Black Power

by Richard Wright

  But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin is dead.

  For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.

  As I walked on in the hot sun I could sense vast emotional impactions taking place; I could feel dammed-up physical hungers straining like jungle plants for the heat of the sun; and, in the end, I could see that Africa too some day would exhibit those strange and fantastic patterns of Western neurotic behavior that would necessitate the uncovering of all of that which religion was now covering up, that there would be doctors to coax these people to believe again in that which religion had taught them to repress. I could feel the mental suffering and emotional anguish that had yet to come into those innocent lives….

  I paused before a young woman selling tin pans and, by pointing, I indicated that I wanted to buy one. At once a group of women gathered about; it seemed that my buying a pan made them feel that they had the right to examine me at close quarters. The woman to whom I had pointed out the pan seemed baffled; she called hurriedly to a friend. Soon a crowd of no less than fifteen women were ranged about me, chattering excitedly. Finally they called an old man who spoke a little English and he translated. The pan cost seven shillings and I paid, sweating, wondering why the women were evincing such interest. As I started off with the pan under my arm, the old man called me back.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The women chattered even more loudly now.

  “What you do with pan, Massa? Women wanna know.”

  I looked at the women and they hid their faces, laughing.

  “I’m going to use the pan to boil water. I’m making a chemical solution in which to develop films…” My voice trailed off, for I could see that he had not understood me.

  “They wanna know if you buy it for wife?” the man asked.

  “No.”

  There was another outburst of laughter.

  “They wanna know if Massa cook chop in pan?”

  “No. I eat in a hotel restaurant,” I said.

  The women conferred with the man again and he shook his head. Finally he turned to me and asked:

  “Massa, women wanna know if Massa make peepee in pan?”

  I blinked in bewilderment. The women were howling with laughter now.

  I pushed away, hearing their black laughter echoing in my ears as I tried to lose myself in the crowd. I learned afterward that it was considered a disgrace for a man to purchase pots, pans, or food, that it was an open confession that he had no woman to do such things for him, and that no decent, self-respecting African would ever dare be caught buying such a thing as a pan in the public market. In the eyes of those women I’d lost caste, for they’d been conditioned in a hard masculine school of detribalized thought whose slogans regarding women were: keep ’em ignorant, keep ’em pregnant, and keep ’em ten paces behind you.

  That evening the Prime Minister’s office called and informed me that I’d be picked up and taken to Cape Coast to watch the Convention People’s Party campaign in a by-election. It seemed that Kwesi Plange, one of the youngest and brightest members of the party, had died and that it was now necessary to fill his post with a man upon whom Nkrumah could rely in the Legislative Assembly. The Plange seat was being hotly contested by the opposition parties led by the English-educated old guard. Cape Coast was the educational center of the nation and most of the best educated families lived there. A Gold Coast slogan went: as Cape Coast goes, so goes the country. Hence, the Convention People’s Party was most anxious to win. But, so many wild and hot charges had been made by both the Convention People’s Party and the opposition that the outcome was a tossup and an opposition victory was being predicted in some quarters.

  Next morning at ten o’clock a string of about twenty automobiles halted in front of my hotel; the cavalcade consisted of sound trucks, private cars filled with the party’s ablest speakers and organizers. There was one car filled with women only…. This rigorous separation of the sexes seemed to prevail in almost everything the Africans did; you never saw their women until the time came for them to make their appearance, and then they moved ghostily, doing their chores, and, it seemed, at some prearranged moment, they would vanish as quickly and silently as they had come.

  I sat in the car with the Prime Minister and we roared out into the countryside. A blue haze hung over the green stretches of forest. Much of the conversation that went on was in tribal language and it didn’t seem to bother them that I couldn’t understand; it may be that they talked their tribal tongue so that I wouldn’t understand…. I felt that some of them regarded me as an outsider who’d scorn their habits, their manners, and their attitudes. I found the African an oblique, a hard-to-know man who seemed to take a kind of childish pride in trying to create a state of bewilderment in the minds of strangers. Only a man who himself had felt such bewilderment in the presence of strangers could have placed so high and false a value upon it. They seemed to feel that that which they did not reveal to me I could never know, but nothing could have been more erroneous.

  On this journey I had an opportunity to observe the Prime Minister in action at close range. Among his own people he was a democrat, self-forgetfully identifying himself with the common masses in deed and word each passing hour. He slept, played, and ate with them, sharing his life in a manner that no Englishman or missionary ever could…. It was his lapsing into a sudden silence that drew a line between himself and them. His prescriptive right to leadership was derived from his demonstrating the correctness of his political tactics. I’d not witnessed any evidence of the fury of which I’d been told that he was capable, but there was a hidden core of hardness in him which I was sure that no one could bring to the surface quicker than an Englishman….

  The cavalcade halted in a coconut grove just outside of Cape Coast, in sight of the rolling Atlantic which sent white-capped waves breaking in foam upon the rock-strewn beach. Standing to one side and flanked by his trusted aides, the Prime Minister organized his entry into the town, indicating which car was to enter first, who was to ride in each car. The loud-speakers of the sound trucks were tested; an agenda for the day was drawn up; the route to be taken was mapped out.

  To Nkrumah’s orders the party men reacted quickly, keenly; here, less than five hundred miles from the Equator, amidst an appalling heat and humidity, these blacks whom the world had branded as being lazy and indifferent went about their duties with a zeal that would have put even Communists to shame. While this organizing was transpiring, a crowd of barefooted black boys clustered around. The Prime Minister asked me:

  “How about a drink of coconut milk?”

  “That’d be fine,” I said.

  At his signal the boys raced toward the trees; they did not climb them; they walked up, so adroitly did they scale the tall, slick tree trunks. Soon they were nestling in the tops of the trees and coconuts rained earthward. A tall boy picked them up and, with a cutlass, whacked holes in them. I was handed one; the juice tasted sweet, cool, and delicious.

  I noticed that the women’s contingent stood discreetly to one side. Such separateness, I was now convinced, must have a deep basis, a religious origin. At no time did the women mingle with the men; they kept in one compact group, to themselves. I spoke to one and she replied shyly, edging away…. She was a fully mature woman and surely she was not afraid of talking to a man. This exclusiveness of the women was undoubtedly due to some powerful tribal taboo too deep for even the Convention People’s Party to overcome….

  The cavalcade was ready; we got into the cars; the Prime Minister stood up, lifted his hand in the party salute. I sat behind him in the open convertible car…. The loud-speakers of the sound trucks blared:

  “FREE—DOOOOOM!”

  And the procession was off on its political mission. Already the people of Cape Coast, hearing the roar, were crowding into the streets, rushing from their mud or concrete houses to salute and scr
eam:

  “FREE—DOOOOOM!”

  The Prime Minister knew where his votes were; he hit the slum section first. The people, many of them half naked, flowed out of the warrens and mazes of compounds into the streets and their reactions were vital. They waved their hands in that queer, trembling vibration of the outstretched palm, giving a rolling, veering motion with their bodies as they sang and yelled:

  “FREE—DOOOOOM! FREE—DOOOOM!”

  “All for you, Kwame!”

  “FREE—DOOOOOM! FREE—DOOOOOM!”

  The procession wove in and out of the narrow, dusty streets, up and down hill. We passed Cape Coast Castle, built by the Swedes in 1657; it stood white and awesome in the hot sun. It was here that most of the slaves of the entire Guinea Coast had been assembled to be shipped to the New World. With loud-speakers screeching, we finally entered the Cape Coast residential section which fronted the sea; here lived some of the oldest and most respected families of the nation. They boasted a Sir or two, a few Orders of the British Empire, scornfully dubbed by the nationalists as: Obedient Boys of the Empire…. It was here that the African elite attitude held forth with bitter mien; it was here that the colony’s most famous schools were located; it was here that Drs. Danquah and Busia, the intellectual leaders of the opposition, had raised the nostalgic but futile cry: “Preserve our traditions!”

  There was less shouting for “FREE—DOOOOM!” in these quiet and sedate streets. Indeed, a skinny black man with a pince-nez athwart his nostrils, a chuck of graying mustache upon his upper lip, wearing his toga like that of a Roman emperor, stood on the wooden steps of his house and shouted again and again:

  “I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM!”

  The loud-speaker grated:

  “VOTE FOR WELBECK! VOTE FOR THE CPP! VOTE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT NOW! FOLLOW NKRUMAH TO VICTORY!”

  After two hours of emotional blitzkrieg upon the inhabitants of Cape Coast, the tour ended; later in the afternoon would come the ideological assault in the form of words hurled in an open-air rally in the center of the city. As we drove toward a private home for lunch, the Prime Minister told me some of his problems.

  “We really don’t know the exact mineral resources of this country,” he said. “The British were only interested in getting rich quick, exporting those minerals which could be carried away to England or some other place. One of our urgent tasks is to find out just what mineral wealth we have locked in our soil.

  “We have a wonderful soil out of which to make bricks. We’ve also found locations with soil from which we can make cement. But the British ship us cement from England…. And nothing is done about the natural advantages of making cement here. We’d like to, say, in housing, evolve a distinctly native style of architecture that would be suitable both to our people and to the climate….

  “Until today England has decided what was good for us and shipped it to us at prices that they determined. For example, woolens, which are far too hot for this climate, were shipped here and sold. Even now they make our local police wear woolen uniforms in this awful heat….

  “Take another example…. Our climate is good to grow almost anything, yet 80 per cent of our staple food is imported. No one has really ever tried to experiment and determine what foods this soil will grow best. Why should the English care about things like that? They don’t live here. They came here to make money in government or business and then they go back. And, of course, they never dreamed that one day the native would arise and say:

  “‘No more of this!’”

  We sat down to lunch and the Prime Minister warned me:

  “Take it easy with that food. You’re not used to it.”

  I ignored him and served myself generously with ground-nut soup, kenke, fufu, all of which tasted wonderful except for the fiery red pepper which pervaded everything.

  “It may give you trouble,” somebody else cautioned me.

  “What harm can this good food do me?” I asked challengingly.

  The next morning I knew….

  After lunch the cavalcade set out for the center of town where a vast crowd had congregated. There was no shade and the tropic sun beat down without mercy, making me squirm, sweat; finally I put my handkerchief, dampened with water, to my face to keep from feeling faint.

  An African band—composed mostly of drums—played music and a group of singers chanted a dirge for the dead Kwesi Plange; then speaker after speaker lashed out at the crowd in Fanti and English. It seemed that the oppositionist, Dr. Busia, had allowed himself at some time or other to be quoted as saying that he did not think that the country was ready for self-government and this was used for all that it was worth against him. Even if people were not ready to govern themselves, they certainly would not want to be told so in such snobbish terms…. Nkrumah’s orators were no novices; they were consummate politicians and they played upon the crowd’s emotions with great skill. But from where had they gotten this art…?

  Again, as it had been in Accra, the meeting was a mixture of tribal ancestor worship, Protestantism, Catholicism—all blended together and directed toward modern political aims. One speaker, for example, trained his audience to respond verbally by telling them: “When I say——, then you say——!” The speaker then chanted his words and the audience responded, not knowing where the seemingly innocent words were leading. It went something like that game that children play when they recite: “One nis ball, two nis ball, three nis ball…” And ending in: “Ten nis ball….” And when the crowd discovered that they had been unknowingly led into chanting a political slogan or hurling a stinging insult at the opposition, they literally howled their approval. One man, clad in a toga, rose, lifted his hands skyward; his eyes glazed and dreamlike, he sang out with orgiastic joy:

  “What a wonderful life! What a wonderful life!”

  Never before had that man had a chance to express himself, or to hear others state what he felt to be true, and the mere hearing of someone recount his hopes and dreams was enough to make him feel free. England was reaping the results of keeping these people from trying to manage their own lives and now they were relishing freedom, savoring it, so to speak.

  The Prime Minister advanced to the microphone. He was in form; he was sharp, unyielding in his condemnation of the opposition. He hissed:

  “I don’t care how many university degrees that Busia and Danquah have between them! The truth is: they don’t know politics! Why, they are scared of you, as scared of you as the British are!”

  The crowd laughed.

  “Danquah ought to be an assistant librarian and leave politics alone! I’ll give him such a job, if he wants it!”

  The audience listened, open-mouthed, smiling in agreement.

  “Busia? He’s a goat! Let him keep to his sociology! As a politician, why, he’s not worthy to stoop down and untie my shoestrings!”

  This was hard fighting and the crowd roared their appreciation.

  “We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquillity!”

  “FREE—DOOOOOOOM! FREE—DOOOOOOM!”

  The crowd chanted as their dark and emotion-spent faces left the meeting; wistfully I watched their toga-draped bodies wander off in the fading light of the setting sun…. I sat brooding. How had he conquered them? He had held them in the palms of his hands; he had poured scorn on the claims of the opposition; he had allowed no mercy for a contrary opinion; and it seemed that that was what his followers wanted. Prolonged British evasion and aloofness had made them ready to embrace certainty, definiteness….

  Back in my hotel room that night in Accra I tried to analyze what I’d seen. One could argue that Nkrumah had learned such tactics from observing Communist activities in London and New York, but there was the problem of determining how his aides, in five short years, had developed such a high degree of political dexterity with the masses. I had had enough experience in the Communist Party of the United States to know that what I had seen in Cape Coast had not been Communism. Communis
m was, above all, ideological; and what I had seen was the quintessence of passion.

  My tentative answer was that, with the multitude of revolutionary examples before their eyes to indicate a general sense of direction, Nkrumah and his boys had doped out the rest, had guessed it, had fumbled and found how to organize their people; moreover, back of it all was, I believe, something much deeper and more potent than the mere influence of Marxist thought. It was my conviction that the twentieth century was throwing up these mass patterns of behavior out of the compulsive nakedness of men’s disinherited lives. These men were not being so much guided as they were being provoked by elements deep in their own personalities, elements which they could not have ignored even if they had tried. The greed of British businessmen and the fumbling efforts of missionaries had made an unwitting contribution to this mass movement by shattering the traditional tribal culture that had once given meaning to these people’s lives, and now there burned in these black hearts a hunger to regain control over their lives and create a new sense of their destinies. White uplifters were generally so deficient in imagination that they could never realize how taunting were their efforts to save Africans when their racial codes forbade their sharing the lives of those Africans….

  What I had seen was not politics proper; it was politics plus…. It bordered upon religion; it involved a total and basic response to reality; it smacked of the dreamlike, of the stuff of which art and myths were made…. The number of men around the Prime Minister who knew Marxism were few in number, and how could they have instilled so quickly such abstruse ideas into illiterate masses? What I had seen was a smattering of Marxism plus the will to be, a thirst for self-redemption! And I suspected that Nkrumah himself was but an agent provocateur to the emotions of millions—emotions which even he did not quite grasp or understand in all of their ramifications….

  Eleven

  At last the Prime Minister’s political secretary, Kofi Baako, called at my hotel to talk to me. He was a short, brownish-black man, thin, restless, intense, nervous. So well did he know the story that he had to tell that he had no need of notes; he got down to work at once, the words coming fluently from him. I recapitulate his story: