In my room, I turned up the windows’ sound insulation, and tried to psych myself into doing some work. The next morning I was scheduled to film a lecture by Helen Wu, chief advocate of the view that Mosala’s methodology verged on circular logic. Before letting Munroe talk me into filming the inland divers, I’d been planning to spend the whole afternoon reading Wu’s previous papers; I had a lot of catching up to do.

First, though…

I scanned the relevant databases (eschewing help from Sisyphus , and taking three times as long). The Pan-African Cultural Defense Front turned out to be a loose affiliation of fifty-seven radical traditionalist groups from twenty-three nations, with a council of representatives which met each year to decide strategies and issue proclamations. PACDF itself was twenty years old; it had appeared in the wake of a resurgence of the traditionalist debate in the early thirties, when a number of academics and activists, mostly in central Africa, had begun to speak of the need to “reestablish continuity” with the pre-colonial past. Political and cultural movements of the previous century – from Senghor’s négritude to Mobutu’s “authenticity” to Black Consciousness in all its forms – were dismissed as corrupt, assimilationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism – according to the most vocal of the new traditionalists – was to excise it from history completely: to aim to behave, in its aftermath, as if it had never happened.

PACDF was the most extreme manifestation of this philosophy, taking an uncompromising – and far from populist – line. They decried Islam as an invader religion, as much as Christianity or Syncretism. They opposed vaccination, bioengineered crops, electronic communications. And if there was more to the group than a catalog of the foreign (or local, but insufficiently ancient) influences they explicitly renounced, they might have found it hard to differentiate themselves without such a hit-list. Many of the policies they advocated – wider official use of local languages, greater support for traditional cultural forms – were already high on the agenda of most governments, or were being lobbied for from other quarters. PACDF’s raison d’être seemed to consist of being greater purists than anyone else. When the most effective anti-malarial vaccine on the planet was manufactured in Nairobi – based on research carried out in that well-known imperialist superpower, Colombia – condemning its use as “a criminal betrayal of traditional healing practices” sounded like sheer fundamentalist perversity to me.

If Violet Mosala had chosen to emigrate to Stateless, I would have thought they’d be glad to be rid of her. She might have been a hero on half the continent, but to PACDF she could never have been anything but a traitor. And I could find no report of a death threat – so maybe Savimbi’s claim had been pure hype; the reality might have involved nothing more than an anonymous call to his news desk.