Black Power

by Richard Wright

  I discovered later that this shyness indicated that she was afraid of saying the wrong thing; above all, it meant that she did not completely trust me, did not know me…. Western “knowing” and non-Western “knowing” were two different things. It was impossible for a European to “know” somebody in the sense that an African “knows” somebody; “knowing” a person to an African meant possessing a knowledge of his tribe, of his family, of the formation of his habits, of the friends surrounding him, of being privy to the inmost secrets of his culture. While Western “knowing” was limited to a more rational basis—to a knowledge of a man’s profession, of his ideas, and perhaps some of his interests.

  So often had the Africans been deceived that distrust had become enthroned in the very processes of their thoughts. I could feel Mrs. Hannah Cudjoe’s distrust of me; it came from no specific cause; it was general. I was a stranger, a foreigner, and, therefore, must be spoken to cautiously, with weighed words. Distrust was in full operation before any objective event had occurred to justify it. A stranger confronting an African and feeling this distrust would begin to react to it and he’d feel himself becoming defensively distrustful himself. Distrust bred distrust; he’d begin to watch for evasion; he’d begin to question a flattering phrase. So, with no basis in immediate reality, both sides would begin regarding the other warily, searching for hidden meanings in the most innocent statements. In the end, what had begun as a stranger’s apprehension of the African’s wariness would terminate in a distrust created out of nowhere, conjured up out of nothing. This fear, this suspicion of nothing in particular came to be the most predictable hallmark of the African mentality that I met in all the Gold Coast, from the Prime Minister down to the humblest “mammy” selling kenke on the street corners….

  I had literally to pull Mrs. Hannah Cudjoe’s words out of her, so cautious was she; finally, she told me frankly:

  “You know, we black people have to be so careful. We don’t have many friends. Everybody wants to hurt us. They come here and grin in our faces, and then they go away and make fun of us….”

  “I understand,” I said. “But you must learn to control your reactions; you mustn’t let others see that you are afraid. You must never show weakness, for weakness invites attack—”

  “You think so?” she asked me.

  “Absolutely,” I told her.

  She was silent for a few minutes, then she relaxed and began to talk slowly. She told me that she had enlisted in the Convention People’s Party in the early days when the party had been young and the going hard. She had stood alone and many of the women of the Gold Coast had reviled her for daring to enter the political field…. She had once married one of the top party leaders, but she was now divorced. She worked hard, making four or five speeches a day, always on the move.

  “Please, be careful what you write about us,” she begged me. “We are poor and we must learn to live the modern way. So many people have hurt us.”

  Her answers were simple, direct, and factual, but she could not grasp abstract ideas and could not give me broad, coherent descriptions. She related how she had gone into the “bush” and had recruited hundreds of women into the party, how she had taken food to them and had made them feel that others cared about them, how she had shown them how to wash and feed their children.

  “Just what is the position of tribal woman today?” I asked her.

  “We are chattel,” she said frankly. “Under our customs the woman is owned by the husband; he owns even the clothes on her back. He dictates all of her moves, says what she can and can’t do. That’s why we don’t have as many women in the party as we would like. When a woman tells her husband that she wants to attend a political meeting, the husband tells the wife to stay home, that he’ll go to the meeting and he’ll tell her what she needs to know. A tribalized African simply cannot, will not believe that a woman can understand anything, and the woman alone can do nothing about it. Tribal law is against her; her husband has the right to collect all of the wife’s earnings….”

  “But, despite that, some of them are joining the party, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Slowly,” she said. “Almost all the women in our party are illiterate. In their homes, the women cannot speak about politics. But once they join the party, they find that life can be different. So some of our best defenders are women. They give their lives to the party and will stand and fight as nobody else will.”

  “Listen, Mrs. Cudjoe,” I asked her, “do you think that it’s possible for me to become a paying guest in an African home? You see, I’d like to get closer to the people, like to know how they live in families. What do you think?”

  I watched her face grow thoughtful and I knew that it was not a question of whether she could find an African home that would accept me as a paying guest; the question in her mind was: what would be my reactions to the life I’d see in an African home? She feared my scorning that life, laughing at it; she was afraid of me; I could feel distrust welling up in her….

  “I’ll ask around,” she mumbled without enthusiasm.

  And the lame tone of her voice told me that I’d never hear from her about my request, and I never did. What had been done to these people? That they had had and still had a lot of enemies, I had no doubt; but how could they ever win sympathy or friends if they were afraid to honor a simple, human request, if the most casual questions evoked grave doubts? Or were they so childlike as to imagine that they could hide the entire life of the Gold Coast from strangers? With the exception of the work of one or two of their educated men, all the history of their country and the interpretations of their customs had been written by Europeans, and those interpretations had shamed and angered them, but it was only to Europeans that they could talk really, that they could try to communicate.

  When Mrs. Cudjoe had gone, I fought against a horrible realization that was seeking to make itself manifest in me: these people could never really trust me. They had a tradition of nearly a hundred years of trusting—even against their will—the British and they had grown used to British authority, so used to it that they kept on trusting the British even when they hated them. For a long time to come it would be only to their British masters that they could really open their hearts. They’d grown used to British snobbery, curtness, aloofness and, even though they loathed it, they missed it when it was absent and felt loose and uncomfortable. I gritted my teeth and shook my head in dismay. Centuries of foreign rule had left their marks deep, deep in the personalities of the people, deeper than the people themselves had any idea of….

  The Africans I met knew that I knew something in general of the conditions of their lives, the disorder, the polygamy, the strange burial customs, etc.; these were the things in which they most deeply believed, yet they were ashamed of them before the world. How could one believe in something that one was ashamed of? Perhaps it was because it was all that they had? Western civilization had made them want to hide their traditional lives and yet that civilization had given them no other way to live….

  All that the African personality seemed to have gotten from the West so far was a numbed defensiveness, a chronic lack of self-confidence. How could even that which the Africans were ashamed of be changed if they never wanted it shown or talked about? Their contact with the West had been so negative and limited that they could not objectively determine what in their lives they could be proud of or ashamed of. They were uncertain, uneasy, nervous, split deep within themselves. I wondered if the British were sensitive enough to know what they had done to these people? Crimes have been committed in this world of so vast a nature that they have never been recorded in any criminal code.

  Thirteen

  Next morning I paid a visit to the headquarters of the Convention People’s Party. It was housed on the second floor of a stone building in a thriving trading quarter of Accra. It looked exactly like any political headquarters of any political party in the world: that is, dingy, humdrum, ill-lighted, and bare. Mr. Kwame Afriyie,
the general secretary of the party, was presented to me and at once he said:

  “We won in Cape Coast, you know.”

  I congratulated him. During my entire visit the phone rang; every party member was wanting to know the results of the Cape Coast by-election. Streams of people flowed in and out of the office, asking questions, seeking help in their party work, and offering themselves to be assigned to duties. A chief came in with his “linguist,” his umbrella, and all; he was taken into a private room….

  “Do chiefs come here too, especially after your party has clipped their political wings?” I asked Mr. Afriyie.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, laughing.

  “But why do they come?”

  “They’re sensible,” Mr. Afriyie told me. “They’re adjusting themselves to the new situation. Some of them come here to beg the Prime Minister to address audiences in their local areas. You see, when a chief feels that he is losing prestige, he wants our help. Then sometimes a chief is the president of a local council and he wants our advice on some point or other. And a lot of chiefs are now wanting to become presidents of town councils; you see? We don’t bother with the chief’s sacred, religious, or ceremonial functions, but we see that he keeps out of politics. The smart chiefs see the handwriting on the wall and are trying to get adjusted to the new social order that is in the making.

  “Since we have come to power, the old tribal spirit and cohesiveness have declined. Many of the old chiefs were corrupt, holding their positions by right of the British under a system of indirect rule. Many people were deeply dissatisfied with them. Chiefs pitted their little tribes against other little tribes in senseless disputes, and the resulting debilitating atmosphere was discouraging to the masses who wanted something concrete and practical done. Then many of the chiefs were illiterate and would co-operate with no one. They could understand nothing.”

  “And did the British try to correct that?”

  “Why should they have tried to do that?” he asked me. “It wasn’t in their interest. The British wanted things to stay just as they were.”

  I examined the membership book of the Convention People’s Party and saw that the Prime Minister’s name headed the list. The party had a membership of about 400,000, the average age being about thirty-five. The rank and file were carpenters, students, clerks, seamstresses, goldsmiths, photographers, tailors, pressmen, watch repairers, printers, chauffeurs, barbers, teachers, building inspectors, electricians, foremen, masons, draughtsmen, traders, nurses, blacksmiths, fitters, mechanics, and storekeepers—essentially a petty bourgeois class.

  Tribally they derived from Wangara, Wassaw, Ajumaku, Asdna, Shai, Prampram, Grushie, Ga, Fanti, Twi, Ashanti, Ewe, Akan, Guang, Nzima (the Prime Minister’s tribe), Akwapim, Kwahu, Efutu, Demkyira, Anum, Krobo, Adangme, Nkronyo, Ada, etc.

  “Tell me, how do you get discipline in the party?” I asked Mr. Afriyie.

  His genial smile wavered. I saw distrust flicker across his face. The moment I touched upon some vital question, I could feel the African’s emotions running away….

  “We follow the Leader,” he said evasively.

  I knew that it would have been useless to persist. Yet I could sense tense dramas taking place in the life of the party: expulsions, chastisements, factional battles, etc. I was once a Communist and I knew that those things were inevitable in any vital organization. But all of that was hidden and, so far as I was concerned, would stay hidden. Yet, I could guess at the concealed reality. I studied Mr. Afriyie and could see that he felt that he had fooled me. To have insisted would only have roused his doubts and suspicions of me. I found that the African almost invariably underestimated the person with whom he was dealing; he always placed too much confidence in an evasive reply, thinking that if he denied something, then that something ceased to exist. It was childlike.

  I shook hands all around and took my leave. Didn’t Africans know that their elusiveness simply whetted people’s curiosity the more? The African had a mania for hiding the facts of his life, yet he hid those facts in such a clumsy way that it made others know that he was hiding them. In short, African secretiveness defeated itself by calling insistent attention to what was being secreted.

  I wander through the Accra streets…. Is it because I see so many men and women urinating publicly, in drains, on the sides of roads, in bushes, behind hedges, that I’ve begun to think that Africans urinate oftener than other people…? That, manifestly, is not true. Then, what is it? Is it that the African urinates, as it were, so unconsciously that one is forced to the conclusion that he urinates oftener than other people? It cannot be that, as a nation, they have weak bladders; “racially,” no such fact could be proved. A woman suddenly pauses at a corner, leans a little against a wall, opens her legs, and urinates, standing up…. Then she walks blithely off. Men will squat with their backs to the roadway, their heads turned to watch the traffic or passers-by, and urinate. At cocktail parties the British have an expression for wanting to urinate; they say, mindful of African habits:

  “I must go and water the garden.”

  One wonders what such constant urination does to the plants, flowers, grass, etc.

  One evening I accompanied a young, American-educated African to an outdoor dance arena, the Weekend in Havana. The specialty of this establishment, as with all the dance spots in the Gold Coast, was a shuffling, lazy kind of somnambulistic dance step called High Life. Curiously enough, even here I observed that tendency of the African sexes to segregate themselves. Little knots of women—they all wore European dress to these social affairs—clustered together. I was informed that this avoidance of the opposite sex was but an extension of the rituals of the tribal African family life; in the home men and women slept under different roofs and ate their meals separately, even when they were married. And so ingrained had those habits become that even when they were participating in non-African activities they tended to keep to their fundamental patterns of behavior. Perhaps it made them feel more at ease, quieted a sense of guilt for deserting their traditional ways…?

  I compelled myself, out of politeness to my host, to watch the dancing. Nothing could have been more boring to my temperament than such spectacles and I sat with a fixed smile on my face, nursing a bottle of beer, wishing I was somewhere else. I’d seen better and more spirited dancing among the Negroes of New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, but since it was expected of me to watch Africans demonstrate that they could imitate Europeans or Americans, I thought that I’d better pretend to be interested.

  Then my eyes caught sight of something that all but pulled me up out of my seat. Two young men walked slowly across a corner of the dance floor, each with his arm tenderly about the waist of the other, their eyes holding a contented, dreamy gaze…. What was that? Had I misjudged the African capacity for the assimilation of Western emotional conditionings? But maybe those two boys were from Oxford or Cambridge…? They didn’t look like it. I wanted to question my friend about this, but I feared appearing too indelicate. But, just as I repressed my impetuosity, the two young men glided gracefully out upon the dance floor and moved with all the sexual suggestiveness of a mixed couple to the catchy music. Again I inhibited myself, not wishing to wade too abruptly into such matters with people whose reactions I could never predict. After all, I was a stranger in a strange land. I sat quietly, watching, wondering. Had the British brought homosexuality to Africa? Had the vices of the English public-school system somehow seeped through here? Just as the African had taken inordinately to alcohol, had he taken to this too? Then I was startled to see two more young men, holding hands, walk leisurely across the dance floor, heading, it seemed, for the bar. A deep, calm togetherness seemed to exist between them. Was this more evidence of that innocence of instinct that I had previously observed? I could no longer restrain my curiosity. I leaned toward my host and whispered:

  “Look here. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t get you,” he said; but I saw an ironic twitch on his
lips as he suppressed a smile.

  “If what I see happening here tonight between young men happened in New York, the police would raid the place and throw the people in jail….”

  My friend guffawed.

  “What do you think you see?” he demanded.

  “I think I see some pretty overt homosexual behavior,” I said quietly.

  “You don’t,” he said flatly.

  “Then what am I looking at?”

  “You’re looking at nice, manly tribal young men who love dancing,” he explained in a somewhat aloof voice.

  “Look, I’m no moralist; I don’t care what they are,” I said. “But I want to make sure.”

  “And I’m making no moral defense of Gold Coast boys,” he said. “But you don’t see any homosexuality. Listen, I wanted you to come here to see this. I could have called your attention to it, but I was waiting for you to notice it—”

  “How could I escape it?” I asked him. “Now, why are they acting like that?”

  “It’s a bit complicated,” my host explained as the music jumped all over the dance floor. “These young boys are still mainly tribal. They speak English; they go to school, to church; and they work as clerks, perhaps, in European offices. But their deepest reactions are still basically tribal, not European. Now, in tribal dances men dance with men, women dance with women, or they all dance together, or each person alone, if he wants to…. Tribal dancing is not uniquely sexual. Sometimes they dance for a god, to please him, to coax him, to tell him something. Sometimes they dance to please each other. Long habituation to this kind of dancing makes them, when they dance in public to Western tunes and rhythms which are replete with sexuality, still follow their tribal conditioning. There is no homosexuality here. In most tribal dancing men get used to touching or holding other men; they think nothing of it; and they’d be morally shocked, hurt, if they thought that you saw something perverse in it. So you have here a strange synthesis of seemingly disparate elements—young boys dancing together, embracing ardently, holding hands, with no thought of sex. They are brothers.”