Musings on the magical rabbit warren that is Wikipedia.

This morning I was writing about Africa and wanted some background information about an advisor to Jomo Kenyatta whom I had met a couple of times when I lived in Nairobi back in the 1970s. I popped into the rabbit hole marked T Ras Makonnen and found myself in the part of the warren inhabited by the London-based Pan African activists of the 1930s. I fossicked around for a while, coming across Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and others and popped back up through a hole marked Arthur Andrew Cipriani. I re-entered another burrow, that of Danny Cipriani, to remind myself what outstanding promise he had showed as a rugby fly half early in his career before seeming to lose his way and moving to Australia to find his focus again. Wikipedia told me that he shared the politician’s Trinidadian roots so I hung around the Trinidadian bit of the Wikipedia warren to learn that my old friend and one-time Attorney General of the Turks & Caicos Islands Lisa Agard is now CEO of Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago.
So in an enjoyable hour a chain of links joined two pleasant and hitherto unconnected memories, a chat about jazz which I had with Mr Makonnen in Nairobi in the 1970s and an enjoyable lunch with Lisa nearly 20 years later, at a restaurant in Providenciales looking out over the turquoise seas while we passed the time waiting for a flight to Miami. Lisa played a significant part in the development of the Turks & Caicos Islands in the 1990s and features in my book An Accidental Envoy, a copy of which I will send her.
The danger of course, particularly for a writer, is to spend too long on ‘research’ and not enough time on using the information resulting from it. But Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and, en passant, I recommend that when we get the regular begging letter from Jimmy Wales, its founder, we make a modest donation.