My African journey made me even more critical of the colonial powers. Whites, who in their respective countries would have been porters and petty traders, lived in Africa like pashas. Their treatment of Africans was so appalling it almost made me sick. In Africa, their behaviour was shameful. What was extraordinary was that, even in 1962, the British were justifying their policies of oppression—from Fiji to Mauritius, from Trinidad and Tobago to Rhodesia. They were lecturing us on human rights, having paid no heed to them for three hundred years. I constantly crossed verbal swords with the
...more
