Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...

What can you buy with Zimbabwe's new 50 dollar banknote?

 

50 dollar banknote?

What can you buy with Zimbabwe's new 50 dollar banknote?
FILE - A man counts a wad of the new Zimbabwean ten-dollar notes received from an ATM outside a bank in Harare on May 20, 2020.  -  
Copyright © africanews
JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP or licensors

ZIMBABWE

Zimbabwe's central bank on Tuesday announced the introduction of a new 50-dollar note, the country's highest denomination, worth only around US$0.60.

Insufficient to pay even for a loaf of bread, the bill's entry into circulation has revived memories of the hyperinflation the southern African nation experienced over a decade ago.

As price growth spiralled out of control, denominations at the time mounted as high as a 100-trillion-dollar note.

Award-winning journalist and government critic Hopewell Chin'ono scoffed at the new banknote, which at the unofficial black market exchange rate will be worth just $0.35 in US dollars.

"It tells you something about inflation in your country if you need 3 notes of your highest currency denomination to buy a premium beer in a supermarket," tweeted Chin'ono.

The new note is the latest and most valuable in a series introduced from February 2019 as Zimbabwe moved back to using local currency.

US dollars had been used since 2009, when the country trashed its own worthless units after hyperinflation reached 500 billion percent.

Now the new denomination is stoking fears of a return of the kind of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and collapsed the economy, with head-spinning daily leaps in the prices of goods and services.

Last year Zimbabwe's inflation rate soared to more than 800 percent, but it has begun easing with the June year-on-year rate officially at 106.64 percent, according to the National Statistical Agency.

The central bank had forecast inflation to slow to 55 percent in July.

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