Watching the nano-second messaging of modern electioneering from Washington to Paris to London, I couldn’t help but think of pigeons.
Carrier pigeons, to be precise. I was thinking of an earlier era, in an African setting, when I worked for Reuters before embarking on a career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. In the run-up to the election in 1980 that brought Robert Mugabe to power, I was part of the coverage of the ceasefire in Zimbabwe’s seven-year bush war that preceded the vote.
