Cités Term Analysis

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.