Brixton came to be seen as a riot zone. A lot of shops were boarded up for months afterwards and never reopened. It felt like Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government just left us to rot. There was no investment in the community, nothing was repainted and everything was underfunded. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go; we felt like a forgotten generation.

Despite such fear and animosity in the UK at that time, Mum enjoyed living in Grandad Bertie’s house with her cousins and half-siblings. He created one of the coolest drinking clubs in south London, the Era Residential Club, in the basement of his house in Acre Lane. I’ve seen pictures of Muhammad Ali (when he was Cassius Clay) coming through the door, and musicians like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh used to drop in for a drink. Norman Manley, cofounder of the People’s National Party and the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, went to the club when he was in London, and even had a conversation with my mum. He told her he was rebuilding Jamaica, saying: ‘All the young people like you have to come back.

I passed my first year comfortably, but in my second year I relaxed and spent more time on my social life than my studies. I got called in by the head of department – a dry, sour man I found intimidating.

‘You’re only here as an experiment,’ he said. ‘You’d better buck up!’

As the only black student on the course, I knew what he meant. In those days there was no one to complain to, and if I had I would have been kicked off the course. My friend and housemate Deborah, who also went to the London College of Furniture, and joined the course a year after me, told me recently that the same tutor gave her such a hard time, downgrading her marks and saying her work wasn’t ‘ethnic enough’. In the end she had to leave Teesside, and said she was traumatised for years.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.

The multi-purpose colonial dog cannot solve what is a monumental predicament. Well-intentioned yet continually unable to socialise with the natives, the white settler repeats history in grand Marxian fashion, “first as a tragedy, then as farce”. Emigration offers the prospect of a life in which one no longer has to agonise about engaging with slaves who refuse to be treated as slaves any longer. Blindness to the Other can continue uninterrupted; one need not countenance the horrifying prospect of becoming the equals of former underlings. Having prospered off the land for hundreds of years, there is little sense of civic responsibility, no pang of duty to contribute towards social betterment.