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Page 32


  When you look back at the United States, you see the ideal pattern. Until 1914, America was the largest debtor nation in the world. Entrepreneurs had borrowed a huge amount of money in the nineteenth century to develop our infrastructure. We built railroads, canals, cities, and factories.

  Today, there is an immense hoopla—and correctly so—over our deficit. There’s nothing wrong with being a debtor nation if you are putting the money into productive assets for the future, which is what we did in the nineteenth century. The Europeans sent their money to our country because they could make a lot of money off us. We got the payoff in the twentieth century, when we became the richest country in the world.

  This could happen to Zaire, too. If Zaire attracted entrepreneurs who would truly develop the country, in time its economy would become immensely powerful. Unfortunately, back in the sixties and seventies Zaire had thrown out all the capitalists solely because they were capitalists and colonialists, or exploitative.

  Economically, nineteenth-century America was like Africa or Siberia today. Then, of course, there were no currency controls, regulations, immigration policies, and visas. There were no United Nations’ studies and task forces saying money should be sent here and there. If the opportunity looked good, capital, which was fluid and without inhibitions, took advantage of it. Like water running downhill, capital flowed to wherever the return was the highest.

  Capital never cares whether you’re black, white, Communist, socialist, Christian, or Muslim. All it cares about is its safety and its profit. It goes where the opportunities are. Capital is not concerned whether it impregnates Israel or Egypt, electronics or diamond mines.

  With this in mind, the Russians could solve their problems quickly. Legalize private property, tax everyone modestly, and make their currency convertible, and their mess would straighten itself out in rapid order. Foreign capital would find that attractive.

  In the sixties and seventies, the Communist countries—China, Albania, and that whole crowd—said, “No, we’re going to do it on our own. We don’t want any outside capital because then we’ll be exploited like the Africans.”

  The Africans said the same thing, but they were all looking at the wrong model. In the nineteenth century, America borrowed huge sums of money and invested it wisely. We didn’t buy furs for the dictator, we didn’t buy cars for Mobutu. The money went into productive assets, and we got rich.

  Thus, South Africa now has a leg up on every other place in Africa because of an infrastructure laid on by its “exploiters,” its true developers—an infrastructure any future government and all future generations will be glad to have. In the West we hear that everything in South Africa would rapidly resolve itself if only the Europeans would leave so the real Africans could run South Africa. After traveling close to the ground through the black-run countries of Zaire, Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, I was certainly not convinced that this was any inevitable path to African prosperity and social justice.

  I wondered who, in fact, were the real South Africans. In Johannesburg, the population was indeed black and white, but in Cape Town it was multicultural and multicolored. Two centuries before the English had arrived in the nineteenth century to mine gold and diamonds, European settlers called Afrikaners had settled the Cape of Good Hope, establishing Cape Town. Through a former student of mine we met Hannes Myburgh, the ninth generation of a Northern European family that had arrived on the Cape more than three hundred years before. His family, which owned the oldest vineyard in South Africa, had been in the Cape area longer than most every black’s.

  He invited us to have lunch at the vineyard, where we and his other guests sampled not only his wines but also a number of competitors’. It turned into an exuberant day that lasted long past lunch and ended in our dancing on the table. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a yet more complicated dance that evening, which resulted in a fall and an injury to my back, that ten-hour lunch might still be going on.

  A day in bed gave me time to reflect on who were the real South Africans. Those blacks we’d seen crowding borders north of here to enter South Africa were typical of the immigration that had taken place over the past century, black Africans from northern regions migrating south for mining and then industrial jobs.

  The earliest inhabitants of South Africa were the Khoisan peoples, called Bushmen and Hottentots by the white colonizers. Not large in number, they lived across much of what we today call South Africa but were concentrated in the Cape peninsula.

  In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a rest stop at Cape Town for its trade to China, Indonesia, and India. Some Europeans spread out from the town to grow food for the settlers, called Boers, and to supply food for the company’s ships, which provided the Boers with European consumer goods.

  As long as two hundred and fifty years ago, South Africa, particularly the area around Cape Town, wasn’t a black country; it was more of a melting pot than New York City is. Europeans pulled in here, particularly the Dutch, English, and Portuguese, as they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed to China and India. Naturally some stayed and settled. Chinese, Indonesian, and Indian traders heading west followed the same pattern. Many of these peoples intermarried.

  “Go back?” one Indian shopkeeper said to me. “Where? I don’t speak Hindi. My family’s been here since the late seventeen hundreds. I speak only Afrikaans and English. I wouldn’t have any idea where to go if things become impossible for me here.”

  Force this shopkeeper and Hannes to “go home” and they would no more know where to head than would 95 percent of Americans. The ancestors of these two had been on their continent far longer than most Americans have been on theirs.

  Hannes was no longer European; he and my new Indian friend were both African.

  The farther south we had gone in Africa, the more beautiful and prosperous Africa had become. At that time, of the sub-Saharan countries, I considered investing in only Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and Botswana.

  Despite everything you have heard about boycotts, black Africa’s trade with South Africa was booming. Even though Mobutu, the dictator of Zaire, was a leader of the boycott, we had bought South Africa’s delectable wines throughout Zaire. South African products were available in every black country through which we had passed. These countries had wanted the boycott to continue so they could get there first and capture the South African market. For example, Zimbabwe’s trade with South Africa had been doubling every year for at least five years.

  Here’s my bullish case for Africa: In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the Soviets and the Americans had financed dozens of African regimes through the CIA and KGB. Today there are no more struggles with Communists or socialists, nor any money to finance them. The movement has died. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets are propping up guerrilla movements now.

  As a result of their leaders dying or simply stepping aside, African governments are collapsing, their people rising. The continent’s status quo and its borders are ripe for change, which will bring some strife. Any wars that might follow will be short, however, since there are few armaments to speak of on the continent and little will to fight. In the political reformation to come, the Africans will adopt either the Western model or the Chinese model, that is, one mouthing social and political platitudes but allowing every kind of vigorous free-market activity.

  The borders in Africa are even now becoming rational. After years of war, Ethiopia and Eritrea have peacefully agreed on how to split into two countries. The border problems in the Sudan are working themselves out. Until we intervened, a similar process was happening in Somalia.

  As African problems get cleaned up, the entrepreneurs who already exist throughout Africa will be freed to develop real economies. Africa has huge natural resources. The commodities markets are depressed now, but someday the world will be desperate for Africa’s resources, especially as production in the former USSR falls apart. Zaire, for instanc
e, is wonderfully fertile. Let a seed fall from your hand and it grows. Zaire used to export food, and it could again. Even Angola will bounce back. As for the future of South Africa, it all depends on how the political struggle plays out.

  What I know for certain is that big fortunes will be made on the African continent in the next twenty-five years.

  Without doubt I’ll be back in a few years to make more extensive investments.

  Tabitha’s grandfather had been a submariner in Western Australia during the Second World War. He befriended a young Australian family, and over the years he had stayed in touch. Now the husband, Francis Burt, was the governor-general of the state of Western Australia.

  Not knowing what to expect, Tabitha called him when we arrived in Perth and explained that her grandmother had said she must look them up.

  We were invited to dinner at the governor-general’s mansion. She explained that we were on motorcycles and didn’t have much in the way of fancy clothes, but this was waved away. We put on our best bibs and tuckers. Tabitha had brought along a pair of high heels and a single black silk dress for such occasions. I wore my leather jacket and boots, shined for the first time in months, put on a bow tie, and off we went.

  The governor-general, we learned, was Queen Elizabeth’s ceremonial representative here. He occupied a spot in the Western Australian government roughly equivalent to that of the queen in hers, a figurehead who cut ribbons and hosted state dinners.

  Australia is made up of six such states and the Northern Territory. Western Australia covers half the country but contains only 1.6 million people. Imagine if the United States west of the Great Plains held only 1.6 million people.

  We had a delightful dinner with Francis and his wife, Margaret. The following weekend we even witnessed the baptism of their grandchild.

  Australia is roughly the size and shape of our lower forty-eight states, which made driving around three of its four borders a very long ride.

  We planned to start out from Perth and ride along the western and northern coasts to Darwin. From there we would ride south to Ayers Rock and Alice Springs. After retracing our route back north, we would ride east to the Great Barrier Reef. We would then hit the east coast and pass through Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, from which we would ferry over to Tasmania, then ride back to Sydney in order to fly to South America.

  In distance, this was the equivalent of riding from Los Angeles to Seattle, taking a right turn and riding to the Minnesota-Canadian border, driving down to Tulsa and back up to Chicago. On to New York and the New England states, from which we would ride through Washington, DC, Raleigh, and Miami before hopping a boat to Cuba and then back to Atlanta.

  Nine thousand miles of motorcycling.

  Australian roads turned out to be different from those anywhere in the world, except perhaps Texas. For the most part the country is flat. The roads barreled forward for hundreds of miles without a curve. We put our rubber on the asphalt—the roads here were paved—and made terrific time.

  The first time we went to pass a large truck we were taken aback. We were going around it—and going around it and going around it—until we realized it was a vehicle called a road train. Essentially, it was a tractor with three long trailers attached, each fifty to sixty feet long. Road trains shot down the highway because there was no reason not to, another example of mankind adapting to its circumstances. We had to goose up our motorcycles to get around them.

  In Australia everybody lives along the coasts, inside of which is very little except desert. As we drove the long distances between towns there was nothing man-made—no gas stations, no houses, no mailboxes.

  The vast distances of Australia were broken only by the occasional roadhouse offering gas, food, and beds, and the even less frequent towns. Every so often dead kangaroos and sheep appeared by the side of the road, victims of high-speed trucks and cars. The absolutely straight roads appeared surrealistic, pressing forward into the endless, empty, flat desert. It made me realize how much as travelers we expect a variety of scenery to sweep over us rather than to encounter the same scene without end.

  We crossed Australia in a month and a half. Luckily we were there in the dry season, so we didn’t have to worry too much about rain.

  In the west, flash floods were a danger. We had seen photographs of stalled vehicles flooded out in the desert. Along the roads depth rods, four yards high, stood every mile or so to warn motorists how deep the water was during these floods. Later we saw these same rods as we crossed the Andes, warning of the depth of snow.

  In the Sahara we sometimes covered as few as fifty or sixty miles a day. Here we had several days during which we covered seven hundred miles, our longest driving days on the entire trip, since there was little else to do but drive.

  We were taking a trip the Australians themselves did not take. In the west we constantly met people who said, “I’ve never driven in the east. I’d love to go there.” In the east people said, “I’ve never driven in the west.” When you realized it is as big as the United States but mostly empty, you understood why.

  Unlike the land mass of other continents, Australia has been stable, with few geological shifts to create mountains. The starkly beautiful landscape was interrupted only by salt lakes and infrequent protrusions, like Ayers Rock, the Olgas, and a few austere hills. In our Old West, a cow needed forty acres to survive; here, too, each kangaroo or sheep needed an enormous tract of grazing land.

  The hours passed in a surreal experience of humming motor, paved road, red clay, and rocky scrub. One night Tabitha said she spent much of this driving time, which didn’t require the concentration demanded by Africa, Siberia, and China, thinking back through much of her life, replaying her childhood, school, and college days in an effort to understand them better.

  Tabitha and I began to talk about life after this trip, which seemed remote. We’d been away forever, and it seemed almost as if we would be away forever. Life when we got back? Well, yes, we wanted to refashion our lives, but neither of us was quite sure how it would work.

  …

  We enjoyed stopping at the Australian roadhouses, perched on the never-ending, straight desert roads.

  For hundreds of miles these were the only places a traveler could rest and resupply. A roadhouse sold gas, had a small restaurant and a convenience store, and let rooms, usually no more than eight to ten. Too remote to be whipped into any sort of conformity by competition, they had developed into crusty frontier hangouts, each individual and unique. An air about them encouraged the Australian passion for drink at any hour of the day. This was the first time I had ever been offered a beer for breakfast.

  At night the travelers swapped stories and drank beer. Occasionally a few employees joined us, but the owner and his wife, understaffed like entrepreneurs everywhere, were usually too busy to sit down and talk.

  The employees tended to be drifters. In one roadhouse, the staff was in revolt because the owner, going bankrupt, couldn’t pay them. They were working there only long enough to get the money to move on to the next roadhouse.

  I felt sorry for many roadhouse owners because their business was suffering. The road-train drivers, usually out in pairs, didn’t stop at night. We guessed they swapped drivers and slept in the rear of their cabs.

  This seemed to be a good time to buy roadhouses and develop a chain. I determined that their business was suffering because the price of oil had shot up as a result of the Gulf War and people weren’t traveling. Buying Australian roadhouses in this slump would be an example of buying straw hats in winter. Whether for business or pleasure, travel is going to be a major trend in the world of the future. Those prepared to take advantage of it are going to reap fantastic profits.

  Our tires made a satisfying sizzle against the asphalt as we reached sixty-five miles an hour. We’d just tanked up, the sun bore down, the road shot off straight before us, and we were ready for a three-hour run to the next roadhouse.

  Pop! My bike wobbled b
etween my legs. The engine had blown something, I guessed, and from its hard knocks and the way I couldn’t steer properly, something major.

  I pulled to the edge of the road. The bike lurched as I came to a stop. Ahead, Tabitha had slowed and looked back, wondering if I was adjusting my helmet or if something was wrong.

  My back tire was flat. Examining it, I found I’d had my first blowout in twenty-five years of driving, a three-inch-long gash. The tire had become worn in its center, which I had also never seen on a motorcycle. Normally the wear is even, as motorcycles constantly bank on all surfaces of a tire, but there were few curves on these long, straight, flat, hot roads. As I assisted Tabitha in changing the tire we realized we had to examine our tires more frequently.

  I’d always expected a blowout to be dangerous, but this happened at what for us was top speed and yet I’d had no difficulty in controlling the bike. I wondered what would have happened if the front tire had blown at high speed. I decided I’d be happy to wait another twenty-five years to find out.

  We finally hit Darwin, a semi-Asian frontier town.

  As Australia’s northernmost city, the one nearest the Indonesian islands, it was striking how multicolored, multiracial, multiethnic, multieverything it was. People from all over Asia had crowded in here—Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, Indians, and Pakistanis. In the street we heard a polyglot of languages, along with English spoken in peculiar ways.

  A boomtown now, it would be one for a long time. As Australia opened up more, people would move into the frontier areas such as Darwin and Perth. It would become one of those world cities where a go-getter could strike figurative gold. People are always on the alert for where the gold is and rush to it. If a student asked me today where it would be over the next couple of decades and he insisted on speaking English, I’d send him to Darwin. I’d tell him to go into tourism or into any field having to do with trade between Asia and this crossroads.