Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him. I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew that he had found himself while studying in prison, and that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own.

Sometimes it all comes back to me and I ask myself: “Why all this shit? Why do all these horrors happen to me? … All the shit I’ve been through in this motherfuckin’ world ever since I was born. … What kind of world is this? A world where you get your ass kicked if you do good … but given a medal if you kill some guy in the name of patriotism! What shit is that?” My first clash with “law and order” people was on 30 April 1974. I can’t forget that, man! Oh, what bastards! There I was in my house in Surulere. At that time, you know, there wasn’t any barbed-wire fence around my place. I had nothing to fear. I wasn’t even thinking they could have something against me. I was just preaching revolution for Africa, you know.

Talk of comedy! Yesterday, Friday, I was here in Kĩambu to collect the largest wages of my life. I was with friends. Now I am back in the same town, without the money, and nobody knows me. The prison guards shake their heads to every question concerning the fate that awaits us. A Saturday in ruins, I note in my mental diary.

He has a few words for me, the only thing he can give. He says: Be prepared for the worst, but always hope for the best. See you in court tomorrow. He leaves as the guards are herding us back to our cells. The hope that the court tomorrow will end my misery buoys my spirits. I whisper to one inmate what I have learned. Soon everybody has the same news about the court tomorrow.

From prison, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.’ Not all great art is possessed of the darkness we are probing, but much of it is.