first condition of humanityââdoes, however, act constantly against the fulfillment of that craving for peace, an insertion into my mental template that can be regarded as a âcategorical imperative.â There is nothing mystical about it, nothing beyond an overacute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust.
A casual involvement, at a most impressionable age, with the Abeokuta womenâs movement, narrated in
Aké,
may have prepared the soil. That began in the late 1930s, when the women, led by my aunt, the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, rose against unjust taxes and chased the feudal lord, the Alake of Abeokuta, from his throne. So might also the induction, in my school days, into the propensities of the class bully, merging onto a broader canvas of the arrogant ways of colonial domination. That last in turn formed a continuum of visceral identification with the apartheid victims of South Africa, a condition that ironically honed itself to an insurgent pitch only when I arrived in the United Kingdom in 1954, into the homeland of a colonial power that ruled with violence in parts of Asia and Africa, Kenya most notoriously on the latter continent.
When I was studying in England in the mid-1950s, vacations found most of us African students headed for London from all over the British Isles to earn some extra moneyâmostly as porters in railway stations and post offices. We would then gather at the Overseas Students Club in Earlâs Court, the University of London Student Union, or the West African Students Union in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. There, virtually only one topic dominated all conversation: colonization and how/when to end it! The West African colonies appeared to be on their way to negotiated independence, so our agitated sights were set in other directions. Kenya was embroiled in the Mau Mau revolt, a truly indigenous, internally generated struggle, in which the forests favored the liberation fighters. South Africa, however, occupied a special place of bafflement, rage, and despair. Awareness of that degraded zone of existence on the soil of our own continent, the apprehension of a world that assigned to oneâs race a condition of subhumanity, was all-consuming. We began to prepare ourselves for the day when we would reclaim that humanityâby force of arms if needed.
This obsession with the humiliation of racist entrenchment in southern Africa was not one of bloodless empathyâwe did, after all, savor mild doses of that condition in our encounters with the white natives on their own territory. Even as a student, occupying a mostly sheltered environment, I did not escape pointed acts of contempt or rejection. My overanthologized poem âTelephone Conversation,â the record of an exchange with a landlady, was only one of my many trite encounters with British racism. On public transport, for instanceâ although admittedly I
enjoyed
having a seat to myself in a filled-up double-decker bus, which made turning over the abnormally broad pages of
The
Yorkshire Post
much easierâcould I really pretend not to notice, or fail to be stung by, the fact that a boarding passenger had traversed the length of the bus, seen the one empty seat next to me, but had chosen to retrace his or her steps and climb upstairs to search for a vacant seat? That the same passenger had come down againâno standing allowed upstairsâand chosen to attach his or her arm to a strap sooner than take that empty seat? Or, even more blatantly, when I was about to take the nearest vacant seat on a two-seat bench, that the occupant next to the window would shoot up, quickly extricate his or her body, and move to another seat or remain standing? Incidents like these, even in the mid-1950s, were mind-numbingly commonplace.
In shops, you turned invisible. The shopkeeper ostentatiously pretended not to see you and turned to attend to someone who had entered the shop long
A casual involvement, at a most impressionable age, with the Abeokuta womenâs movement, narrated in
Aké,
may have prepared the soil. That began in the late 1930s, when the women, led by my aunt, the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, rose against unjust taxes and chased the feudal lord, the Alake of Abeokuta, from his throne. So might also the induction, in my school days, into the propensities of the class bully, merging onto a broader canvas of the arrogant ways of colonial domination. That last in turn formed a continuum of visceral identification with the apartheid victims of South Africa, a condition that ironically honed itself to an insurgent pitch only when I arrived in the United Kingdom in 1954, into the homeland of a colonial power that ruled with violence in parts of Asia and Africa, Kenya most notoriously on the latter continent.
When I was studying in England in the mid-1950s, vacations found most of us African students headed for London from all over the British Isles to earn some extra moneyâmostly as porters in railway stations and post offices. We would then gather at the Overseas Students Club in Earlâs Court, the University of London Student Union, or the West African Students Union in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. There, virtually only one topic dominated all conversation: colonization and how/when to end it! The West African colonies appeared to be on their way to negotiated independence, so our agitated sights were set in other directions. Kenya was embroiled in the Mau Mau revolt, a truly indigenous, internally generated struggle, in which the forests favored the liberation fighters. South Africa, however, occupied a special place of bafflement, rage, and despair. Awareness of that degraded zone of existence on the soil of our own continent, the apprehension of a world that assigned to oneâs race a condition of subhumanity, was all-consuming. We began to prepare ourselves for the day when we would reclaim that humanityâby force of arms if needed.
This obsession with the humiliation of racist entrenchment in southern Africa was not one of bloodless empathyâwe did, after all, savor mild doses of that condition in our encounters with the white natives on their own territory. Even as a student, occupying a mostly sheltered environment, I did not escape pointed acts of contempt or rejection. My overanthologized poem âTelephone Conversation,â the record of an exchange with a landlady, was only one of my many trite encounters with British racism. On public transport, for instanceâ although admittedly I
enjoyed
having a seat to myself in a filled-up double-decker bus, which made turning over the abnormally broad pages of
The
Yorkshire Post
much easierâcould I really pretend not to notice, or fail to be stung by, the fact that a boarding passenger had traversed the length of the bus, seen the one empty seat next to me, but had chosen to retrace his or her steps and climb upstairs to search for a vacant seat? That the same passenger had come down againâno standing allowed upstairsâand chosen to attach his or her arm to a strap sooner than take that empty seat? Or, even more blatantly, when I was about to take the nearest vacant seat on a two-seat bench, that the occupant next to the window would shoot up, quickly extricate his or her body, and move to another seat or remain standing? Incidents like these, even in the mid-1950s, were mind-numbingly commonplace.
In shops, you turned invisible. The shopkeeper ostentatiously pretended not to see you and turned to attend to someone who had entered the shop long
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