Zong was in 1781. Blacks were goods. But long after, long after that practice of decanting blacks into the sea for commercial reasons, blacks are still dispensable. Disposables. Perhaps now, nuisance. The police in America are well trained . But training often polishes the brain and not the heart. Many liberal philosophers are racists. Everywhere, blacks are considered poorly endowed mentally, and prone to uncontrolled emotions. Congenitally stupid. White women have borne crushing oppression for ages. But it hasn’t rendered them insensate to racial prejudice. Black males are their peevish brutes. So white policemen can adjudge them criminal minds. And shoot them. The owners of the slave ship Zong drowned their goods.

An anonymous quote has it that self-praise is no recommendation. Once upon a time there was a character out of fable; the widely known and recognized lizard which made a spectacle of itself at the village square when by accident it came down from the heights of an iroko tree. It noticed that nobody applauded it falling from an imagined height of the 200-metre Eiffel Towers in central Paris. It nodded its head three times in self-congratulation.

The world was agog this week with the certainty that the next British Prime Minister would be a woman. The attainment of that office this Wednesday by Theresa May who replaced a politically-crushed David Cameron at 10,

DAVID Cameron, the outgoing British Prime Minister, has made mistakes (who hasn’t?). But at critical junctures – in the past few days especially – he has behaved impeccably and proved that he is the product of a good upbringing and a gentleman.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has lived the life of the quintessential vice president in the past 14 months of his emergence. There is an old American anecdote that portrays the Vice Presidency as a particularly “irrelevant” post in a presidential democracy. It tells of how one Unlce Tom “lost” two of his sons: “one joined the Navy, the other became the Vice President”.