In VS Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River,” perhaps the best novel written about 20th century Africa, the Indian-African narrator is taken to a college party in the new university compound, at the house of a white academic and his much younger white wife, who has Joan Baez music on:

“You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless –like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks –you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.”