How can any human go on holiday with two pairs of shoes? I have never managed less than five. “It’s aspirational,” said a friend as I despaired over a “how to pack” piece in Conde Nast Traveller. But as the NRA would remind us, guns don’t kill people: it is people who kill people – people who believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong.. I HAVE always assumed that, at some point in life, I would learn how to pack a suitcase. This would be a relief because, for starters, I could then quit reading those articles telling me how to pack a suitcase. You know the ones: they advise you to roll up everything into sausage shapes and insist that all you need for two weeks at the beach is a sarong, a floaty pair of shorts and a Swiss Army knife.

It has taken me decades to realise that this is complete rubbish and that articles on packing have nothing to do with reality. If the NRA does not sort itself out, it risks being outflanked by gunmakers and gun opponents alike.Compromise on gun regulation seems inevitable, when the manufacturers themselves are moving in that direction. There are even signs that America’s love affair with the gun is waning. And he will use it to destroy you.” But on that occasion the gunmakers didn’t make their appearance under the auspices of the NRA; they used another group, the American Shooting Sports Council, which had been formed in 1989 as a result of unhappiness with the NRA’s extremism. Yet despite all the progress that has been made, despite the Brady Bill, which cut gun deaths by a quarter, 9,390 people were killed by hand guns in the US in 1996. A Harris poll found that the number of Americans with a gun at home has declined from half of the population in 1973 to a third, and that more than two-thirds of Americans want tighter gun control laws. Last year, 15 manufacturers appeared with President Clinton to say that they would voluntarily ship trigger locks with their guns.As far as the hard-liners are concerned this is defeatist talk, pinko liberal trash.

Mr LaPierre wrote to the gunmakers who appeared with the President: “You have helped Clinton to co-opt, to steal yet another issue. Nor, on the whole, do the movement’s devotees – members of still underprivileged minorities – have the power to do much harm to others. The damage Afrocentric fake history can do is mainly to its intended audience, not to their supposed enemies.In other ways, though, Afrocentrism is no less disturbing and damaging than rival historical myths. This is partly because of the tragic irony that a structure of illusion and reverse racism has taken hold among some of the very people who have suffered most from others’ prejudice. It is partly because, unlike most other ethnocentric fantasies, it attracts sympathy in liberal and leftish quarters.And it’s partly because Afrocentric fantasy threatens to fill a gaping hole where true knowledge of Africa should be.

The global mainstream of education and communication has only very recently – and very partially – struggled away from old racist assumptions about Africa: that it’s basically historyless and cultureless. Meanwhile, poverty and technological underdevelopment mean that continental African voices barely feature in the global conversation of the Web. Now the new mass of ahistorical fabrications about Africa claim to correct the old ones but actually reproduce many of their worst features. If we go straight from the legend of the Dark Continent to the fable of Pharaohs in cyberspace, the main loser will be Africa itself.Stephen Howe’s `Afrocentrism: mythical pasts and imagined homes’ has just been published by Verso..