MY TEN YEARS IN AMERICA.

My ten years in America has been happy and eventful, but at the same time they had been remarkable strenuous. Life would have been so much easier if I could have devoted all my time to study. As things were, however, I was always in need of money and had to work out ways and means of earning my livelihood.

On one occasion I found a job in a soap factory. I had imagined that I would leave work each day smelling of roses or honeysuckle but this was far from the case. It turned out to be by far the filthiest and most unsavoury job that I ever had. All the rotting entails and lumps of fat of animals were dumped by lorries into a yard. There you found a mountain of rubbish. Armed with a fork I had to load as much as I could of this stinking and utterly repulsive cargo into a wheelbarrow and then transport it, load after load, to the processing plant.
As the days went by, instead of being steadily toughened, I had the greatest difficulty in trying not to vomit the whole time. At the end of two weeks I was almost fit to be transformed into a bar of soap myself. A doctor friend of mine advised me strongly to leave the job. If I did not, he said, I would certainly never complete my education in America.

Taking this advice I began to look for other work. I decided to go to sea, and was lucky in getting a job abroad the SHAWNE, a ship plying between New York and Vera Cruz in Mexico. The pay was reasonably good and we were always assured of three good meals a day.
On the other hand, there was always a most haunting feeling of loneliness, not just being without companions, but if being nobody's concern. Many times as I walked in the street of Vera Cruz or in other foreign ports the thought struck me that anybody could have attacked and killed me and nobody would have missed me unduly.

I learned too, that to sleep under the stars in my native Africa was, in spite of the raiding mosquitoes, a far happier prospect than sleeping out in cities of America. When I first visited Philadelphia with a fellow student neither of us had any money for lodgings and as we had nowhere else to go, we walked back to the railway station and sat on one of the benches intending to pass the nigh there. We had not reckoned with the ubiquitous American police. At about midnight we were rudely shaken out of our doze and greeted by a firm but unkind voice saying.
'Move on, chums, you can't sleep here.'

Extract from The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.