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14 housing project called Newtown. Abel is a Christian, a deacon in his church, a Sunday-school choir-master, a competent electrician, a devoted family man. Yet on three nights of any average week, he will come home sodden drunk, rage at his eldest son, frighten his babies and beat his wife. He is a sick man. Yet his clinical diagnosis - chronic malnutrition, chronic alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver - do not explain his ill-health. To understand that, one must know at least a little of his life history.

He was born on raw farmland 100 miles away. The fifth of eight children, he grew up in a sprawling company of parents and grandparents, sisters, cousins, brothers, and uncles. Every one of them worked and no one went hungry. It was a deceptively simple world. When Abel was five, he cared for the chickens, as his older brother had done before him, when he was six, he watched the goats, when he was seven, he herded the cattle. If his mother had to work in the fields there were plenty of sisters, cousins and aunts to hold the newest baby. If someone was sick, he was nursed. His child-rearing was the same as his mother and father had.

Two things changed the pattern. When Abel was seven, he went to a Christian mission school and began to learn about another world. When he was nine, he was catapulted into that other world; his father, mother, two brothers and he moved to the city. Their house was different, their food was different, the people were different; suddenly the world was full of strangers behaving strangely, speaking different languages. The family was different too there was no supporting network of relatives. The fields and cattle were gone; people worked for money. There was always talk of police and passes, jobs and jails. Here Abel Ngasa grew up, went to school, learned a trade, learned to drink, speak English, became a Christian and married.