Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “I guess we’d better go.”

  We paid for our drinks and climbed back into the taxi. Mr. Togoland was wistful and grateful, but somehow disappointed.

  “Was that the first time you’ve ever been in such a place?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he sighed. He glanced shyly at Mr. Justice. “And in such company,” he murmured, deeply impressed.

  Mr. Justice was silent, serious, reflective. The white Spanish-styled villas flew past the taxi window. We came in sight of the ocean where the sun splashed and glittered on the seascape. Ships idled at anchor. Gulls wheeled in the dazzling blue, crying hungrily.

  “Listen,” Mr. Justice began soberly, “those houses are safe, well run, clean. They’re all right. I know that all of the leading British administrators, merchants, and soldiers in West Africa go to such houses when they visit Las Palmas….”

  “Then it must be all right, if they go there,” I said tersely.

  Mr. Justice looked at me searchingly, surprised.

  “Of course, it is,” he said. “Did you doubt that?”

  “I’ve never doubted the wisdom of the British,” I said.

  “Oh, come now,” he chided me uneasily. “Be fair.”

  “I’m not a fair man, Mr. Justice,” I informed him.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said slowly.

  “I understand you,” I said.

  Six

  As we entered West African waters, the sea was choppy, with whitecaps showing. A blue mist hung on the horizon and, I was told, the humidity in the air was a foretaste of what I’d encounter in the Gold Coast.

  At dinner I watched Mr. Justice take his wheat germ, his yeast tablets, his vitamins, and his laxative sticks. I struggled against an oblique sympathy that was dawning in me for the man. How England had mangled his soul! The truth was that the judge was living in the wrong century. His enslaved grandfather had desperately pulled himself out of servitude, had lifted himself above the tribal level, and, in doing so, he had been akin to the millions of Europeans and Americans of the nineteenth century who had so valiantly overthrown the remnants of feudalism. Mr. Justice represented the victory of enlightenment: he could read, he could vote, he was free; but he was adamant against the hungers of the new generation.

  Mr. Justice’s grandfather had been a hero to him, but I doubted if Mr. Justice’s children would regard him in a heroic light. He wanted his children to be black Englishmen. But would his children want to be that? Were there not much bigger and more exciting battles for them to fight? Mr. Justice had succeeded at the moment when history was about to nullify his triumphs, and he was already confused and bewildered at the new social and political consents swirling about him.

  We were now in tropic waters, almost opposite Dakar. The horizon was continually shrouded in mist. The sea was smooth, with a tiny whitecap here and there. Hourly the heat and humidity mounted and I imagined that the temperature on shore must have been very high.

  That afternoon I wandered down into third class and found a group of young African students. I insinuated myself into their conversation and steered it toward politics. One undeniable fact informed their basic attitudes: Russia had made a most tremendous impression upon the minds of these world’s outsiders. From where these colonial boys stood, Russia’s analysis of events made sense. The first inescapable fact was that it was only from Russia—not from the churches or the universities of the Western world—that a moral condemnation of colonial exploitation had come. On this moral ground abandoned in embarrassment by the West, the Russians had driven home telling ideological blows.

  The foremost conviction I found in them—or maybe you’d call it mood—was that nobody should strive for a unique or individual destiny. This was, of course, in essence, anti-Christian, even if the befuddled boys holding such notions did not know it. The historic events of the past forty years had made them feel that the only road into the future lay in collective action, that organized masses constituted the only true instrument of freedom.

  This was not Communism; it was its impact; it was not the ideology of Marxism; it was its influence. The methods of imperialists have made it easy for these boys to embrace the idea of “masses,” and the masses they have in mind are black masses…. Of Communism per se they wanted none, but they keenly appreciated the moral panic into which Russia had thrown the Western world. And they were aware of the huge mass of empiric material available about the techniques of making uprisings, general strikes, all kinds and degrees of actions that could paralyze the economic activities of imperialist powers….

  One rather heady young man expressed himself about Russia as follows:

  “Russia’s a gadfly! I’m not for her, but I’m not against her! Let her stay where she is and harass the West! Why are the British treating us a little better? They’re scared of our going over to the Russians, that’s all. If Russia were defeated tomorrow, a tide of reaction would set in in all the colonies. But, with the Cold War raging, even an Englishman, when he passes you on deck, is willing to say ‘Good morning’!”

  Their resentment against the British went far beyond economic issues. They swear that they’ll rename many of their towns, rivers, villages and they’ll christen them with names that their fathers gave them. They despise names like Gold Coast, Mumford, and Queen Anne’s Point; and they are determined to rename their country Ghana…. I’m afraid that white Westerners will look on in dismay when they leave the Gold Coast and wonder what all their labors were for; they may go so far as to accuse the Africans of ingratitude….

  That night the ship washed through a steamy, tropic sea. A lighthouse whirled a powerful beam every few seconds through the velvet dark. The air smelled of rain. The winking red and green lights of a plane floated through the sky with a sound so faint that it emphasized the silence of the sea. Overhead the blackness was studded with points of star fire floating in a haze of silver; the sky seemed heavy, rich, about to swoop with a ripened load toward the heaving surface of the water.

  Next day the sea was a flat, gray disc whose surface stretched toward a vague horizon. During the night it had rained and now drops of water clung to my porthole. The ship plowed through slaty seas that looked like viscous oil. The heat was so enervating that I felt sleepy, heavy, filled with unrest. The slightest exertion brought sweat to my face, yet the sky was never really bright; the sun’s rays could not penetrate the overhanging mist. The day wore on and a kind of grayness pervaded the world and there was no line between the sea and the sky.

  PART II

  The Nervous Colony

  Detribalization breaks down traditional ideas and introduces some of the Western; exploitation sharpens the ensuing restlessness into discontent; missionary education provides leaders and unwittingly furnishes much of the ideology and patterns of expression, for African revolts are frequently a mixture of religious fanaticism and anti-European sentiment.

  THE MARGINAL MAN, BY EVERETT V. STONEQUIST

  Seven

  When I awakened on the morning of the 16th of June, I was at once conscious of a strange, dead quiet. The ship’s diesel engines had ceased to throb; stillness gripped my narrow cabin. We had docked! I leaped out of my bunk-bed and peered through the porthole and saw Africa….

  I dressed hurriedly and went on deck; an African city, under a blanket of blue mist, lay spread out before me. The heat was heavy, close, wet; and the city—Takoradi—seethed with activity at even this early hour. On the wharf was a forest of derricks, cranes, sheds, machines and, as I looked closer, I could see that they were being operated by black men—a fact that must have produced pain in the heart of Dr. Malan of South Africa, for he had sworn that black men were incapable of doing these things.

  I studied the swirling crowd on the docks and found it hard to distinguish men from women, for practically everyone had a richly colored cloth draped about him, and almost everyone was barefooted except the policemen who, to my horror, were dressed in dark blue wool! I wondered how they coul
d stand it….

  At the breakfast table I took my farewell of Mr. Justice who was continuing the voyage to Lagos, Nigeria.

  “I wonder what you’re going to make out of Africa,” the judge said reflectively, chewing.

  “I don’t expect to find too much there that’s completely new,” I drawled.

  “Africa’s strange, strange,” he assured me.

  “My background’s rather strange too,” I informed him.

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “If you get to Nigeria, you must look me up,” he said. “Don’t forget me.”

  “I shan’t forget you,” I told him.

  I descended to the customs shed where it was twice as hot as it had been on board. A young man approached me.

  “Mr. Wright?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m meeting you for the Prime Minister.”

  He was Mr. Ansah, short, black, alert, a personal friend of Nkrumah. He guided me through customs and informed me that a government transport bus would take me to Accra, the capital. Emerging from the customs shed, I saw Africa for the first time with frontal vision: black life was everywhere. My eyes were riveted upon a woman wearing a brightly colored length of cloth which held a baby strapped to her back; the infant’s legs were sprawled about the woman’s hips and thighs, and the tiny head of the baby lolled in sleep with sweat beading on its forehead. The cloth held the weight of the baby’s body and was anchored straight across the woman’s breasts, cutting deeply into the flesh. Another woman was washing in a pan set on the ground; she was bent at an angle of forty-five degrees in the broiling sun, her black child also sound asleep upon her back. The babies of other women were awake, their wide, innocent eyes avoiding the broad blank expanse of their mothers’ backs, looking at the world from side to side. Then I was startled by a European family threading its way through the black crowd.

  “They are the minority here, hunh, Mr. Ansah?” I asked.

  He roared with laughter.

  “It’s good not to be a minority for once, eh?” he asked.

  “I admit it,” I said. “Say, how do they behave?”

  “All right,” he said. “It’s the high officials who need watching. Individuals like these are generally polite; they have to be. They’re dependent upon us, you see.”

  We walked past black traffic officers, black policemen, gangs of black workmen; and, in the locomotive of a train, I saw a black fireman and a black engineer. The whole of life that met the eyes was black. I turned my attention to my host.

  “You’re a businessman, I take it?”

  “Yes. I hope you’re not opposed to businessmen.”

  “Not if they’re working for the freedom of their country,” I told him.

  He laughed heartily and grabbed my hand.

  “Just what do you do?” I asked him.

  “Timber. I cut it, dress it, draw it, and ship it to all parts of the world.”

  “How many men do you employ?”

  “About two hundred. Say, would you mind coming with me to the store? I must do a bit of shopping….”

  We entered a huge, modern store that reminded me of a unit in the American Atlantic and Pacific grocery chain; it was managed by the British but staffed with Africans. As Mr. Ansah shopped, I wandered about. I examined an enameled pot that would hold about a quart of liquid; it was priced at £1! Or $2.80! A salesman came up to me.

  “You wish to buy something, sar?”

  “No; I’m just looking.”

  “You’re American, aren’t you, sar?”

  “Yes; how did you know?”

  “Oh, we know, sar,” he said. Another salesman joined him. “What part of Africa did you come from, sar?”

  I stared at him and then laughed. I felt uneasy.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t your mother or grandmother ever tell you what part of Africa you came from, sar?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared vaguely about me. I had, in my childhood, asked my parents about it, but they had had no information, or else they hadn’t wanted to speak of it. I remembered that many Africans had sold their people into slavery; it had been said that they had had no idea of the kind of slavery into which they had been selling their people, but they had sold them…. I suddenly didn’t know what to say to the men confronting me.

  “Haven’t you tried to find out where in Africa you came from, sar?”

  “Well,” I said softly, “you know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us didn’t keep any records.”

  Silence stood between us. We avoided each other’s eyes.

  “Are you going to stay with us, sar?”

  “I’m visiting.”

  There was another silence. I was somehow glad when Mr. Ansah returned. We went back to the docks. It was so hot and humid that I felt that my flesh was melting from my bones. I climbed into the government bus and shook hands with my host. The bus rolled slowly through streets clogged with black life. African cities are small and one is in the “bush”—the jungle—before one knows it. Ten minutes out of Takoradi was enough to make Africa flood upon me so quickly that my mind was a blur and could not grasp it all. Villages of thick-walled mud huts heaved into view, tantalizing my eyes for a few seconds, and then fled past, only to be replaced by others as mythical and unbelievable. Naked black children sat or squatted upon the bare earth, playing. Black women, naked to the waist, were washing their multicolored cloths in shallow, muddy rivers. The soil was a rich red like that of Georgia or Mississippi, and, for brief moments, I could almost delude myself into thinking that I was back in the American South. Men, with their cloths tied at their hips, were cutting grass at the roadside with long cutlasses. Then I saw a crowd of naked men, women, and children bathing in a wide, muddy stream; the white lather of soap covered their bodies, and their black, wet skins glistened in the morning sun.

  Then, to my right, the Atlantic burst in a wide, blue, blaze of beauty. Along this coastline Africa had been in contact with Europe for more than five hundred years. What kind of relationship had these people had with Europe that left them more or less what they were…? Travelers’ accounts in 1700 tell of having seen thousands of tracks of antelope, elephants, and other wild animals in the areas through which my bus was speeding. Wild life has vanished from here now. Those not slain by hunters have been driven deeper into the dense jungles. But the customs of the people remain almost unaltered…

  In 1441 a Portuguese navigator, one Antonia Gonzales, launched the slave trade on these shores by kidnaping a few Africans; evidently the Christians of Portugal liked the services of those blacks, for Gonzales returned in 1442 for another shipload. Thus were inaugurated those acts of banditry which, as the decades passed, were erected into an institution that bled Africa and fattened Europe. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the slave trade took on a definite historic pattern and soon became the dominant passion of the Western world.

  It had not, however, been for slaves that the Europeans had first sailed down the coast of West Africa; they’d been trying to prove that the world was round, that they could find a route to India, seeking to determine if Africa was a peninsula. They had become distracted by the incredibly rich gold dust to be found on the Guinea Coast and, in 1455, there had sprung up what was known as the “silent trade,” a kind of coy and furtive bargaining between the predatory Europeans and the frightened but gullible natives…. Europeans would leave heaps of cheap trinkets upon the ground and then retire a half day’s march away; the Africans would steal out, examine the shoddy merchandise, and place tiny piles of gold dust upon each heap. The Europeans would then return and try to determine if the gold dust left was an adequate payment for the goods; if they felt that it was not, they’d retire again and the Africans would sneak up. If the Africans wanted the goods badly enough, they’d increase the tiny piles of gold dust…. Confidence being somewhat established in this manner, the Portuguese, according to historical records, had once traded exten
sively for gold in the very neighborhood through which my bus now sped.

  The kaleidoscope of sea, jungle, nudity, mud huts, and crowded market places induced in me a conflict deeper than I was aware of; a protest against what I saw seized me. As the bus rolled swiftly forward I waited irrationally for these fantastic scenes to fade; I had the foolish feeling that I had but to turn my head and I’d see the ordered, clothed streets of Paris…. But the string of mud villages stretched out without end. My protest was not against Africa or its people; it was directed against the unsettled feeling engendered by the strangeness of a completely different order of life. I was gazing upon a world whose laws I did not know, upon faces whose reactions were riddles to me. There was nothing here that I could predict, anticipate, or rely upon and, in spite of myself, a mild sense of anxiety began to fill me.

  The bus stopped and I stared down at a bare-breasted young girl who held a huge pan of oranges perched atop her head. She saw me studying her and she smiled shyly, obviously accepting her semi-nudity as being normal. My eyes went over the crowd and I noticed that most of the older women had breasts that were flat and remarkably elongated, some reaching twelve or eighteen inches (length, I was told later, was regarded as a symbol of fertility!), hanging loosely and flapping as the women moved about—and intuitively I knew that this deformation had been caused by the constant weight and pressure of babies sagging upon their backs and pulling the cloth that went across their bosoms….

  Some of the roofs of the huts were made of thatched straw and others were constructed of rusty corrugated tin. Many of the mud huts—commonly known as swish huts—had been fairly recently erected and were of a reddish-brown color; others were old, showing cracked walls half washed away by the torrential tropic rains, and their color tended toward a tannish yellow. I learned later that these swish huts had been known to withstand tropical weather for more than seventy years, so strongly were they built, and that they were cool and comfortable to sleep in. What fascinated me was the manner in which the swish hut structures ordered the manner of living; or was it that the African manner of living had preordained the odd structure of the huts…? They were so constructed that they formed a vast rectangle, three sides of which were solid walls of clay rooms whose doors fronted a wide courtyard; the fourth wall of rooms had a narrow opening serving both as exit and entrance. A dwelling unit of this sort was referred to as a compound, and, in its enclosure, washing, cooking, mending, carpentry, and a score of other activities took place. A compound of this nature was a variant of a stockade and it was believed that the Africans resorted to this mode of building when they wanted to protect themselves from slave snatching.