Yet, as an American Negro whose life is governed by racial codes written into law, I state clearly that my abandonment of Communism does not automatically place me in a position of endorsing and supporting all the policies, political and economic, of the non-Communist world. Indeed, it was the inhuman nature of many of those policies, racial and otherwise, that led me to take up the instrumentality of Communism in the first place….
Hence, the problem of freedom is still with me. The Communist instrumentality which I once held in my hands has built up a slave empire of 800,000,000 people; and the Western world, of which I am an uneasy member, has not materially altered many of its attitudes toward the aspirations of hundreds of millions of minority peoples caught by chance, time, and culture within its wide sway of power.
In this dilemma of a divided world one elementary fact stands out undeniably: the victories of the Communist instrumentalities were largely won by skilled Communist appeals to the Western sense of justice, by Communist exploitation of the thwarted traditional hopes of Western man. In fact, it can be definitely stated that Communist strength is predicated upon Western stupidity, moral obtuseness, foolish racial jealousies—of the abandonment by the West of its own ideals and pretensions…. (“Capitalistic contradictions,” the Communists call it.)
If Western man has irrevocably decided that his record of dealing with the colored part of mankind is just and beyond criticism, that his way of life is perfect, that he has a godlike right to determine and time the development of mankind according to his own convenience, that his mere presence in this world is a blessing to the less fortunate, that he will make no meaningful concessions to the sense of justice and freedom which he himself helped to instill in men’s hearts—if this is the stance of Western man, then the last and strongest weapon of the West has been voluntarily surrendered to the Communists, the most solid moral ground of the last two thousand years has been gratuitously vacated, and the chances of a Communist global victory thereby immeasurably enhanced.
The aim of this book is to pose this problem anew in an area of the world where the issue has not yet been decided, an area that is proving a decisive example for an entire continent. The Western world has one last opportunity in Africa to determine if its ideals can be generously shared, if it dares to act upon its deepest convictions. China has gone the desperate way of totalitarianism; India teeters on the brink; and now has come Africa’s turn to test the ideals that the West has preached but failed to practice….
Let me be honest; I’m not too hopeful. The Western world does not even yet quite know how hard and inhuman its face looks to those who live outside of its confines. One of the aims of this book is to show you that face in its characteristic historical expression, to show you that face in terms that maybe you can understand and recognize. I don’t know. It may well already be too late. If you can feel that the person who presents these perhaps unwelcome facts to you does so with the desire of making you aware of your moral stance, of making you realize how others see and judge you, then you might read these lines with care.
In presenting this picture of a part of Africa, I openly use, to a limited degree, Marxist analysis of historic events to explain what has happened in this world for the past five hundred years or more. If anyone should object to my employment of Marxist methods to make meaningful the ebb and flow of commodities, human and otherwise, in the modern state, to make comprehensible the alignment of social classes in modern society, I have but to say that I’ll willingly accept any other method of interpreting the facts; but I insist that any other method must not exclude the facts!
But my utilization of Marxist instrumentalities of thought does not necessarily commit me to programs or policies popularly associated with Marxist philosophy. The measures which I recommend at the end of this book do not derive from any programmatic theories of any political party. They are derived from my concern about human freedom, from what I know of the world, from what I saw and felt in Africa, and the concrete situation of the Convention People’s Party of the Gold Coast.
This book seeks to provide Western readers with some insight into what is going to happen in Africa, so that, when it does happen, they will be able to understand it, so that they will not entertain the kind of illusions that held forth about China; my point is that if Africa today is in turmoil, it is not merely the omniscient hand of Moscow that is fomenting all the trouble; but that, given the harsh background of Africa and the numbing impact of the West that it has suffered, what is happening was bound to happen. Frankly, this current mania of ascribing all the world’s unrest to Russian Communists simply credits the Russians with more intelligence than they actually possess.
The issue of who is to blame in a colonial nation that is determinedly actuated by Western ideals to throw off the yoke of foreign rule is a tricky one. The popular assumption is that colonial people are happy and that only evil foreign agents are stirring up strife, but the facts of life in the Gold Coast do not bear out such tortured contentions. Indeed, the greatest incentive to the growth of Communism in Africa today would be the attempt on the part of the West to throttle the rise of African nations; such an attempt at crushing African aspirations would drive the Africans straight down the road that China is so bloodily traveling…. That road began with Mau Mau.
The historical material in this book is drawn exclusively from bourgeois sources, if that is of any comfort to anybody. The interpretations of facts, their coloring and presentation, are my own, and, for whatever it is worth, I take full responsibility for them. And I think that time will bear me out.
This volume is a first-person, subjective narrative on the life and conditions of the Colony and Ashanti areas of the Gold Coast, an area comprising perhaps the most highly socially evolved native life of present-day Africa. The choice of selecting the Gold Coast for such an intensive study was my own and the judgments rendered are not comparative. I felt that it was time for someone to subject a slice of African life to close scrutiny in terms of concepts that one would use in observing life anywhere. Thus, some conclusions arrived at in these pages might well startle or dismay those who like to dote on “primitive” people….
Africa challenges the West in a way that the West has not been challenged before. The West can meanly lose Africa, or the West can nobly save Africa; but whatever happens, make no mistake: THE WEST IS BEING JUDGED BY THE EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRE IN AFRICA!
RICHARD WRIGHT—PARIS: MAY, 1954
PART I
Approaching Africa
Only in one particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades—the commodity involved was man.
ERIC WILLIAMS’ CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY
One
The table had been cleared and the coffee was being poured. The Easter Sunday luncheon was almost over and we were stirring the sugar in our cups. It was so quiet that the footfalls from the tranquil Paris street below echoed upward. It was one of those moments when, for no reason, a spell of silence hangs in the air. I sipped my coffee and stared at the gray walls of the University of Paris that loomed beyond the window.
One of my guests, Dorothy, the wife of George Padmore, the West Indian author and journalist, turned to me and asked:
“Now that your desk is clear, why don’t you go to Africa?”
The idea was so remote to my mind and mood that I gaped at her a moment before answering.
“Africa?” I echoed.
“Yes. The Gold Coast,” she said stoutly.
“But that’s four thousand miles away!” I protested.
“There are planes and ships,” she said.
My eyes ranged unseeingly about the room. I felt cornered, uneasy. I glanced at my wife.
“Why not?” she said.
A moment ago I had been collected, composed; now I was on the defensive, feeling poised on the verge of the unknown.
“Africa!” I repeated the word to myself, then paused as something strange and d
isturbing stirred slowly in the depths of me. I am African! I’m of African descent…. Yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans; I’d hardly ever thought of Africa….
“Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister, is going to table his motion for self-government in July,” Dorothy said.
“It would be a great experience for you,” my wife said.
I heard them, but my mind and feelings were racing along another and hidden track. Africa! Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common “racial” heritage? Africa was a vast continent full of “my people.”…Or had three hundred years imposed a psychological distance between me and the “racial stock” from which I had sprung? Perhaps some Englishman, Scotsman, Frenchman, Swede, or Dutchman had chained my great-great-great-great-grandfather in the hold of a slave ship; and perhaps that remote grandfather had been sold on an auction block in New Orleans, Richmond, or Atlanta…. My emotions seemed to be touching a dark and dank wall…. But, am I African? Had some of my ancestors sold their relatives to white men? What would my feelings be when I looked into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great-grandfather had sold my great-great-great-grandfather into slavery? Was there something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and meaningful? Would the Africans regard me as a lost brother who had returned?
“Do you think that the Gold Coast will be self-governing soon?” I asked. I genuinely wanted to know about the political situation in the Gold Coast, yet another and far more important question was trying to shape itself in me. According to popular notions of “race,” there ought to be something of “me” down there in Africa. Some vestige, some heritage, some vague but definite ancestral reality that would serve as a key to unlock the hearts and feelings of the Africans whom I’d meet…. But I could not feel anything African about myself, and I wondered, “What does being African mean…?”
“…and they are fighting for self-government,” Dorothy was explaining. “It would be wonderful if you could be there when the first black Prime Minister in history asks the British for the freedom of his people.”
“Yes,” I said. “How long does it take to get there?”
“One day by plane and twelve days by ship,” Dorothy said.
Was Africa “primitive”? But what did being “primitive” mean? I’d read books on “primitive” people, but, while reading them, their contents had always seemed somehow remote. Now a strange reality, in some way akin to me, was pressing close, and I was dismayed to discover that I didn’t know how to react to it.
“Just what level of development have the people there reached?” I asked Dorothy.
“You must ask George about that,” she said. “He’s been there…. But you’ll find their development mixed. You’ll find Christians and pagans…”
“I want to see the pagans,” I said impulsively.
“Why?” my wife asked.
“I know what a Christian African would have to say, but I don’t know what paganism is—”
“It’s all there,” Dorothy said emphatically. “And if you’re going to attend the session of the Legislative Assembly in which the Prime Minister will make his bid for freedom, you’d better see about passage.”
“I’ll go by ship, if I go,” I said. “That would give me time enough to read up on the history of the country.”
“You must go,” my wife said.
The fortuity of birth had cast me in the “racial” role of being of African descent, and that fact now resounded in my mind with associations of hatred, violence, and death. Phrases from my childhood rang in my memory: one-half Negro, one-quarter Negro, one-eighth Negro, one-sixteenth Negro, one thirty-second Negro…. In thirty-eight out of the forty-eight states of the American Federal Union, marriage between a white person and a person of African descent was a criminal offense. To be of “black” blood meant being consigned to a lower plane in the social scheme of American life, and if one violated that scheme, one risked danger, even death sometimes. And all of this was predicated upon the presence of African blood in one’s veins. How much of me was African? Many of my defensive-minded Negro friends had often told me with passion:
“We have a special gift for music, dancing, rhythm and movement…. We have a genius of our own. We were civilized in Africa when white men were still living in caves in Europe….”
To me talk of that sort had always seemed beside the point; I had always taken for granted the humanity of Africans as well as that of other people. And being either uninterested or unable to accept such arguments, I’d always remained silent in such conversations. My kind of thinking was impotent when it came to explaining life in “racial” terms. On countless occasions I’d heard white men say to me:
“Now, you take the racial expression of the Negro…”
And I’d looked off uneasily, wondering what they meant. I was accounted as being of African, that is, Negro, descent, but what were these “racial” qualities that I was supposed to possess? While in the presence of those who talked confidently of “racial” qualities, I would listen and mull over their phrases, but no sooner had they gone than my mind would revert to my habitual kind of thinking that had no “race” in it, a kind of thinking that was conditioned by the reaction of human beings to a concrete social environment. And I’d ask myself:
“What are they talking about?”
Over the Easter Sunday luncheon table, I mapped out my voyage. I wanted to see this Africa that was posing such acute questions for me and was conjuring up in my mind notions of the fabulous and remote: heat, jungle, rain, strange place names like Cape Coast, Elmina, Accra, Kumasi…. I wanted to see the crumbling slave castles where my ancestors had lain panting in hot despair. The more I thought of it, the more excited I became, and yet I could not rid myself of a vague sense of disquiet.
I excused myself from the table and consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the description of the Gold Coast it gave was vivid, replete with dangerous reptiles, gold, and diamonds. There were only three short paragraphs about the people who were described as being of the “Negro race.” The Gold Coast was about four degrees from the Equator and teemed with mineral and agricultural wealth. I returned to the table.
“Do you think I’ll have any trouble getting in?”
“You’d better apply for your visa at once,” Dorothy advised. “If you have any trouble, get in touch with the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, George’ll tell Nkrumah that you want to come….”
“Just what’s the setup in the Gold Coast? Are foreign affairs in the hands of the British?”
“Yes; and finance and the police too,” she said.
“And the rest of the cabinet ministers are African?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going,” I said. It was decided.
Two
On the platform of Euston Station in London I saw swarms of Africans, Western in manner and dress, for the first time. The boat-train compartment in which I sat was cold and I huddled in my macintosh, longing for my heavy coat which was packed in my trunk. Outside the train window the landscape was as bleak as any described by D. H. Lawrence or Arnold Bennett or George Moore…. I drifted to sleep, then I was awakened by the train jolting, slowing. I looked out of the window and saw Liverpool….
This was the city that had been the center and focal point of the slave trade; it was here that most of the slavers had been organized, fitted out, financed, and dispatched with high hopes on their infamous but lucrative voyages. Suffice it to say that the British did not originate this trading in human flesh whose enormous profits laid the foundations upon which had been reared modern industrial England. The honor for the launching of that crusade against Africa rested upon the pious shoulders of the Portuguese who had had the right, under a papal bull of 1455, to subject to servitude all infidel peoples. Later it fell to the daring of the English to rear that trade into a system whose function
ings would in some manner touch more than half of the human race with its bloody but profitable agitations—the consequences of which would endure for more than four hundred years.
In dredging through books for material on the background of the Gold Coast, I purposefully confined my reading to the historical facts presented by the British themselves, many of whom, like Sir Alan Burns, Eric Williams, W. E. Ward, and K. A. Busia, etc., are still living and active. I found that though the British might at times be guilty of a kind of intriguing understatement, they never hid facts, even when those facts contradicted their own moral notions. The sketchy backdrop which follows came not from Socialist or Marxian, but from conservative British sources.
The search for short sea routes, the thirst for gold and spices, and Columbus’ discovery of the New World set in motion international economic rivalries that have not subsided even to this day. I’ve often wondered why the assault upon Africa was called “imperialism” even by ardent revolutionaries, why such a mild word as “exploitation” was ever used to describe it. The simple truth is that it consisted of a many-centuries-long war waged by the peninsula of Europe, with the sanction of Catholicism, against the continent of Africa. In that campaign the odds were on the side of the superior organization and technical development of white Europe which, when pitted in war against the fragility of an essentially agricultural and tribal people, smashed those people, dealt them a blow from which they have never recovered. Indeed, so unimportant were Africa’s millions deemed that no real account of that long campaign was ever fully or properly recorded.
True, forms of rigorous servitude existed even among European whites when the slave trade was launched, and, in those days, Liverpool had had but a modest share of it. Yet, there existed in England the conditions, the attitudes, and the impulses which would easily lend themselves with passion to the slave trade. The first slaves to toil for Europeans in the New World were not Negroes, but the indigenous Indians who, alas, were found to be temperamentally unsuited for arduous labor under tropic suns, and new sources of human instruments had to be sought. The next experiment in harnessing human beings to the plantations of the New World involved poor white indentured servants and convicts, and, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word “convict” had a meaning that conveniently covered a wide area of people.
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