Occasionally, certain curious persons who, not knowing me, are tempted to surmise my character from my academic curriculum vitae, have found it puzzling that I could ever have conceived of my grounding in elite educational institutions (Achimota, Groton, Harvard, Columbia) as preparation for anything but a prestigious position in the established world just the way it happens to be.

Such puzzlement is due to a failure to understand that before entering the world of schools, I grew up in a home environment that gave me a point of view from which I could see that the vision of reality the established world offered me in its magnificent schools was an atrocious lie.

If such a conclusion sounds unkind, consider this aspect of my background: Before I went to school, I lived in Cape Coast, a West African town where the largest artificial structure was a castle built in the slaving era by European raiders who went on from Elmina and Cape Coast to build other bases for their missions of global massacre elsewhere in Africa, in the Caribbean and the Americas.