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that celestial glow of a hard worker whose intelligence has been pounded out long ago.
For the seed of triumph can be found in the misery of the disappointment.
Bantu philosophy, he soon learned, saw humans as forces, not beings. Without putting it into words, he had always believed that. It gave a powerful shift to his thoughts. By such logic, men or women were more than the parts of themselves, which is to say more than the result of their heredity and experience. A man was not only what he contained, not only his desires, his memory, and his personality, but also the forces that came to inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead.
One did one’s best to live in the pull of these forces in such a way as to increase one’s own force. Ideally, one would do it in harmony with the play of all forces, but the beginning of wisdom was to enrich oneself, enrich the muntu which was the amount of life in oneself, the size of the human being in oneself.
No surprise if tribal life in America began to live among stone walls and drugs. The drug gave magnification of the sentiment that a mighty force was still inside oneself, and the penitentiary restored the old idea that man was a force in a field of forces.
N’GOLO WAS a Congolese word for force, for vital force. Equally could it be applied to ego, status, strength or libido. Indubitably did Ali feel deprived of his rightful share. For ten years, the press had been cheating Ali of n’golo. No matter if he had as much as anyone in America, he wanted more. It is not the n’golo you have, but the n’golo you are denied that excites the harshest hysterias of the soul.
Therefore it occasions in me the emotion that I am an instrument of eternal forces.”