New Corrected Coin Book On South African Coins

I note that Nortje edited his post to remove any suggestion he had apologised on the BidorBuy forum at just before 8.30am Sunday morning 2nd April (South African time). You can see his latest edit time at the bottom of the post linked in my post above.

So the link above will now reflect his latest edit and the screen dump here, which I had the foresight to make (knowing this devious man), will reflect what he edited out: http://gwb.com.au/nortjefraud.jpg

The screen dump was taken at about midnight, eight hours earlier.

What is interesting to me is that Karel aka Nortje (or his voice) keeps on suggesting in this same Bidorbuy forum that the book I published on the Strachan and Co tokens with Prof Clive Graham in 1978 was published in 1976.

Nortje knows this is a lie but does not EDIT that very old post seen here: http://forum.bidorbuy.co.za/forum/b...o-token-scam. When you read his comments you will quickly see why a 1978 publication date does not fit.

For the record Prof Michael Laidlaw is a very well respected South African numismatist who will confirm that he forwarded Nortje's email (as cut and past above) to me this weekend.

We now know who Karel on this forum really is.

You can see the facts here while tokencoins.com is being updated: http://www.gwb.com.au/nortje.htm (some links to this page might not work for obvious reasons)

My last observation in this thread.

I spent thirty years researching this subject - material I personally unearthed that resulted in the rewriting and acceptance by just about everyone that the Griquatown tokens failed completely. Before my research it was claimed that they circulated widely for two years. In my view and most others not one Griquatown token ever circulated as money - if they did circulate back then it was as a gift or trinket.

Nortje spent two weeks selectively plagiarising this online research and writing a PDF which claimed the tokens circulated. For that he was given an award by the NNS whose Secretary is Brian Hern author of the coin catalogues that claimed the tokens circulated widely.

Nortje's work was fraud; mine was a lifetime of dedication.

Those are the facts.

Actually the shoe is on the other foot.

How can anyone take you seriously when you claim to be a pillar of the community?

Nortje in his email above belatedly admits to blatant selective plagiarising of my research - something I exposed over 18 months ago - something he earlier refused to admit to even though it was a no brainer.

Is plagiarising research fraud?

Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. One form is the appropriation of the ideas and results of others, and publishing as to make it appear the author had performed all the work under which the data was obtained. A subset is citation plagiarism - willful or negligent failure to appropriately credit other or prior discoverers, so as to give an improper impression of priority. This is also known as, "citation amnesia", the "disregard syndrome" and "bibliographic negligence". Arguably, this is the most common type of scientific misconduct. Sometimes it is difficult to guess whether authors intentionally ignored a highly relevant cite or lacked knowledge of the prior work. Discovery credit can also be inadvertently reassigned from the original discoverer to a better-known researcher. This is a special case of the Matthew effect.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scien...c_misconduct

You obviously know little or nothing about research. What is described above from Wikipedia is exactly what Nortje did and one of the main reasons he has now agreed to return his NNS award. (See his email above).

As someone who researched the Griqua for 30 years let's be quite clear about one thing.

The overwhelming majority of the Griqua at Griquatown in 1817-20 had no understanding of money. (This view is supported by Prof Arndt - yes they understood traditional barter like beads which they could string around their neck.)

Not only that but the findings of both Ann Stuart (undertaken recently on behalf of the publisher of the catalogue) and I are that there is no record anywhere of a single token actually circulating. In fact her report is headed the FAILED tokens....

Intent does not equal success regardless of how much money the LMS threw at it it.

The publisher of the catalogue has quoted the wrong word used by Helm... he states and I quote - according to your post:
"The fact that it is recorded (Helm 1821) it was distributed at too cheap a rate only can be accounted for that it was issued but unfortunately not recorded as received. Yes, distribution must mean something given in return but we could not account for what that was..." The word used by Helm is DISPOSED NOT distributed - distributed is only ever used by Nortje in his fraudulent research. Disposed means to get rid of permanently - it does NOT imply circulation. Stuart and I quote the correct word DISPOSED, used by Helm, in our research.

As the publisher of the catalogue also points out on Stuart's research "As to the influence of who and how many understood money at the time - this was not part of the report and we can only speculate that..."

That is the difference between my 30 years of research on the people and Stuart's very focused research on just the tokens. I have a very clear understanding of the environment at Griquatown at that time - where Stuart had no understanding of this. How you can ignore the environment of the people back then defeats me.

I give you the six key facts confirming that not one Griquatown token ever circulated - there are many others. It's plain logic:

1 When Anderson returned to Griquatown from Cape Town in 1814 the people there had lost faith in him. In fact the major Griqua families left Griquatown leaving the settlement a ghost town until 1820.
2 There was no shop in Griquatown in which to trade the tokens.
3 There was no hole in the tokens to facilitate carrying them with their beads.
4 The people there had no understanding of money (Prof Arndt)
5 The tokens are never listed as assets anywhere, at any time, by the LMS at Griquatown
6 There is not one reference to them by Campbell in his second book covering his trip to South Africa and Griquatown in 1820. In fact Campbell's only related comment in this book is that "regular trades do not exist in Griquatown".. the resident missionary at the time, Anderson, makes no reference to them at any time despite writing a large number of letters and keeping journals.

The publisher of the catalogue advised me a couple of weeks ago by email that although he recognises the Griquatown tokens were a complete failure he would be speculating that a few might have circulated. I have no understanding of the outside forces that might have forced this concession by him but speculation is not fact.

As a direct result of this speculation I have withdrawn my support of his coin catalogue. I advised him a couple of weeks ago that he could not use my research on the Strachan tokens in his coin catalogue. I had earlier freely supplied this to him at his request. I withdrew my permission because I could not ethically be seen to support what his new coin catalogue claims.

I am happy to wait for the time when logic prevails and speculation is cast aside and the FACT that not one Griquatown token ever circulated as money is finally accepted.

The fact is that until a direct reference from that time to the tokens circulating is found it is incorrect to claim that even one circulated. This fact is not rocket science.

I am not going to respond to "Karel" who hides behind a non-de-plume.

If he has the courage to reveal who he really is I will happily debate him on this subject.

Hi january1may,

Anyone interested will find that the missionaries in general used money, virtual and real, as a method of teaching. Some of the missionaries themselves became traders, so it would have benefitted them to introduce and teach the relationship between commodification and money to the local population.

They were also expected to find ways to make the various mission stations self -sustainable. The trade by the missionaries were frowned upon, but accepted on condition they do not make a profit. "God's bankers indeed".

We know that the Griqua Town tokens reached their destination and were issued. I include a pic of a circulated token, showing light wear. More circulated examples have also been found.

Point is, I am not making a case for more or less widely circulated. I am simply saying that the tokens are a good example of a numismatic event rich in history.

We know that the author of this catalogue will now include this in his new updated catalogue, and quite rightly so. That tokensa1 is not in agreement is neither here nor there. The "new corrected coin book" will now be corrected.

I have updated my one page PDF explaining the "environmental reasons" behind the fact not one Griquatown token ever circulated.

Here they are:

It is a fact that Spink & Son now distance themselves from Parsons booklet and support the more recent research by Scott Balson who finds that the silver tokens were produced as day and half day labour tokens but completely failed. ie not one token ever circulated even though they did arrive in Griquatown c1817. Recent research by Ann Stuart demonstrates Parsons research is flawed.

and

In fact the only direct reference to the Griquatown tokens is by Helm who replaced Anderson in 1820. He asks the LMS "what am I to do with the greatest part of them" and refers to Anderson disposing of a few in the past at "too cheap a rate". Disposed means to "get rid of permanently" and too cheap a rate is likely to be a polite way of saying Anderson gave them away - not confusion over their value as previously claimed. In no way does this statement imply any circulated.

Source: http://gwb.com.au/summation.pdf

Yes, I think we got the point that you have a lot of hatred for anyone who doesn't agree with you. I think, and I'm sure a lot of other people would think the same, that this isn't the place for your personal vendetta.