But there were constraints upon me, not the least of which was survival. It went without saying that my portrait must be respectful and must appear to be respectful, but in addition to this the Secretary had issued three outright diktats I must obey. First: the portrait should be emphatically in my own style and I should project the King of Kings into such phantasmagoria as I wished. This was a great project of Ethiopia, a challenge to the artists of America and Europe: Africa, too, can produce the wild, the strange, the new. In Africa is being born a civilisation that will challenge your way of doing things. We shall begin with the best of you and of us, and there shall be a reborn power in the world, a new conception of humanity. Warhol must quake, Lichtenstein must shudder, and Henry Kissinger and his Soviet counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze must take note that the old continent was rising. At the least, they should know that they were well met.