by R. Benedito Ferrão

I had finally arrived, but the start of this journey of a lifetime had already begun badly. Journeying from the metropole – London – to the once colonial periphery – Nairobi – I had made it, but my suitcase hadn’t. In it were the hand-written notes from the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis and a copy of the book that that chapter was based on: Roger King’s A Girl from Zanzibar, published in 2002 and set in the 1980s. As I explained to the travel insurance company, no, I hadn’t typed up any of those notes and, no, I couldn’t reconstruct a year’s worth of work from memory. Perhaps it was the perfect postcolonial metaphor – the loss of a suitcase full of words between the empire writing back and a subaltern trying to speak.

photo credit: Alejandro Luengo Upsplash