There was once a city of white towers built on a hill above a great plain. The towers were old and cold and beautiful, which is to say they were built to keep things out, and they were very good at this. The people of the towers had lived there for many generations, and they had constructed a philosophy to explain why the towers were theirs and why the plain below was not, and this philosophy had calcified over time into something they called the Natural Order, which they wrote in tall letters in their lawbooks and their hymns and their histories.
On the plain below the hill lived many peoples of many kinds. Some had lived there nearly as long as the tower people had lived above. Some had arrived later. Some had been brought to the plain in chains and made to work the fields that fed the towers, and their children had been born in those fields, and their children's children, until the chains were removed and their great-grandchildren were told they were free, which was true in the same way that it is true that a man released from a decade in a lightless room is free the moment the door opens.
Among those people on the plain, there was a man. He had a name, but let us call him the Petitioner. He was the great-great-grandson of men who had worked the fields in chains. But he had studied the tower people's books. He had learned their language and not just the common tongue but the formal register, the philosophical register, the register of the lawcourt and the academy and the council chamber. He had served the towers in their wars. His father had served the towers in their wars. His grandfather had carried towers' banner across three foreign campaigns and returned decorated and proud and still living on the plain.
The Petitioner had decided, after much study and much observation, that he was different from the others on the plain. He had developed a taxonomy. There were, in his estimation, four kinds of people below the hill. There were the Worthies, a small group of perhaps two or three in ten, who understood the Natural Order, kept their households in good condition, and contributed something measurable to the civilisation of the towers. There were the Corruptibles, a middling group, confused but salvageable. Then came the Degraded, the vast majority, and behind them the Irredeemable, the lumpen of the plain, the ones who seemed to him to embody every argument the tower people had ever made for why the plain should be cleared. He spoke of the Degraded and the Irredeemable with a special contempt that he never applied to the tower people, though the tower people had built the conditions that produced them.
The Petitioner had spent many years speaking in public about these categories. He had attracted audiences. He had said the things that most people on the plain were afraid to say, or refused to say, and he felt this made him brave, which in a sense it did, but bravery directed at the wrong target is a form of service to the wrong master.
And then, one grey morning, the Petitioner received a summons.
At the top of the hill, in the great administrative hall of the tallest tower, two brothers sat behind a long stone table. Let us call them the Registrars, because that is what they were. They had been appointed by the city's Council of Heritage to conduct the Great Registry, which would determine, once and for all, who truly belonged to the city of white towers and who did not. The Registry had been in discussion for years. Now it was happening.
The Registrars were not cruel men by their own reckoning. They were, they believed, simply clear. They had read the founding texts. They had studied the philosophies of blood and soil with the rigour that the Petitioner had applied to their lawbooks, and they had arrived at conclusions that satisfied them thoroughly. A city, they held, was a people. A people was a bloodline. A bloodline was a fact of biology, and biology was prior to culture, prior to history, prior to any individual's personal record of service or achievement. You could not read your way into a bloodline. You could not serve your way in. You could not be born into belonging if you were born into the wrong category of flesh.
They had brought the Petitioner up the hill because he was useful. He was the kind of man whose presence at the table gave the Registry the appearance of fairness, and the appearance of fairness was the administrative oil that allowed the machinery to turn without friction. They did not dislike him. They found him interesting. He was articulate. He was reasonable. He agreed with most of what they said. All of this made him enormously valuable to them, and entirely replaceable once the Registry was complete, but they saw no reason to tell him that.
The Petitioner entered the hall and felt something lift in his chest. He had been in many rooms in his life. He had never been in a room like this. The stone was old. The light came through narrow windows and fell in clean geometric columns across the floor. The Registrars rose when he entered, which he took as a sign of respect, and did not recognise as the gesture one makes when a useful instrument arrives.
They spoke for many hours.
The Petitioner laid his credentials on the table as a merchant lays out his best goods. He spoke of his family's generations on the plain, of their service in the wars, of their records in the city's own archives, of their educational attainments, their property, their standing. He spoke carefully and at length. He had prepared. He was very good at this.
The elder Registrar listened with his chin in his hand and then said: these are impressive things. We do not question your individual record. But the Registry is not a document of individuals. It is a document of peoples. And a people is defined by its blood, its stock, its genetic continuity with the founding generations. Your family's service is noted. Your family remains what they are.
The Petitioner had heard this before. He had a response. He spoke about compatibility. About culture. About the shared language and shared history and shared experience of living on the same land across so many generations. He argued that there was an American in him, or a citizen of the towers, or whatever the allegory demands, that was real and substantive and could be measured in the same way that loyalty and sacrifice and contribution could be measured.
The younger Registrar said: compatibility is downstream of genetics. You know this. You have said this yourself. Look at what you have written, what you have argued, the framework you have built. You believe in the Natural Order. You believe that blood determines culture. You have said this in public many times. If you believe it, then you must accept what it concludes about your own position. The logic does not stop where it becomes inconvenient.
The Petitioner paused. He did not have a clean answer to this. So instead he pivoted. He said: let us talk about the Degraded. Let us talk about the Irredeemable. He said: you are right that most of the people on the plain are a problem. He said: I would leave the plain too, if I had to live in the worst parts of it. He said: the racial hygiene argument has merit and someone needs to apply it below the hill before the rot spreads further.
The Registrars nodded with some satisfaction.
This was what they had brought him up here for.
For the rest of the afternoon the Petitioner helped them build their case. He agreed that the majority of his own people were a civilisational threat. He agreed that their cultural dysfunction was inherent enough to warrant structural remedy. He agreed that the registry should be strict and the categories should be firm. He drew lines on their maps. He provided testimonials. He said the words they needed to hear from a mouth that looked like his, and they wrote those words into the Registry's supporting documents with the care of men who understood the administrative value of what they were receiving.
All the while he believed he was negotiating. He believed that each concession purchased a corresponding security for himself. That each line he drew around the Degraded and the Irredeemable was a line that moved him further from them and closer to the table. That his willingness to be honest, to face difficult truths, to refuse the soft solidarity of racial loyalty in favour of the hard clarity of the Natural Order, would eventually be recognised as the defining quality that separated him from the category they wanted to empty.
He was wrong, of course. But the wrongness was not visible to him from inside the hall. Inside the hall, the light fell through those narrow windows in clean geometric columns, and the stone was very old, and the Registrars listened carefully and sometimes smiled, and the Petitioner felt, for the first time in a very long time, that he was being taken seriously. This feeling is a powerful anaesthetic. It dulls many things.
Near the end of the day, the elder Registrar asked a question.
He asked: if the Registry concludes that all people of the plain must be remigrated, peacefully, without the bloodshed you quite reasonably wish to avoid, do you believe the city of the towers would be better without them?
The Petitioner knew the right answer. He could feel it sitting in his throat. But the wrong answer came out instead, wearing the right answer's clothes. He said: if things on the plain cannot be turned around, then yes, I think I would have to agree with that conclusion. He said: I would leave too if the Degraded could not be brought to reason. He said: it is the nature of things.
It is the nature of things.
There it was. The surrender dressed as philosophy. The shrug dressed as wisdom. The man has spent a lifetime building a fortress of credentials and family history and personal achievement against the possibility of exactly this moment, and when the moment arrived he dismantled his own fortress from the inside and handed the materials across the table.
The Registrars exchanged a glance that the Petitioner did not see.
Here is what the allegory must say clearly, because allegory has this obligation: the Petitioner was not a stupid man. He was, in many respects, a perceptive and intellectually serious man who had engaged with more ideas in more depth than most people on the plain or in the towers. He had read the founding texts. He had studied the histories. He could argue the Natural Order from first principles and he could also argue against it, when it suited him, with some skill.
But there is a particular kind of blindness that descends on those who have spent years trying to buy their way into a system. The blindness is not intellectual. It is structural. It is the blindness of the man who has invested so much in a transaction that he cannot permit himself to see that the other party never intended to complete it. The investment is too large. The alternative is too painful. And so the Petitioner sat in the great hall and helped the Registrars build the Registry and believed he was a diplomat, believed he was a pragmatist, believed he was the one person in this room who was being truly honest, while all around him the documents were being completed that would determine the fate of everyone below the hill including him.
The Registry was a long document. It took many more months to finalise. The Petitioner was cited in it seventeen times. His testimony was described as uniquely valuable in three separate sections. The phrases he had used, the categories he had constructed, the concessions he had made, were woven into the Registry's philosophical foundations with care and precision. The Registrars were very good at their work.
When it was complete, the city announced it from the top of the tall towers. The people on the plain gathered and listened. The Registry was read aloud by a herald with a clear voice. The categories were named. The rules were stated. The timeline was established.
And the Petitioner stood among the people of the plain and heard his own words read back to him and understood, with a clarity that came too late to be useful, that the Registry had always known exactly what it was doing with his words, and had done it very well.
He had built them an excellent case.
He had signed it himself.
He had thanked them for the opportunity.
In the closing lines of many allegories, the protagonist reaches understanding, and the understanding redeems them, or transforms them, or at minimum changes something. This allegory cannot offer that comfort because it is drawn from a real event and real events are not structured for the convenience of redemption arcs.
What the allegory can offer instead is this:
There are people on the plain who have never gone up the hill and never will. There are people on the plain who know, in the way that the body knows danger before the mind has named it, that the towers were built to keep them out and that the Registry was always coming and that the question was never whether it would arrive but what kind of people they would be when it did. Some of them have been saying this for years. Some of them have been called naive for it, or angry, or unable to face difficult truths, which is always what the tower people say about the plain people who refuse to adopt the tower people's framework for evaluating plain people.
These people were on the plain when the Petitioner came down from the hall. They did not celebrate him for his bravery. They did not thank him for his honesty. They looked at him with the expression of people who have watched a fire spread and have been warning about it since before anyone lit the match.
The Petitioner looked back at them and did not know what to say.
Above the towers, the herald was still reading.
The towers are still there.
The Registry is still being completed.
There are men on the plain today, right now, in the real world that this story is merely the shape of, who are climbing the hill with their credentials in their hands and their taxonomies ready and their contempt for the Degraded sharpened like a tool and their belief, absolute and unshakeable, that the system can be appealed to. That the right combination of compliance and credential and honest engagement with difficult truths will move the line.
Frantz Fanon said the colonised mind must be decolonised as the first act of liberation because a man who has internalised the oppressor's gaze will use it on himself and on everyone around him with more efficiency than the oppressor ever could. He said this clearly. He put it in a book. The book has been available for seventy years.
Walter Rodney said the dysfunction of the colonised world is manufactured, it is the direct result of what was done to it, and to blame the colonised for their condition is to complete the colonial project at the ideological level, to add the final insult after the centuries of injury. He said this clearly. He put it in a book. He was assassinated for the larger body of his political work, which is the tower's ultimate response to the people of the plain who refuse to bring their credentials to the registry and smile.
The Petitioner read neither of them.
He was too busy preparing his testimony.
Dedicated to everyone on the plain who never went up the hill.