What did that mean, an African city? Why? Because Joburg was soundtracked by the maquamba beat? There was nothing un-African about Cape Town. He felt the old sentences begin to take shape, the old argument begin to coalesce. This city and all its fucked-up divisions and casual cruelties was the way it was because of slavery and colonialism and you don’t get more African than that.

Who are these “world leaders”? Destroyers, man. Not builders. Not creators. But destroyers. You see, I can’t accept that my fate be in the hands of such fucked-up people. Does that seem normal to you? Do you accept the idea that your fate, your last hour on this earth, might depend on some motherfucker sitting up in the White House in Washington or up in the Kremlin in Moscow? Should the fate of the whole world depend on whether or not one of those bastards’ pricks couldn’t get hard one night? Is that normal? Not to me, man! You see what I’m getting at? A handful of unnatural, unbalanced people are ruling this world. That’s why when I hear that the non-aligned bloc is trying to be a third solution, I can only shake my head. ‘Cause those people who call themselves non-aligned are unbalanced. Do you know what something which is non-aligned means? It means something which ain’t straight, man. Something crooked, unbalanced, an out-of-line people, you know!

I also told them that Africans have to start by feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belonging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Africa has to open her doors to every Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man.

A lutta continua… A lutta continua… A lutta continua... Those words kept turning over and over in my mind during the flight. At first I didn’t understand because it was Portuguese language. One of the boys finally translated it as “the struggle continues!” I said to myself: “How can a responsible leader ever want the struggle to continue?” Who can want a war to continue? War is massacring … and killing. How can anybody want that to go on indefinitely? Those were the things I kept turning round in my head on the flight back from Berlin to Nigeria. That’s when I said to myself: “No! It must not continue. The struggle must STOP!” Since then, that’s been my slogan.

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

My mum says it’s not done to talk about one’s own contribution. Rakgadi agrees, saying it’s not our culture. She does not mean Tswana or Xhosa culture. She means the culture of the Movement.The Struggle was a collective endeavour, above any individual. It seems ugly, grasping and glory hunting in the face of other people’s suffering to oneself front and centre. Freedom fighters were trained in secrecy. They took pride in it. Even couples instinctively knew what not to ask each other.