To Africa, the rest of the world, and back home.  My life has been anything but normal as a roller-coaster of business, financial, and cultural change. 

 

From a small farming community north of Napanee Ontario the only house I could see from my bedroom was my grandmothers.   My father died beside me on my 10^th birthday with us both in hospital for different problems, but for me it was part of life.   It just was what it was.  I did well in school somehow and followed a responsible engineering path through Queens' University in the late 1980’s.   On campus I watched demonstrations about South-West Africa (Namibia), apartheid, and Nelson Mandela.  I understood nothing, but I was intrigued at how different the world was from my own early years.  When a chance to be ‘recruited’ to South Africa as an engineer arrived, I grabbed it.  And yes --- my world changed more than I thought possible.

 

For the next 5 years I worked in the high stress production environment of deep level gold mining where, if people knew how gold was mined back then, they would perhaps never want to wear it again.   The fall of apartheid, a cultural and government funded civil war, the rise of Nelson Mandela, and my own integration into an environment that was 0% like my first 22 years of life in Canada, and I was a changed person.  Carrying a handgun to work is unconceivable now – but in that world it was normal.  There are lots of ‘normal’ things we did which would sound crazy if uttered today.

 

Realizing that deep level mining was not the place to live a long and happy existence, my life changed 180 degrees again when I manipulated myself into the parent company to end up one of the largest traders on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange during the deregulation period of the late 90’s.  Asian tiger market crash 1 followed by market crash 2, then Dot.com bubbles, 9/11, the turmoil of volatility is long.  I survived it all surprisingly unscathed and went on to establish a Cayman Islands based hedge fund while domiciling myself in Dublin, Ireland.   Five years of Guinness was amazing, but my African passport literally pulled me back into South Africa – for me a different South Africa from the one I left.  

 

Carrying on in the world of hedge funds and making good money perhaps too easily, I decided The Democratic Republic of Congo and its natural resource abundance of cobalt, copper, and other minerals was the place to hang my hat.  I turned 180 degrees once again and started fresh in the DRC as a small business entrepreneur. To be continued...