John Ryle

Murderers are frequently reported by acquaintances to be civil, diligent, pleasant in manner, if a little reserved, normal in appearance, cultivated to a degree, kind to animals and, with certain fatal exceptions, to their fellow human beings. If such characteristics were grounds for suspicion, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 14 or 15 youths in North London over a period of five years, would have been rounded up with the rest of us. But there were no grounds for suspecting anyone of being guilty of these murders, for until the grim day in February two years ago when a plumber found human remains in the sewer of the house where Nilsen lived in Muswell Hill there was no indication that any crime had even been committed. The victims were vagrant youths whom nobody missed, rent boys, no-hopers, waifs of the West End. They were seldom even reported missing. No wonder they went home with him. When they disappeared, nobody cared, except, perhaps, Dennis Nilsen.

In Africa the fall of a tyrant does not always presage better times. Worse things have happened in Uganda since the overthrow of Idi Amin – even worse than happened under his regime. Imperial autocracy in Ethiopia was succeeded by a military dictatorship which has proved equally repressive and a great deal bloodier. In countries where political life has been stifled, traditional leadership undermined and educated people wiped out or driven into exile, there may not be the wherewithal to establish representative government of any kind. This is not the case in the Sudan. There are all too many people waiting to form a government. President Nimeiri’s 16 years in power were characterised more by political confusion and economic mismanagement than by outright repression. The executions and amputations of the last two years were the last stratagem of a demented Machiavel who thought, perhaps, that he could safeguard both his soul and his worldly power by playing the Islamic card.’

What is more important: is it the project of understanding why sexual desire is, or has become, a problem for us like no other, fraught with particular anxiety and special perplexity; or is it the task of establishing – maintaining, perhaps – principles according to which this desire can be regulated, guided, temporised? The change in relations between the sexes and the concomitant change in relations between members of the same sex, the double alteration that has come over us in the last two or three generations makes a certain kind of intellectual investigation possible for the first time. The impure hush has ended; the tongues of desire have been freed. Texts that were formerly read selectively, through a haze of anxiety, or feverishly perused for the legitimation of proscribed longings have at length entered ordinary scholarly discourse.

The Mende are a forest-dwelling West African people, numbering about a million, one of the two principal ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. They owe their existence to the 16th-century diaspora of the Mande-speaking inhabitants of the Mali Empire and the incorporation by these conquering bands of a number of small coastal tribes. Mende history until the colonial era is one of raiding and slave-holding, their economy is agricultural and their traditional religion the veneration of ancestors and nature divinities under the aegis of a creator god. They do not figure largely in ethnographic literature, nor in accounts of African art, though their highly polished black wooden masks are found in many collections. Radiance of the Waters, in fact, is only the second book to be written about them (the other is by Kenneth Little, an anthropologist whose The Mende of Sierra Leone first appeared in 1951).