Somehow they trusted me. Kings, Prime Ministers, dedicated civil servants and a few of the world's poorest folk shared their aspirations and agonies, and together we worked for change. Weeping Kings and Wild Boars, a collection of memoir essays, tells their stories and mine drawn from my career as an overseas agricultural economist. A reigning monarch sat on a darkened veranda with me, shedding tears of frustration. In a single sentence, a teenage village girl taught this "foreign expert" the true meaning of poverty and human worth. Before her assassination, one of Lesotho's royal family and I worked quietly to help desegregate South Africa thus linking that nation and hers. My life's kaleidoscope has been graced with remarkable people, powerful moments of change, unspeakable loss, and glimpses into age-old cultures.
About the Author: Jerry was a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University which sent him to live more than 20 years on projects in South Asia and southern Africa. As an academic, he wrote nearly 200 articles and professional papers, two of which won Best Published Article awards. His work redirected agricultural and labor policies in Pakistan and Lesotho and contributed to food grain self-sufficiency in Pakistan and Gambia. In South Africa his research and writing spurred the White government to accelerate abandoning apartheid by creating a Black middle class. He also wrote the basic treatise which framed much of an interracial dialogue on rights in South Africa leading, ultimately, to a new Bill of Rights in the 1997. Several op-eds in the Christian Science Monitor influenced American policy toward South Africa. He ended his overseas career by writing the first economic strategies for the incoming Mandela government. Jerry's early nonfiction celebrated the natural world, especially wildlife, in American and Pakistani outdoor magazines. He wrote a hunting and fishing column in the Fort Collins Coloradoan for two years. Following retirement, his literary nonfiction appeared in Pilgrimage, Matter, The Superstition Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Memoir Journal, Ruminate, and elsewhere. "Mahlapane's Story," first published in The Superstition Review, won the Northern Colorado Writers 2011 essay competition.