Complicated world

Following the post at reference 1, I wondered about the Lusaka Boys' School. What sort of a place was it back in the fifties? What sort of a place is it now?

Google turned up what looked like memories from past pupils and pictures which suggested that the place was a bit like one of our lower grade public schools is now and is a bit like one of our comprehensives. A regular school doing regular sorts of things, albeit in the middle of Africa.

But it also turned up a memoir by one Peter Fraenkel, in the form of a google book. It seems that he was a child in the 1930's, of a Jewish family from Breslau (now part of western Poland and called Wrocław, then part of eastern Germany) who, for some reason that I have not yet got to, wound up in Lusaka.

At that time the school seems to have been a school for whites, perhaps the poor whites rather than the real ruling classes, with most of the pupils being Afrikaans speaking rather than English speaking. With the former still hating the English after the Boer war and rooting for Germany in the bigger war which was about to start. They were also very prejudiced about both blacks and Jews. Notwithstanding, one of the best teachers in what he reports as a bad bunch, not up to Breslau standards at all, was an Afrikaans speaker, very shocked that coloureds, never mind blacks, were allowed to drive cars down to the south in Johannesburg.

Fraenkel, an exile in an outpost of England, was trying hard to assert his Germany hating credentials and had a hard time.

Amazon offer lots of books by Fraenkel, presumably he went on to become an established author, with this book new at around £30, but I settled for a second hand one at around £3, including postage. Maybe it will be shipped from one of those second hand book warehouses in the Mid West where they all voted for Trump - which seems rather ironic. In any event, I shall read more in the book than is convenient on the screen.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/trees.html.