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To evoke my mental world in this way is to follow history from its ‘bad’ side, as Brecht has it, focusing on the afflictions which were lodged in our inner lives. This is the story of colonial oppression. But while true, it misses an important dimension. Intellectually there were also virtues in ou…

The emergence of this system of universal, mass politics coincided with my own growing up. I had inside me the sensibilities of the colonial order of things. But for my generation, following 1938, in no way could the colonial system represent our future. We could only perceive it as an unwanted imp…

The unrest of the late 1930s was the outcome of profound crises which had accumulated over many decades. Economic dependency and the exploitation of labour had done their inexorable work. In the eighteenth century the Jamaican plantocracy reaped the economic rewards. ‘King Sugar’ reigned supreme. B…

I resented his social quietism: the fact that he went along with her project for us without complaint, and that he tolerated the way he was patronized by the men he drank with

[...] the gay, Yoruba-born, artist-photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Rotimi lived and practised most of his adult life outside Africa. He became one of the most significant figures in the explosion of black artistic creativity in the UK in the 1980s, and one of the first to break the silence by brin…