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Buduh Square
Katanga remains a primeval mystery to me. Oh, you can set foot there, travel through it, and yet the depth of its reality never ceases to fascinate me. Tucked in a wallet, neatly folded in equal...
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You Never Go Back
“You never enter the same river twice” ~ Heraclitus the Obscure aka Heraclitus of Smyrna 24 May 1931 – Dar Es Salam, Tanzania –Departure of the MV Llandgibby Castle (later Juno LSI) That was...
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A Pith Helmet for Every Climate, Location and Occasion
To my utter surprise, the small piece “What drove pith helmets extinct” has generated quite the reaction. It means that pith helmets are still lurking in our collective mind. To this day, they remain...
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Creepy Crawling Maggots
Now, don’t be squeamish. Maggots are back in fashion. Maggot therapy is even at the cutting edge of wound treatments in establishments such as the Chester and Westminster hospital. We put green-bottle...
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French, Not France
Life magazine with De Gaulle – 13 November 1944 Mélanie Vogel, representative for the French living abroad, quoting from the results of a global study among French non-residents, December 2024: The...
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Frenchcore
1947 – Jadotville, Panda Likasi, Congo – De Gaulle in the living room If you wish to know yourself better, there will always be people to tell you what you are. Now, it is also true that it is up to...
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WWI National War Loan Campaign
1917, The Last Push To finance the war effort during WWI, France balanced money printing and war bonds. The war bonds were not a novelty, and had been used since the French revolution in every...
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The Club
30 October 1948 – The Club, Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), Congo All of it stopped when my grandmother died. It did not have to, but there was an inevitability to it. Maybe because they were doing...
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Core Sampling
March 1936 – Kotouba, Cameroon – Core sampling We take for granted the copper of our electrical lines, the iron in our concrete, the rare metals that allowed us to engineer mobile phones that fit in a...
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Aboard a Steam Ocean Liner
May 1949 – Tenerife – The steam ocean liner Albertville on a stopover in TenerifeMy mother Claude (far right), her sisters and Suzanne, my grandmother Very little seemed more of an out-of-body...
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