We had all been living at this pitch for over two years — I think it’s possible we were all slightly mad out of sheer exhaustion.

Ted began to sing, to keep himself awake; and Paul, in a completely different voice from the one he had used in the discussion with Willi, started on a whimsical fantasy about what would happen in an imaginary white-settled Colony when the Africans revolted. (This was nearly a decade before Kenya and the Mau Mau.) Paul described how ‘two-men-and-a-half’ (Willi protested against the reference to Dostoevsky, whom he considered a reactionary writer) worked for twenty years to bring the local savages to a realization of their position as a vanguard. Suddenly a half-educated demagogue who had spent six months at the London School of Economics created a mass movement overnight, on the slogan: ‘Out with the Whites’. The two-men-and-a-half, responsible politicians, were shocked by this, but it was too late — the demagogue denounced them as being in the pay of the whites. The whites, in a panic, put the demagogue and the two-men-and-a-half into prison on some trumped-up charge; and, left leaderless, the black masses took to the forests and the kopjes and became guerrilla fighters. ‘As the black regiments were slowly defeated by the white regiments, dozens of nice clean-minded highly educated boys like us, brought all the way out from England to maintain law and order, they slowly succumbed to black magic, and the witch-doctors. This nasty un-Christian behaviour very properly alienated all right-minded people away from the black cause, and the nice clean boys like us, in a fury of moral condemnation beat them up, tortured them, and hanged them. Law and order won. The whites let the two-men-and-a-half out of prison, but hanged the demagogue. A minimum of democratic rights were announced for the black populace but the two-men-and-a-half, etc., etc., etc.’

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognize it as frustrated idealism — now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.) He went on: ‘There is another possibility. Suppose that the black armies win? There’s only one thing an intelligent nationalist leader can do, and that is to strengthen nationalist feeling and develop industry. Has it occurred to us, comrades, that it will be our duty, as progressives, to support nationalist states whose business it will be to develop all those capitalist unegalitarian ethics we hate so much? Well, has it? Because I see it, yes, I can see it in my crystal ball — but we are going to have to support it all. Oh, yes, yes, because there’ll be no alternative.’

‘You need a drink,’ Willi remarked at this point.