so you know the way to advance?

My feeling is that in the intellectual sense the Rhodesian culture was a completely pre-psychological one: Pre-Freud, pre-Jung. (No wonder Marechera was excited to discover these!)

Yet, in the sense of having a feeling for moral decency, it was in some ways -- although quite unevenly developed -- more advanced that much of the contemporary culture I've experienced.

To say to someone of my mother's age: "Please help me. Speak to this person X. He's is suffering so much from his condition of being human that he has become emotionally and physically abusive," and to get a response that is straight out of the slimy moral incoherence of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party is to experience cultural destitution and unwitting savagery.

For future reference, those who wear their modernity and Christianity on their sleeve: If I say that someone is being abusive, that is not a call to fantasise about a totally different character structure that would give you hot times in bed. What I'm saying is that there is a problem here, and that you need to switch off from your self-indulgence for a little while, to pay the smallest amount of moral respect to what I am saying. You need to act as if information actually means something.

It is a morally regressive culture that cannot act as if information means something. This is why I continue to oppose various aspects of postmodernistic thinking quite virulently.

If I call for your aid in a particularly harmful situation, I want to feel as if I'm actually saying something -- not pointing out for you an opportunity entirely in the opposite direction to anything I've said.

The old Rhodesian ladies -- think about this -- would have understood me.