THERE IS NO NEW ENTITY BORN OUT OF COLONIALISM', WROTE Frantz Fanon in one of his impassioned editorials of 1958 for the Algerian nationalist weekly, EI Moujahid. A simplication, of course: like all cries of anguish. Much has come out of colonialism in Africa. But a new entity, a new shape to civilisation? On the morrow of independence, in 1960 and after, it was possible to think so or at least to hope so. Later, with one new regime after another in more or less dire emergency, it was difficult to do either.

Yet these years since about 1870 have in any case produced a situation in which new entities can at last emerge: new frameworks and structures, that is, which are capable of matching Africa with the modern world. The Africa of today is extraordinarily different from that of a hundred years ago: even where the old things and ideas seem most alive they may often be found, on looking closer, only to be shells of their former meaning. Already these shells enclose a new reality.

The extreme situations of modern Africa may be those that show this most easily. Here, in the wars of the 1960s against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, it was possible to see the old and the new in direct and dramatic juxtaposition.

Early in October 1967 I landed with guerrillas on the south-eastern coast of Portugal's West African colony, where the waves of the Atlantic wash in among dense mangrove thickets.

'October 9. Last night a long night half-mooned. We came up an arm of the creeks with a man pole-sounding on either beam and crying out depths while the ocean tide cradled us closer to the trees. I stood by the rail with him for a while. He was calling a deep and personal cantata: Bra’ giu'do, Me'o bra’ giu'do … Brass exactly, half-brass exactly; and it couldn't, I thought, have changed in centuries. Just such a voice and just such a man, stone black as a moving statue but for points of brilliant silver when he turned up his face to the night, crying at the skipper on the poop above him, would have patiently sung in die caravels of long ago, edging their keels through rippled water the colour of dark violet, steering beneath tropical stars to a hazardous landfall.