of these new bills. They might be thousand-dollar denominations, but you now needed a suitcase full of them to pay for the $70 USD meal.
Despite the constant looting of the Treasury by government officials, Zimbabwe still had a massive agricultural output. Formerly, Rhodesia fed the entire continent of Africa north of them. During UN Sanctions, Rhodesia brokered agricultural commodities through South Africa, providing Africa with abundant grains to feed virtually the whole of the continent of Africa.
For a few years after Independence, export of agricultural products brought huge amounts of money into the country, which was promptly stolen and sent out of the country. But then to add stupid to recklessness, greed and corruption, the Zimbabwe government encouraged the black Africans to murder and brutalize the remaining white and black farmers, driving them off. These huge and efficient agricultural operations ceased functioning and the government confiscated the farmland and distributed the land to their “supporters” and “war veterans” during the “Liberation” war.
Many of these “war veterans” hadn’t even been born until after the war was over so this was a sham to keep Mugabe in power. The blacks who took possession of the farmland had no idea how to farm, so fertile land was soon covered with weeds and ‘State-of-the-Art’ modern farm machinery sat rusting. Within a couple of years, Zimbabwe was begging for international food aid to prevent massive starvation.
100 Trillion Dollar Zimbabwe notes blew around on the streets and no one bothered to stoop over to pick them up as they were no more valuable than the trash blowing around the streets. The banks ran out of room in their vaults and stacked their money in bales towering up the walls to the ceilings and in every conceivable spare space. They locked the bank doors at night but with little worry about robbery. It was too much work to carry all those bales of money out for what they were worth. Eventually nothing.
Stan: What was it like for the average person just walking out of their house to go to work or the market? Was it safe?
Jack: Dangerous. However, after starvation begins to set in... usually within three weeks, people turn literally into zombies. The brain does not function properly because of lack of carbohydrates that allow brain neurons to fire allowing thought. The body becomes too weak to rob anyone, except another weaker starving person... which person usually has nothing. (#6 LINK)
The police and military ruled with an iron hand. Most whites, who had not been totally financially destroyed, were living in protected areas or walled in houses with guards. What is uncertain to me is if the starving resorted to cannibalism. Probably so, but the Communist government stopped anything detrimental to the image of their Communist “Utopia” getting into the news... including that, if it occurred and the fact that AIDS in Zimbabwe was out of control and killing the population.
A bit of advice to International Travelers. Buy a low-cost insurance policy that immediately flies you back to the United States, if traveling abroad and you get sick or injured. You DO NOT want to get a blood transfusion in Africa because of AIDs. Well, maybe not here either because of the Covid mRNA contamination.
People traveled outside the walls of their houses with bodyguards if they could afford to hire them. Sometimes just feeding a bodyguard and their family got you protection. Being a bodyguard or working for a well to do black or white homeowner ensured you had food. Laws had been passed in Rhodesia before Independence that a homeowner had the responsibility to feed black Africans in their employ the same as they put on the plates to feed themselves and their family.
What was on a white or black African employer’s plate to eat, the same food of the same quality had to be fed to the black African employee.
Stan: Was law enforcement still on the job?
Jack: Law and Order and Safety. In a dictatorship, the police never sleep. Not because they want to protect the citizenry against crime... it is the aspect of societal order that motivates them, only to maintain the control of the government over all others. (#7 LINK)
Despite the starving people, the police and army were well fed and kept order. They would shoot to kill any looters or rioters on sight to keep total chaos from occurring. The non-government people who could afford to, white and black Zimbabweans, banded together and had food brought in on guarded convoys from South Africa or their relatives in South Africa provided food for them brought in on these convoys. The leadership had their own abundant food supply of whatever they could imagine brought into their gated and guarded enclave.
The countries of Africa are now all Majority Rule and that means black African rule. At least the Colonists had some sense of decency in them when it came to incarcerating people by prison and jails. The black African countries have now perfected the wall-less and invisible barbed wire jail and prison. After starving those incarcerated for a month, the prisoner has become like a zombie with little strength and virtually no brain activity to think about escaping or enabling them to escape.
They are just in a daze and can’t form a single thought. They sit aimlessly and can barely move. They are prisoners of their minds and weak bodies. Of course, when the torture gets bad enough, the tendency is to escape, so there are walls and barbed wire and guards and dogs. But that’s what most African prisons and jails have become, torture centers. Do a ‘deep dive’ on the internet on what the Africans do to their prisoners.
It is so bad, that a veteran British Broadcasting War Correspondent-Cameraman, filming the corpses of two black Africans who decided to be brave and stand in the line to vote against Mugabe in the subsequent elections, just “disappeared,” later found in a ditch. The cameraman vomited. The dead and mangled were nothing new to this hardened cameraman until he saw these two. Barbarically and grotesquely tortured so that he vomited. The black African brings new meaning to the saying... “I’ll get medieval on you!”
It's BAD... Bad. Beyond. Your. Wildest. Imagination, Bad. I’ve seen enough of it up close and personal. Take my word for it, you don’t want to know about it... you won’t sleep at night.
Stan: Did people flee the country?
Jack: At Independence, 260,000 whites lived in Zimbabwe. Ten years later 220,000 or more of them had left, moving permanently to England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. That left somewhere between 30 to 40,000 whites living in Zimbabwe. A couple years after “Independence” in 1980, almost all whites had left the army and police forces. The Communist government, afraid that the white led army and police that had defeated them in the war, could still remove them from power, paid the remaining whites and blacks who had morals and character, severance pay to resign and leave. (#8 LINK)
This consolidated their control of the army, police and country through their remaining terrorist “forces,” that had been integrated into the army and police. It also removed opposition to the Mugabe government bringing in the barbaric North Korean Fifth Brigade to help them brutally secure against a counter revolution going on, led by Joshua Nkomo’s Matabele Tribe, that they soon massacred along with white farmers protesting the killings. A further threat came from black and white Africans... increasingly angry as the Communists destroyed Zimbabwe.
The following never made Western news as they had backed the Communists against the Rhodesian blacks and whites and are embarrassed by incidents and atrocities like these. At one point after Independence and the establishment of “Majority Rule,” over 200,000 blacks converged on the former Rhodesian white Prime Minister and decorated WWII fighter pilot Ian Smith’s farm, begging him to take over the government and run it as he had before.
This good man Smith started feeding the Africans gathered there and soon ran out of food. He told them he would not engage in politics because of his age and told them to leave and peacefully change the present corrupt government through elections and peaceful protest.
These people did what former Prime Minister suggested. I was sent a video by an English Friend who was in my Commando back in the day, of a blood-soaked young black in his teens being hurriedly carried down an alley for first aid. You could hear shooting in the background. I assumed that the young man had been hit in the femur by a large caliber bullet, probably a Russian 12.7 MM, which is equivalent to the American .50 Caliber round. This is the caliber of the anti-aircraft, light anti-armor and anti- personnel machine guns mounted on Chinese Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs).
This black kid’s leg was nearly cut in two and dangling from his jeans as he was being hurriedly carried down an alley from the shooting. I am guessing that many were killed, as whites and blacks protested in an area of the Capitol of Harare. Protest of the ongoing starvation, the conduct of the corrupt Communist Leadership and general suffering of life in Zimbabwe... a once abundant country.
I further suspect that many, if not most, of the whites protesting were whites who had moved to Rhodesia decades ago at the urging of the International Communist Party and quietly laid the groundwork for the coming Communist Government to replace that of Rhodesia’s. They were instrumental in the forced immediate transition to black Majority Rule and the expulsion of the duly elected Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa to be replaced by their Communist choice of Robert Mugabe. Almost Biblical... “What you sow... you shall reap!” or the spirit of such phrases.
They were, of course, betrayed by the dictators posing as Communists, which is what happens in every Communist society. They had waited patiently for their Communist Utopia, which never materialized and now, frustrated and angry that their illusion was being hijacked by these Communist “leaders,” they turned to protest.
The Zimbabwe Government’s answer was simple. Something like this... imagine 20 or so, armored Personnel Carriers pulling up to the protest and spreading out into a skirmish line formation... then began machine gunning whites and blacks. End. Of. Protest.
The wholesale slaughter of people that happened there won’t happen in America... as long as we’re armed... I repeat... as long as we’re armed. Even well-trained soldiers don’t like the populace shooting back at them.
Stan: How could employers even keep employees if their wage bought only about half the food today that it could buy yesterday due to the hyperinflation?
Jack: My Father-In-Law owned the most sophisticated printing company in Zimbabwe on the African Continent. It was a well-equipped former Canadian Company he’d run for years and eventually purchased privately after UN sanctions and the political correctness of the Canucks influenced them to sell it. He had huge ‘State of the Art’ 150-foot-long lithograph high-speed printing presses of over 2 million dollars cost each and over one hundred employees. Most of his employees were educated and talented blacks, Orientals, whites, Hispanics and Asian Indians. (#9 LINK)
My Father-In-Law was respected by his workers who were extremely loyal to him for his leadership and fairness. He kept increasing their pay to match inflation and started to give them an hour off at noon. He would pay them at the beginning of that hour off. His employees would then go quickly to a large nearby grocery store, buy their groceries and come back to work. If he made them work all day and shop after work... instead of buying groceries half way through the day... the groceries would cost TWICE as much. That is how bad inflation got... food was doubling in price in ONE DAY.
He, like most businesses, employed a sliding scale for cost of finished products. Just as the customer who bought from him and sold to another business did. This worked for a while until the inflation got so out of control that the time element destroyed the ability to price anything over a few hours’ time. It got to the point that a week to process anything was disastrous to price. No one had the wildest idea of what imported replacement ink and paper would cost for the next job. But if the customer needed it, they would buy it and relied on the honesty of fair pricing for a fair profit.
Soon, foreign imports stopped because the Zimbabwe Dollar was worthless and Zimbabwe had no foreign currency to pay for imports, because the leadership was stealing foreign currency directly from the Treasury the moment it came in to the Treasury.
Stan: What it was like for the well to do and employers?
Jack: “The Family Get Together”…As inflation raged and sources of money to steal disappeared, the government, through the secret police, began to focus on the wealthy. Wealthy blacks and wealthy whites were arrested and taken to Chikurubi Prison. Not just the man of the family but the entire family was arrested and put in cells... the men, women, elderly, children and babies of the wealthy. Then, as my Father-In-Law told me the story in the instance of a white guy, who supposedly had $480 million dollars out of the country, they jailed 30 some of three generations of his family. (#10 LINK)
As the story was told to my Father-In-Law, the secret police selected a child to “interrogate” on a table in view of the entire family. If the story is true, let your imagination run of what they did to this child to the shock, horror and screams of the, siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents. However, it worked wonders. Whatever he had in foreign accounts they got, all account numbers and passwords were obtained, the money was transferred into Mugabe and his henchmen’s accounts. Family then released. Mentally distraught, traumatized... and penniless.
Many rumors like this were circulating in Zimbabwe. After seeing and hearing of other atrocities by the Communist thuggery, I have no doubt that most or all of them were true. The suspicion being that a wealthy black bus line or trucking company owner or white factory owner had money outside the country. In most cases, it was true... and the leadership criminals wanted it... for themselves. The wealth distribution of Communism. This caused a further exodus of black and white Africans... people critical to keeping the country’s economic system afloat.
My Father-In-Law, being a person of vision that he was, saw the problems coming decades earlier and got most of his worth out of the country. He is lucky he wasn’t targeted like other wealthy people. He may have been given a pass, from what you will read he went through, because the government had their eye on his factory for printing Zimbabwe Currency and would have needed him... for a while at least.
There were reportedly some five times the number of black multi-millionaires than white multi-millionaires in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. Many of them with millions that they had sent out of the country during less restrictive and better times. The subsequent torture of wealthy blacks and white family members proved the Communist’s theory of Zimbabwean foreign bank accounts. Who says Communists aren’t creative?
Stan: What were the things that people did and could have done if they knew that hyperinflation was on the doorstep before all the horrors of hyperinflation took hold?
Jack: Eventually, there were virtually no imports. Everything we throw away was valuable... it was fixed and sold. Ingenious repairs and rebuilding of EVERYTHING. Literally nothing was trash. If it was tangible and people used it, it was recycled, repaired and sold. For instance, there was no such thing as a “broken toaster.” (#11 LINK)
My Wife helped my Mother-In-Law, who was somewhat of a pack rat and kept much others would throw away, sell her home and possessions there and get her proceeds into money that could be legally sent out of the country after the financial collapse. People flocked to their “yard sales” and the broken toasters were sold for four times the cost of a new one here and paid for in American Dollars. At that time, the American Dollar became the official currency, after the Zimbabwe Dollar went into the oblivion of the galaxies.
The white and black wealthy were very creative in getting money out of the country. I heard of stories of a Zimbabwe factory owner going to Europe to buy equipment for his factory to be shipped to Zimbabwe. The equipment cost three million dollars. However, he’d get a fraudulent invoice and present it to the foreign currency portion of the Treasury that had to approve the expenditure of foreign currency, that the equipment cost four million dollars.
Four million would be paid to the European equipment company who would then pay one million to the factory owner “under the counter.” The factory owner would deposit this money outside the country and use this excess money to buy materials to import or the money would go into the factory owner’s foreign bank account. Since everything they’d worked for their entire life was teetering on the edge of being worthless, these foreign accounts were for their last-ditch survival effort, whatever amount of money it was.
This was one of dozens of clever schemes that ended eventually when the authorities discovered them. As the government caught on to this method of moving money out of the country, they imposed massive deposit charges on goods like yachts going across borders and did exhaustive analysis of foreign purchase valuations. The Rhodesian-Zimbabweans could write a book on how to defeat currency controls.
I remember hearing a story of someone who had a complete diamond finishing shop with skilled black African Gemologists working in it. They were apparently “cutting” diamonds and gems and faceting, lapping and polishing the stones.
The diamonds were allegedly bootlegged out and sold in the diamond district of Amsterdam, Holland. The reason precious stones were secretly finished, was that possessing uncut semi-precious, precious stones and diamonds was an automatic 7-year jail sentence if caught with them. Period. Possession of finished stones was allowed, with the exception of Sandawana Green Emeralds. Diamond possession was safe unless you got caught smuggling them out of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe.
Stan: Jack, in closing-what kind of advice do you have for people given the time we live in?
Jack:Wow Stan! I recommend Readers review your article of two months ago about the possibility of a shipping container/ocean delivery crisis at this link. As that one critical factor will cause a huge amount of inflation and will cost Americans much more to buy just about anything off the shelves that is imported... fuel and most everything else... since we no longer make anything here. That factor is huge increases in the costs of shipping. That should be shocking to anyone...
“As Mr. Byrne stated, this is inflationary. Quite inflationary. With rates for the 40 foot containers going from $1,342 in October 2023 to $5,900 in July of 2024 this represents an increase in the cost of importing goods from overseas (the US imports the most goods in world commerce)...(Byran Byrne)
UP OVER 400% during the aforementioned 20-month period!
This, in combination with the International Longshoremen’s Association Strike, that will probably still happen... and who knows what else.
I advise all Americans to BUCKLE UP... a rough ride coming!
Click the link below to see... “What’s in the Civil Defense Manual?”
https://civildefensemanual.com/whats-in-the-civil-defense- manual/
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