Perhaps it is a function of age, but I get to the point more often these days, where I reflect on an event in my ever dimming memories of the past, a place, a person, a thing… something.

Part of that reminiscence also focuses on those of my immediate and extended family and their own individual circumstances at that time.

Today for example, I reflected on the tumultuous 1970’s which for me, as a child, were a mixture of events, circumstances and experiences.

As a person of North European descent in Central Southern Africa, you could argue that I came from a privileged background. While contemporaries in the Americas and Europe might have thought of my family and my circumstances as exotic, it was for my brother and I, a curious time filled with confusion and apparent simplicity.

I consider the reason we lived where we lived as being largely tied to a very explicit decision by our parents in the late 1960’s to move North of the Limpopo, to a place that they had never lived before but which carried some strange attraction.

I know that my father had visited the country, then known as Southern Rhodesia, as a late-teen or twenty-something year-old in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s because I had seen old 8mm film footage of their trip to Victoria Falls by coach. I assume that they had also passed through Bulawayo, because that would be the most direct route.

I also know that I had a distant cousin, or rather my brother (a half-brother) had a distant cousin living at the Aiselby Sewage Works on the outskirts of the city., though quite how our relationship all hung together with them was all a bit of a mystery to me.

My nearest real cousins for example, were hundreds of kilometres away in Pretoria and then further South in Durban or the Western Cape.

At any rate, the reason I raise this now, is that, with having relocated for the past 6 months to South East Asia, I am walking in the footsteps of my paternal grandfather some 100+ years later and reflecting on how different things might have been for him, not only in terms of work, but the people around him, the environment, the climate, the whole shabang.

More on that in the coming weeks I guess, but for now, all indications seem to reinforce what I thought I knew, I now just have to find the time to visit things like the local National Archives to discover what other kinds of evidence they have that are not available online.