I was young and famous. I had produced most recently a fivefold image of the moon in which a black man and an Asian woman, their spacesuits discarded, copulated upon a ragged American flag, while behind them in the dark a nuclear war made the earth into a final, fatal jewel. This sort of thing generates comment if you do it right, and I had. In art, comment is fame and fame is money—and of course, money entails comment. Guided only by my artistic sense, I followed The World in Flames with a completely incomprehensible mixed media offering—a shark hanging in an ocean of numbers—and realised almost immediately by the resounding silence that although it had come from the same unadulterated transcription of my inner vision that I did not understand, in career terms it was a misstep. I quickly made an image—heavily disguised, for reasons of social prudence—of the daughter of the Minister of Infrastructure, in which she emerged like Athena from the bursting skull of her father to reach in almost Soviet modern style for a passing aeroplane. Her naked torso was not the conventionally European image of an African woman walking to a well, nor yet the cabaret girl of French erotic shows. Four spectral figures in the background sought to judge her, their eyes lit from within by nuclear fire, but she ignored them. She was a woman—in the discourse of the time, and as I had cause to know—in fullest possession of her own sexuality, because she existed not for the viewer but for herself. It was in the strictest sense a pastiche—I was copying my own style, not executing it—but if I didn’t say that, certainly no one else was going to suggest it. I had only to title the painting Progress , and the whisper of comment became a storm. The shark was politely forgotten, and I flew as a guest and a poster boy between Addis Ababa, London, Paris and New York—the latter, most especially, because Warhol was there and because the Emperor of Ethiopia had made a special friendship with the then President of the United States. So I went, on Haile Selassie’s coat-tails, and drank martinis at Warhol’s Factory, and made sure to point out that I was in my own informed opinion a far greater artist than Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan.