‘A New King for the Congo’ and A Bend in the River

Abstract

I do have a great distrust of causes, simply because they are causes and they have to simplify, to ignore so much … for example in Africa you can get a profound refusal to acknowledge the realities of the situation; people just push aside the real problems as if they had all been settled. As though the whole history of human deficiencies was entirely explained by the interlude of oppression and prejudice, which have now been removed; any remaining criticism being merely recurrence of prejudice and therefore to be dismissed.