In unhistoric acts lies true history

Last week my four-year-old son gained a new classmate. She arrived in the middle of term as her mother has just walked out of Zimbabwe, leaving everything behind to start again from scratch here. I don’t just mean financial scratch — ‘we couldn’t bring a single penny’, she told me as she dashed off to an employment agency — but personal scratch too. When we exchanged mobile telephone numbers I asked her if she texted. She replied that she knew how ‘but I’ve nobody here to text me yet’. The decision of this well-connected graduate — who has worked for the Zimbabwean parliament, the Red Cross and the UN — to turn herself into a refugee tells me as much about the future of Zimbabwe as anything I have read about Mugabe.

I am not alone in finding individuals’ stories a way of understanding current, and historical, events. Take 9/11.