Beyond internal soul-searching and its effects on the bookshelves of Middle England, an identity conundrum in African culture has a broader resonance, too; some of the most powerful political discourse over recent years has proposed a fundamental link between the suppression of African cultures and a decline in ecological, social and political standards across the continent. This is Wangari Mathai territory; in her extraordinary work The Challenge for Africa, Mathai advocates a direct link between the cultural disinheritance of much of the African continent and a decline in political standards: “this also explained to me,” she writes, “why many Africans, both leaders and ordinary citizens, facilitated the exploitation of their countries and peoples. Without culture, they’d lost their knowledge of who they were and what their destiny should be.”

African culture is historically rich with oral traditions, ritual and ceremony; as the continent has developed economically, the role of spiritual cultures is superseded by a cash economy which, Mathai argues, is insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives. The African sense of topography is spiritual as much as it is physical; reengagement with cultural traditions in their spiritual sense is therefore “a political and social necessity… [for] fitting into the modern world.” It’s hardly surprising, she argues, that when they found themselves culturally uprooted, many communities were literally pulling up the trees around them; when communities are told that their culture is demonic and primitive, they lose their sense of collective power.

Mathai’s ecocriticism isn’t a plea for a return to the past; she recognises that African culture can’t go back to what it was, that cultures are dynamic, that people can’t be “walking museums.” But at heart her challenge is essentially the same as Salu’s: a challenge to reconnect, both for a community and for oneself. The word she uses is kwimenya, a Kikuyu term meaning a sense of self-knowledge, entailing “being responsible oneself, but holding leaders responsible as well.” Through the re-collection of culture comes kwimenya, and from that comes a foundation on which to build for the future; a cultural conundrum with a global resonance.