Tuesday 24 September 2013

Skin deep

Another wide carriage Lexikon ready for take off. Image from oztypewriter

4 comments:

  1. WD40? Good lord, man! Haven't you seen the dire warnings?

    But on another note, it's good to see evidence that Olivetti ran a good factory even in South Africa. I also recently learned that they built typewriters in Toronto. They were truly a global typewriter company.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Extremely interesting information about the factory during apartheid.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In Cape Town when I was there in one of the museums there was some of the advertising that was put up in England and elsewhere about boycotting SA made products coz it was an unethical choice due to the exploitation of workers there at the time

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's right Steve. Not just England but the whole of Great Britain was part of the South African trade boycott - we had to learn to eat summer apples from New Zealand instead of the Cape. It wasn't really based on the exploitation of black workers - that still happens there as it does around the world - white workers too. It was more to do with the apartheid laws being a bit crap, especially if you happened to be black. After Mr Mandela was elected prime minister in 1994, he reflected that the SA trade boycott by many countries had hastened his vision of a rainbow nation.

      Delete