They had deep roots to their nature as well, down in the soil and back in the past, the which, like all roots, demanded darkness. When, in his small confused Kikuyu-Masai mind, Sirunga had given me a small contorted key, the reference to a past – ‘long long long ago’ – an African past of a thousand years, I took it into my course of thought. We white people, I reflected, were wrong when in our intercourse with the people of the ancient continent we forgot or ignored their past or did indeed decline to acknowledge that they had ever existed before their meeting with us. We had deliberately deprived our picture of them of a dimension, thus allowing it to become distorted to our eyes and blurred in its Native harmony and dignity, and our error of vision had caused deep and sad misunderstandings between us and them. The view to me later on was confirmed as I observed the fact that white people to whom the past was still a reality – in whose minds the past of their country, their name and blood or their home was naturally alive – would get on easier with the Africans and would come closer to them than others, to whom the world was created yesterday, or upon the day when they got their new car.

The dark people, then, as the clever doctor from Volaia approached, may well have gone through the kind of agony which one will imagine a tree to be suffering at the approach of a zealous forester intending to pull up her roots for inspection. Their hearts in an instinctive deadly nausea turned from the medical examinations of the hospitals, such as they did from the kipanda, the passport giving the name and data of its bearer, which some years later the Government made compulsory to each individual Native of the Highlands.

We Nations of Europe, I thought, who do not fear to floodlight our own inmost mechanisms, are here turning the blazing lights of our civilization into dark eyes, fitly set like the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters (Song of Solomon 5:12), essentially different to ours. If for a long enough time we continue in this way to dazzle and blind the Africans, we may in the end bring upon them a longing for darkness, which will drive them into the gorges of their own, unknown mountains and their own, unknown minds.

We may, if we choose to, I thought further, look forward to the day when we shall have convinced them that it be a meritorious and happy undertaking to floodlight a whole continent. But for that they will have to get other eyes. The intelligent, efficient and base Swahili of the coast have got such eyes.

The outcome of these various circumstances was this: that I would from time to time find myself unemployed as a doctor, and my consulting room empty.