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cultural and moral transformation associated with colonialism, capitalism and Christianity. Controlling such diseases required an intimacy of knowledge of Africans’ domestic and private lives that was considered unnecessary in relation to conditions such as malaria or measles. Acquiring such a depth of understanding of local attitudes and behaviours in Buganda did not require the kind of intense, project
London it was the most natural thing in the world for James, in effect, to pass him on to Padmore. Arriving on the boat-train at Euston station Padmore was waiting for him, initiating a political intimacy which survived many tests. In 1953, when in turn James returned to Britain, his friendship and political collaboration with Padmore picked up again. They were both with Nkrumah in Accra the night that Ghana was founded
: the communal intimacies and shifting loyalties of boarding houses; England in the late 1940s and 1950s; little Englandism; the making of the black prophet in the 1960s and 1970s; the constrained lives of male immigrants whose search for community, acceptance and masculine reassurance resolves itself illusively and elusively into sex; the country manor and cottage; and the vocation of writing
and emblematic figure, representing a generalised exilic or diasporic world-view. 5 Yet he was a product of a very specific local milieu – indeed he often stressed not only the uniqueness, but the very smallness and intimacy, of that formative world. His family background, and what James once described as the ‘Protestant and middle-class’ values imbibed there, 6 have frequently been analysed as