The most visible of these features was the watchtower, usually built on the highest ground, and from which the Union Jack fluttered its symbol of conquest and control. Under constant surveillance, the inmates of the camp and the village, loyal or not, were likely to be stopped and searched at any time of day or night. For all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased.
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All whites knew that the prosperity of the country depended on the mining industry but nobody wanted to see the coerced black labour that rendered the system possible and profitable. The mine compounds were designed to keep indentured black workers tied to their places of employment, but they also had the great benefit of keeping a servile labour force out of the direct line of sight of a European electorate living through its radical dream.
He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.
Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.
On a village or a town street, in an estate park or garden, on an expanse of beach or a landscaped something-or-other: hardly a living soul is ever to be seen. Casually these observations are inserted. Here or there. In a word, a sentence, a fragment. At what turns out to be just the right moment in just the right paragraph. The one that resembles a stone dropping straight to the subliminal bottom.
Every description of the visible world; every association past, present, future; every bit of memory, conjecture, or speculation implies a state of being destitute of human connection. On a small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich the point is suddenly driven home:...
Clearly, the bleakness originates from within. It is the material condition of the narrator’s inner life, the walls that contain him, the prison of his own personality. It is from inside this prison that he is speaking.
Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.
There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.
Fables are made of this.