Sometimes Ngolo joins me here at night. Content to stare quietly while I read or write, what we have could not be called friendship. What he values in me is that I represent the possibility of another set of values, another community. Outcast by his own community, he most easily embraces another. It's the history of white intervention in African life, it's happened a million times in a million villages.
Human love has nothing to do with it.
Ngolo is outcast because one year peanuts were the only profitable crop, and he was the only one who planted peanuts that year. This gave him one year as the wealthiest man in the village, and he could please no one. When he withheld he was called selfish, and when he gave he was thought condescending. Either way whomever he dealt with felt humiliated. It was like being a white man for a year.