My father took this bad photo (the Mudede clan has yet to produce a decent photographer) from the balcony of his bedroom. The captured time is somewhere in the middle of the 80s. The house is still there in Chisipite, but we are all gone—one to London, two to Seattle, one to the grave.

I came across the photo this morning. I also came across this article, which was about the violent events that made it possible for a happy African boy to dive (badly, very badly—the Mudede clan has yet to produce a decent diver) into a swimming pool in a nice neighborhood.

The black population of Rhodesia has been conspicuously silent since 1965, when the territory's white-minority government unilaterally decided to break away from British rule. Last week the blacks—whom Rhodesia's Prime Minister Ian Smith has called "the happiest Africans in the world"—went on a rampage. For three consecutive nights more than 8,000 angry Africans rioted in Gwelo, Rhodesia's fourth largest city, burning buildings and hurling stones at white-owned cars. The trouble spread to Salisbury's Harare township and to Bulawayo, Fort Victoria and Umtali, where eight blacks were killed by police gunfire. By week's end 18 persons were dead (including two white helicopter crewmen) and at least 80 wounded.