I saw a disordered future for the country. No one was going to be secure here; no man of the country was to be envied. Yet I couldn’t help thinking how lucky Ferdinand was, how easy it had been made for him. You took a boy out of the bush and you taught him to read and write; you levelled the bush and built a polytechnic and you sent him there. It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge. The rest of us had to take things in stages.
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