Revolting Revolutionary
It’s easy to forget that Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe was once seen as a liberator. Now his country lies in ruins.
“In the weeks after the election, as the political stalemate persisted, the value of Zimbabwe’s currency plummeted,” Jon Lee Anderson writes. “Before crossing the border from South Africa, I had exchanged a hundred American dollars for three trillion five hundred billion Zimbabwean - thirty-five billion to a dollar. Most of the cash was newly minted five-, twenty-five-, and fifty-billion-dollar notes, with pictures of giraffes and grain silos.
A few days later, the going rate was a hundred billion to one. Food prices tripled overnight, and many salaries were made virtually worthless. Cash was becoming nearly impossible to obtain; banks were allowing customers to withdraw the equivalent of only one US dollar per day.
The effect was a state of existential madness. Prices bordered on the fantastic, and ordinary people had to grapple with calculations in the trillions for the most prosaic transactions.
One day, I wandered into a supermarket to buy some water. The price for a half-litre bottle was $1,900,000,000,000. On a nearby shelf, I found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for $83,000,000,000,000.”
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