Zimbabwe's Independence Day - 30 years later

April 19 was Zimbabwe's 30th Independence Day.

The following audio slide show uses BBC radio archives to give a very brief summary of the last 30 years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8623385.stm

Personally, I have been following Zimbabwe politics since around 2001, when I started the business and was looking to work in Zimbabwe. Some of the pictures from the BBC slide show reminded me of my experiences there. Inflation has been a huge problem during the time I've been working in Zimbabwe. Right now there's a 20,000 Zimbabwean bill in my desk. It's worth nothing. It even has an expiration date on it. I remember reading at one point that it was actually more economical to use money for toilet paper, rather than purchasing the product itself (probably not as sanitary however, but shows how bad it got).

The picture above was taken on one of my trips. I would go into a bank with a thousand dollars or so to exchange and have to take multiple trips back to my car with bags filled with Zimbabwean dollars. When it got especially bad, money would devalue drastically day to day. We would exchange daily if possible because the money would be worth nothing by the following day. Sadly, at that time, using US currency was illegal so the artists with whom we worked were stuck using the Zimbabwean dollar.

Now the Zimbabwean dollar is pegged to the US dollar, making that aspect of doing business in Zimbabwe much easier.