#anmolreads

Modern consciousness in India was almost always a fractured consciousness, and those fractures have left an enduring mark on the non-revolutionary, divisive path that the Independence Movement took, as well as on structures of power and politics subsequently.

What Warĩĩnga tried hard to avoid—though her eyes kept straying in that direction—was looking at the pictures on the walls and windows of the Church of the Holy Rosary. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the Virgin Mary or on the Cross. But others depicted the Devil, with two cowlike horns and a tail like a monkey’s, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God’s angels were white, like Europeans, but the Devil and his angels were black. At night Warĩĩnga would have a recurrent nightmare. Instead of Jesus on the Cross, she would see the Devil, with skin as white as that of a very fat European she once saw near the Rift Valley Sports Club, being crucified by people in tattered clothes—like the ones she used to see in Bondeni—and after three days, when he was in the throes of death, he would be taken down from the Cross by black people in suits and ties, and, thus restored to life, he would mock Warĩĩnga.

In the first place, the rulers of neo-colonial States derive their authority to govern, not from the will of the people, but from the support which they obtain from their neo-colonialist masters. They have therefore little interest in developing education, strengthening the bargaining power of their workers employed by expatriate firms, or indeed of taking any step which would challenge the colonial pattern of commerce and industry, which it is the object of neo-colonialism to preserve. ‘Aid’, therefore, to a neo-colonial State is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial State and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.

Nothing had happened exactly the way it was remembered, especially not in the Mbo, where memory was like a house you arranged for the benefit of those who lived in it, not a museum to leave untouched.

When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn't in us ever bothers us.