‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.’

This comes from Robert Browning’s ‘Epilogue’. It is quoted (though not of himself) in a staggering book by an author who in my eyes holds as good a claim to exemplify its spirit as anyone in the 20th-century history of Africa.