A Penny For My Thoughts

Through some of my anecdotal experiences, the book tracks my mother country’s political and economic struggles from the colonial days of Rhodesia to independent Zimbabwe. I showcase my personal growth and development from a herd boy in the tribal trust lands to a career banker in the country’s revered capital city of Harare, before eventual settlement in the USA as a naturalized citizen.
Key Aspects

1. I relive my early childhood and youth, chronicling my mom’s struggles after the untimely death of my father at the tender age of 40, following an illness I was too young to fully comprehend.
2. I look back at my undisciplined adolescence that messed up an otherwise brilliant school experience, ending up training for a short-lived, poverty-ridden schoolteacher’s job before inadvertently embarking on a more fruitful banking profession.
3. My most endearing experience was meeting Ruby to build our beautiful family of four children, all through the trials and tribulations of many Zimbabwean parents as we pushed them through school.
4. I revive memories of the growth and development of my only brother who was more of my child than a sibling until he passed on at the youthful age of 26. A revisit of my mother’s last days spent in and out of hospital with diabetes bears testimony to Zimbabwe’s dilapidated health system, thanks to the skewed priorities of the ‘revolutionary’ government of President Mugabe.
5. I also took a stroll into world politics in general as well as a looked at the reign of the late President Magafuli of Tanzania and his dictatorial approach to governance as he genuinely worked to uplift the lives of his own people. I made an eye-opening comparison of Mugabe’s style of leadership against the otherwise well-intentioned but still arbitrary tendencies of the long reigning president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. `
   The book combines an autobiography still being lived and enjoyed to date and a personal perspective of world politics where the acclaimed concept of the global village is abandoned for nationalism in an undisguised attempt to justify a rising anti-immigrant sentiment. In the meantime, living conditions in the Motherland continue to deteriorate for many, well after the demise of the founding father – Robert Mugabe.
   Target Audience
   Even in these anxious days in America and the world at large, thanks to the return of President Donald Trump and his open disdain for political correctness, my book will enhance many readers’ appreciation of the richness of globalization, nevertheless. My overriding message is that luminaries like Barak Obama or Nelson Mandela have a good life story to tell but, at the end of the day, the richness of any narrative also depends on how well it is delivered. Just like how A Penny For My Thoughts was written.