Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused. This was before, before I allowed myself to think anything I want. If I had been then what I’ve become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned toward me, his left hand in my right.

God’s truth, if I’d already become then what I am now, I would have slaughtered him like a sacrificial sheep, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

Colonisation by military conquest entails an element of moral regression on the part of the invader, and thereafter cocnsistently complicates any simple-minded notions of what might qualify as ‘progress’. In a situation in which two colonial powers foregoing most ethical considerations had, without consulting the party principally affected, agreed to the wholesale appropriation of African labour at exploitative rates in exchange for rail traffic to a port city that otherwise might not stand up to open capitalist competition, the past and the present were not that easily divided.

The lies told about God's Word in order to build a case for racism led my dad and his siblings to reject Christianity, but the values of his parents’ faith – courage, perseverance, love, and order – permeated 6001 and the lives of those in it. My grandfather was soft-spoken and rarely raised his voice, but made his views known. My grandmother was a disciplinarian. She didn't shout but was a straight shooter. My uncles and aunts knew their parents supported their political activities, yet they didn’t think of their mum and dad as revolutionaries in their own right.

The aim was to make them question themselves, to destabilize their relationship to their own bodies and minds, to un-know what they were capable of doing. This literal depression of the conquered went together with the elevation of the mind and body of the conqueror. The outsiders depicted themselves as the owners of technology, invention, and innovation. They tried to convince the conquered Other that, without the conquerors’ technologies, there would be no production beyond foraging for fruit or hunting animals with their bare hands. I remember some teachers in my colonial school saying that Africa never invented the wheel.

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.