Now that Millennium is in stock and selling, both in print and on Kindle, I’m happy to say that I am donating from the proceeds to charity, as I did with my last book, Wings of the Morning.
I like to support organisations working in Africa but these days, that means International Aid which equals controversy and misuse/abuse of which we have all heard so much recently.
It may be bad news – it IS bad – but it’s not new. Whichever the cause and whatever the source of funds, pots of money collected for a good cause have always signalled opportunity for the ruthless and unscrupulous. During my years of travelling throughout Africa, I came quickly to understand that whatever the deal, whether big or small, there will always be someone or so many looking for some personal benefit on the side, a chance to stick a finger in the passing honey pot.
It could be a small consideration. I remember at least a dozen visits to the same Policeman in Lagos, Nigeria, a quite senior official then in charge of procurement whose offices were on the fifteenth floor of a building in which the lift was frequently out of service. After an exhausting trudge upwards in the humid heat, you arrived at his reception area which would be filled with supplicants. It needed a modest tip to his clerk to jump the queue and once in his sanctum, a large office overflowing with detritus and dusty files, I would sit down opposite ‘the man’, a diminutive fellow made smaller by his vast desk and he would give me a beaming smile of welcome, making polite conversation while I found space amongst his random stacks of paper to put down my greeting of a bottle of Black Label and a carton of fags. The routine was that I would then search and identify the business dossier I had submitted on my last visit, remove it from the bottom of some pile and place it dead centre in front of him, slipping in at the front my latest offer of personal graft. Generally, I got my order but only after two or three visits over as many months.
The other side of this coin is that my contact would likely have been supporting a hugely extended family of relatives and hangers on, all of whom would be expecting largesse to flow from the benefits of his position and he would accept the responsibility to provide.
In Western Europe over the last couple of decades, we have never taken the trouble to understand this culture. We’ve been happy to moralise from an Olympian height and we’ve enthused over a latter day crusade, as in Libya, but we’ve conducted ourselves always to OUR standards, assuming they are correct and best.
At the same time, we’ve managed to ignore completely a problem in Africa which is of our own making. This is to be found in Zimbabwe, the most beautiful country I had the good fortune to visit. We Brits replaced the Rhodesia of Ian Smith with Independence and, I think, made quite a good job of it. The future looked good for this prosperous new nation until the ever increasing madness of Mugabe prevailed and the disastrous decline has grown ever longer and steeper. Over the years, we have been intoxicated by Iraq and we have grappled with Gaddafi but we have abandoned this great chunk of Africa which was our responsibility. And even now Mugabe is gone, we may have little confidence that his successor will be an improvement.
In the rape of this lovely country you find a truly ‘Horrible History’ and it makes me a staunch supporter of an absolutely magnificent Charity called ZANE: have look at their Website www.zane.uk.com which will give you the detail of their remarkable activities and achievements, not the least of which is their proven claim that every penny they collect goes to help the impoverished and dispossessed in that country.
Some of my inspiration for Millennium comes from Zimbabwe, so I hope you will feel inclined to help me in helping them by buying my novels – in print, online, from Amazon or from Julian Beale Books.
Thank you
Julian