But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs. Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

Like love and hate, envy and greed are two sides of the same coin. That envy should become greed is perfectly plausible with the shoe on the other foot and deprivation turning into abundance. In both cases, a compromised self-formation makes it extremely difficult to slow down what are compelling - and ultimately destructive - psychic processes.

I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?

In the age of globalization — an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age — hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset.

To put it simply, when you don’t feel you own a country, you probably won’t feel accountable for its state of affairs. People don’t normally rob themselves. Instead, they take care of their own property and try to ensure its protection. Corruption is stealing from the people of Kenya and all Africa, and it is driven by the mentality of the outsider looking in. This was the main theme in my novel Devil on the Cross, which I wrote in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in 1978. In the novel, I depicted a competition organized by the devil to choose the seven cleverest robbers. But these are no ordinary robbers: to qualify for the competition, one must demonstrate that one has robbed millions or billions from the people. These are world-class thieves. They testify to their past heroic plundering, but they also articulate a vision of future theft. The winner will be crowned Chief of Robbers by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery, then headquartered in New York. I would recommend the book to all those who desire a resurgent Africa.