NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

I wake up at the Sun. I go to the keyboard and check for messages. I reply, bring a few in as items on the Virgin Maverick blog, check the local headlines and produce my own morning entry, then go downstairs for a roll, some bush tea, and a walk over to the Carlton Center.

There I check in with Chief Williams, looking for stories worth re-telling or Clues our people badly need, and then go over to the computer center, where I’m banging on folks to upgrade the blog from Movable Type to Scoop, which would let our Netizens start their own discussions and (temporarily) reduce my workload. Then I take a brisk walk over to Mma Ramosawa, and advise her on marketing Always-On applications, while admiring the way she and her new hires can create prototypes while I sleep.

Between these two walks and my return to the Sun for dinner I’m staying in fair shape, but I also know Mark Cuban is working hard to put together a gym for our growing community. At first I wanted this to be a YMCA, but here in South Africa the Y isn’t that kind of organization http://www.saymca.org.za/ – they’re into hostels and advocacy, not running gyms as in the states. Well, I say, show them a new model. But we can’t use the Y name, he says. Whatever.

I’m also trying to keep up with life back home, and the news isn’t good. The Bush loyalty oath program has, like many of his initiatives, tapered off a little, and Jenni writes she hasn’t yet had to take one to keep her job. But John’s school is now reciting it every day, in place of the old Pledge of Allegiance, and I’m afraid his big mouth is going to get him expelled, with me blamed for it.

Jenni’s letters are filled with news about John’s troubles. There’s a gang of drug dealers between home and school, which wasn’t a problem when I was picking him up. But he gets lost easily, and so can’t readily avoid them. Jenni has drawn him a map to bypass them, but last week he got lost and was found, by a cop, miles from school around 10 AM, crying his eyes out. The kid’s 13 but has no sense of direction.

Robin is quiet. She’s going for her driving test soon, and will need to pass if she’s to make soccer practices this spring, because Jenni gets home too late to take her. I write and tell her all about the animals here in South Africa, about the zoos and how they can use her experience with ZooAtlanta, and about the local universities. Her replies are terse.

Sometimes Jenni’s are, too. She doesn’t want to move. Her company is in the middle of a big project, they really need her, and she feels obligated to see it through. Yet I know she misses me, and she’s hard-pressed. She stopped taking the train to work after I left, and now spends two hours each day in the car, which does her mood no good at all.

Then there’s the general economy. Inflation is way up, interest rates are way up. Homes are hard to sell and jobs are hard to come by. Even our next-door neighbor, who was made a multi-millionaire by the area real estate boom, is starting to look anxious, she says, asking her about the possibility of doing some renovations around our place, like adding those rooms we’ve talked about for so long.

The news is all bad, and she still reads it. People are still dying in Iraq. I keep waiting to see the “Saigon Embassy” scene on the BBC – the one with the last soldiers hanging off the bottom of a helicopter on their way out of Baghdad. But it’s not that way. The President refuses to throw in a bad hand, and his rhetoric just gets more belligerent – rumor is he even slapped Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

When he gets mad he starts in with the rhetoric about enemies everywhere, and liberals get very nervous. I’ve got a file of resumes sent me by old friends who want badly to find work here, and Cuban says he has the same problem, magnified by 100 because he’s famous. Build a Web site for them, I say. But he doesn’t want to offer any false hope.

The only way to get even a small percentage of those who want out, out, is to find work for skilled people with Virgin Maverick, or companies associated with it. Debbie Wyatt cleared a deal with ApexHi to gain some control of all their downtown holdings, but even that may not be enough – thank God Leissner doesn’t know or he’d jack up the price, she says. (That’s not for the blog.)

It’s getting very hard to find good local contractors who can build or renovate according to our specifications, she says. I suggest she check Cuban’s database for some general contractors she can bring over. She did, and they all want to bring over a bunch of key people with them, while Branson wants us to rely on local labor for all unskilled work, and raise its skill levels as we do it. That’s part of our charter he says. I say, look, there’s going to be plenty of work for everyone, why not bring them in?

I suggest Debbie Google New York home renovation companies and match the names against Cuban’s database. She does and finds a match – a woman named Lenora D’Estaing. She’s second generation Haitian, she says, and runs a repair service in Brooklyn. Perfect, I say, bring her over, and have her find five friends.

I wonder, though. American blacks haven’t always gotten a great welcome here. They come in with American attitudes, and locals find them, well, a little stuck-up. They see themselves as black but Africans see them as foreigners. Especially since most are just so light – coffee with way too much cream for their tastes.

So long as they know, I say. Why don’t you do a story with Chief Williams on the problems of assimilation, she says. Or, better yet, on one of his men? Good idea, I’ll add it to the list. Which is getting awfully long.

The crisis starts the next day. It’s St. Valentine’s Day in the states. I think, as I wake, that I hope the kids got the Hershey’s chocolates I sent for before I left.

I wake up to read that Tony Leon, head of the opposition Democratic Alliance, has made a speech attacking Virgin Maverick, calling it a tool of President Mbeki, a sell-out to foreign interests, and demanding a look at all our books, which is impossible under our charter.

Leon, who is based in Cape Town, controls a relatively small group descended from the old Afrikaner opposition to the National Party, and Mbeki hates him, really hates him. Partly it’s Leon’s ambition. Partly it’s his rhetoric, fierce with claims of ANC racism and corruption. Maybe it’s his religion. Leon is Jewish. Debbie Wyatt is certain Gerald Leissner is funneling money to the DA, but it’s all done in secret, for business reasons.

And that’s the real problem. Leon may be a small minority, he may in fact be just a minor irritant, but if the ANC starts treating him the way opponents are treated on the rest of the continent it’s going to drive away investment. Leon wants a debate before the next election, which Mbeki would win handily. But Mbeki, despite the lack of risk, won’t give him the satisfaction, or the platform. Branson wrote privately he urged him to do it, but Mbeki takes it all personally.

Everyone has weaknesses. Mbeki’s are that he sometimes turns the political into the personal, and that he sometimes mistakes his own prejudices for scientific fact. His long-time refusal to associate the HIV virus with AIDS was as embarrassing in its own way as Bush’s war with Iraq, and even Nelson Mandela’s public advocacy for the HIV-AIDS view hasn’t really turned him around. So it hasn’t turned around religious people, either, the people who could turn the curse back.

Anyway, now that Leon has taken out after us, someone has to do something, to say something, to deflect the press, and to be the scapegoat.

Branson’s phone call wakes me up.

That person is going to be me.