“I see,” I said.
Each hour events were driving home to me that Africa was another world, another sphere of being. For it to become natural to me, I’d have to learn to accept without thought a whole new range of assumptions. Intellectually, I understood my friend’s all too clear explanation of why boys liked to hold hands and dance together, yet the sight of it provoked in me a sense of uneasiness on levels of emotion deeper than I could control.
Later that evening the dance gradually reverted more and more to African patterns. The drums in the orchestra took over the tunes and beat out wild, throbbing notes. Around two o’clock in the morning there were but a few mixed couples on the floor—mostly everyone was dancing alone, his eyes half closed, his lips hanging slightly open, his right hand pressed to his heart, as though lost in the sheer physical joy of movement. Presumably each person was dancing for himself or whatever friend or god he felt was near him, or for whoever wished to observe his ecstasy. The African seemed to feel that whenever he experienced something vital, he had to share it; his joy had to arouse joy in others, even though those “others” were unseen. It was to that which was not present to sight or touch, sometimes, that the African seemed to want to talk, to plead, to trust. There was in him a tinge of otherworldliness even when he danced to sexy jazz tunes; he seemed chronically addicted to a form of physical lyricism. He spoke with physical movement, protested with a stiffening of his neck, argued with his legs, cajoled with his arms, said yes with his hips, and no with a slow roll of his head….
Fourteen
There are no mail deliveries. You went to the post office each morning for your letters; if you lived in Accra, you kept a post-office box, that is, rented one. If you didn’t, you asked a friend to receive your letters for you in his box.
When I inquired why mail could not be delivered, the explanation was that the problem of illiteracy made it impractical to assign the delivery of mail to literate men when there were far more important jobs for those literate men to do. It would have been, I was informed, an abuse of the value of the few literate men to impose delivering mail upon them. In banks, stores, and shops there was a desperate need of clerks, and such men could not be spared to sort or handle mail.
The more I probed into the problem of illiteracy, the stranger it became. It was generally stated that there was a 90 per cent illiteracy in the Gold Coast; that is, only 10 per cent of the people could read and write English. All of which might well be true. A few of the natives read and wrote their own tribal languages, but such proficiencies were almost useless in the daily business world where English was not only the official language of the country, but the dominant language of the most vital trade areas of the earth.
Yet, despite this vast illiteracy, an average “mammy” who buys and sells staples in the open markets handles, during the course of a year, a turnover amounting to £50,000! But how does she know this, since she cannot read or write? She keeps it all in her head! It’s possible that tribal African customs have conditioned her to perform these feats of memory for such a multitude of details.
The great majority of the Africans buy not from the European stores, but from each other, and one feels, when looking at the bustling activity in the market places, that almost the whole of the population is engaged in buying and selling. Just how this strange method of distributing products came about is a mystery. Perhaps it can be partly explained by the manner in which British firms ship their products to the Gold Coast. The British exporting firm generally deals through a certain one firm; that firm in turn sells to another, and that firm to yet another…. An African “mammy” finally enters this elaborate process, buying a huge lot of a certain merchandise, which she, in turn, breaks up and sells in fairly large lots to her customers. And her customers now sell directly to the public or maybe to other sellers who sell to the public. African wives are expected to aid in augmenting the income of the household and they thus take to the streets with their heads loaded with sundry items…. Naturally, this fantastic selling and reselling of goods drive the prices up and up until finally poor Africans must pay higher prices than a Britisher for a like product! Capitalism here reaches surrealistic dimensions, for even an ordinary match gains in value if it must afford profit to each hand through which it passes. This frantic concentration of the African mind upon making a profit out of selling a tiny fragment of a bar of soap or a piece of a piece of a piece of cloth is one of the most pathetic sights of the Gold Coast.
Of late there has been an effort to establish co-operatives to eliminate this senseless and self-defeating trading, but a casual glance at Accra’s market places reveals that the whole process of buying and selling is anarchy calling for the sharpest wits imaginable. Haggling over a penny enlists the deepest passion, and you have the impression that the African trader is dealing in life-and-death matters. One wonders if such a manner of trading could have grown up in any society other than an illiterate one. It’s likely that traditional tribal customs can account to some degree for this seeming preference for direct cash dealing on the part of the African, for his passion for visible, tactile methods of exchange of goods; I don’t know…. All I know is that the African seems to love a petty financial game of wits and he’ll ask you ten times the value of any object he’s selling without batting an eye. Of course, the true explanation might be much simpler; the African might have learned all of this innocent chicanery from the Europeans during five hundred years of trading with them. The Portuguese, the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans, the French, and the English had some pretty sharp and unsavory methods of trading cheap trinkets for gold dust, a transaction which allowed for a wide leeway of bargaining…. But I leave this question of accounting for the “economic laws” (I don’t believe that there’s any such thing!) of the Gold Coast to other and more astute minds.
And yet a smart “mammy” will let a moneylender cheat her…. Since an African, when he is short of cash, thinks nothing of borrowing as much as he needs to tide him over, the Gold Coast moneylender will charge two, three, or four hundred per cent interest. I was told of a case in which a cocoa farmer borrowed money on his farm and pledged the yield of each year’s crop as interest; of course, since his farm did not bring him any income, he could never pay off the principal!
Marriage and adultery too operate on a “cash and carry” basis. Tribal Africans do not like to admit that they buy their wives, but obtaining a wife amounts to no more or less than just that. And if your wife commits adultery, you can be compensated for it. There exists a regular fixed scale of fines to be paid by those either trapped or caught in the act of adultery. Or if your wife runs away, you can claim from her family—that is, the ones from whom you bought her—the return of your money. I’m reliably informed that some chiefs urge their many wives to commit adultery so that they can collect large sums of money by fining the culprits gullible enough to commit fornication with them.
The following is a list of fines leveled against all sections of society in a given Gold Coast area for the crime of adultery:
Any Akan man or indigene
£: 5
S.: 5
Plus: 1 bottle of gin
The wife adulteress
£: 2
S.: 2
Plus: 2 fowls
Any clerk
£: 7
S.: 4
Plus: 1 bottle of whiskey
All artisans, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc.
£: 7
S.: 4
Plus: 1 bottle of whiskey
Linguists for divisional chiefs
£: 7
S.: 4
Plus: 1 sheep and 1 bottle of gin
As the delinquents rise in the social scale, the fines increase. For example, men high in the tribal hierarchy, members of royal families, etc., are fined for adultery as follows:
Divisional chiefs without stool: 10—2 bottles of gin
Divisional chiefs with stool: 25—2 sheep and 2 bottles of gin
&nbs
p; Divisional chiefs: 100—3 sheep and 1 case of gin
Divisional chief’s wife: 7 4 2 sheep and 1 bottle of gin
The most severe penalty is meted out to royalty. For example, an Omanhene’s adultery fee is fixed at
200—7 sheep and 2 cases of gin
It is reckoned that the committing of adultery with an important person’s wife amounts to a defilation of his stool and those of his superiors, hence sheep are slaughtered to sanctify the stools or fetishes. A person’s ultimate importance to the state, in the Akan tribal society, is judged by the amount of his adultery fee. The above amounts of fines are in force as of this moment in the Gold Coast, having been enacted by a state council (which will remain unidentified) on the 12th of May, 1953.
Marriage fees are likewise fixed. (This does not refer to what the man pays to the family for his wife.) The following prevails today:
new marriage: £ 1.10/
secondhand marriage: £ 1. 2/
Every woman should give her husband one fowl at a new marriage
When a man marries a new wife, he should pacify his old wife with 8/.
Funeral expenses are also fixed by the state; it was decided that at the death of a man, all women should pay 6d. and men 1/. But when a woman dies, all women should pay 3d. and men 6d. When a young man dies, the chief should pay 3d. and the men 6d. When an adult dies the chief should pay 4/.
These rules were made in an attempt to keep down the cost of funerals, for it has been known for funerals to plunge families in deep debt for years. The motives for spending so much money on funerals are simple: the deceased is about to enter the other world and he has to go there in style, with dignity, etc. One costly item for funerals is alcohol; most funerals are occasions for an inordinate degree of drinking. Attempts are being made to limit the drinking to palm wine, which, God knows, is potent enough. Some chiefs. influenced by Christianity, are actually arguing for lemonade. They constitute a “still small voice” as yet….
So great is the propensity of Africans to celebrate death that many local councils have sought recently to impose drastic time limits upon funerals. For example, in an unnamed but prosperous Gold Coast state, the local council has decreed that:
A. Funerals for young men should be strictly limited to one week.
B. In the case of a child, there should be no funeral. (This is a rather involved and metaphysical point, for when a child dies it is assumed that the child did not wish to stay in the world of the living. It is said that the child’s ghost mother in the other world has persuaded the child to return. In the old days the dead child was actually beaten and punished for not wishing to stay.)
C. Funerals for adults should be strictly limited to two weeks.
Funerals for chiefs, etc., are special occasions and the local council determines the duration of the funeral; the expenses are arrived at by a consultation between the chief’s subjects and the chief’s family. After the funeral the amount spent is shared among all the chief’s subjects.
Adultery fines meted out to Gold Coast people of different religious persuasions often involve odd and incongruous items. For example, a Mohammedan caught in adultery is fined:
£5.5/–, 100 kola nuts and 1 piece of white shirting material.
Further items relating to marriage state:
To the woman he marries, a man owes: £1.10/–, plus a pot of palm wine, 3 headkerchiefs, 2 good cloths, 1 ordinary cloth, 1 hoe, 1 cutlass, 1 wooden tray and also a £2 dowry.
Any marriage contracted after that, the man owes the new wife £1.2/–, plus 1 pot of palm wine, 3 headkerchiefs, 2 good cloths, 1 ordinary cloth, 1 hoe, 1 cutlass, 1 wooden tray and also £2 dowry.
The codification of marriage rules, expenses, etc., runs into fine detail. Nothing is left to chance. For example, the seduction of a young girl who does not go to school is reckoned in terms of fine at £7. But if the girl is in school, the fine is fixed at £50. (Missionary influence?) If a man lives with a young girl as man and wife and refuses to marry her, he can send her off with £5. But if the girl refuses to marry the man, she can send him off with £7.
There is no sighing, longing, or other romantic notions in a young African seeking a wife; kissing is not a part of courtship, and is unknown except among chaste Christians. A man regards a woman as an economic investment; she must be sturdy, able to do a hard day’s work, bear many children, and, above all, obey…. He may aid her in the heavier parts of her field labors, but his aid is limited to providing certain essentials for the household, such as meat which he obtains by hunting. The basic drives reveal themselves not as romance or love, but children and crops.
What desperate coping with nature dictated the African’s concentration upon these elements? Maybe we will never know. Some of his greatest festivals center, until this day, around celebrating the harvest of yams. Another deep regard of the African heart is toward water, for it was water that kept his fields growing. Around ponds, lakes, rivers, and lagoons are likely to be found many myths and legends, and any untoward event occurring in connection with water is at once enshrined in memory. The whole of tribal life is pitched on a sacred plane, and the imposition of any other religion is likely to give them not more but less religion.
This dense illiteracy and the astonishing oral tradition—transmitted from generation to generation—upon which it feeds, its roots sunk in tribal memory, has formed a barrier, has erected a psychological distance between the African and the Western world and has made it increasingly difficult for the African to be known. This distance has not lessened with the passage of time; indeed, it has widened, for the tempo of progress of the West has qualitatively made the difference between the Western and non-Western world almost absolute. The distance today between tribal man and the West is greater than the distance between God and Western man of the sixteenth century. Western man could talk to his God in those days; today illiterate tribal minds are numbed when they hear of the atomic weapons of the Western world; and even when those tribal people revolt against the West and its technical mastery of the earth, they oftime find themselves, ironically, more dependent upon their white masters than before they launched their nationalistic revolutions….
A Westerner must make an effort to banish the feeling that what he is observing in Africa is irrational, and, unless he is able to understand the underlying assumptions of the African’s beliefs, the African will always seem a “savage.” And yet the African too is struck by what seems to him the irrational nature of the world that is non-African, for he too does not often know the assumptions of that non-African world. And when those assumptions are revealed to him they are just as fantastic to him as his are to the West.
In such areas of compounded involvement the chances for self-deception are enormous. For example, the African fondly believes that there is another world beyond this world, and he predicates his most practical actions upon its validity. Therefore Westerners who live or work among Africans, for religious or business purposes, cannot escape lending a degree of recognition to the nonexistent world that the African projects in his living, thereby adding weight to the African’s delusions.
Conversely, the Western assumption of the inferiority of the African compels the Westerner to constrict the African’s environment; so, in time, African psychological attitudes and conditions of life come to reflect the West’s assumptions. And the African, anchored amidst such degrading conditions, cannot help but reinforce them by accepting them; and what was, in the beginning, merely a false assumption, becomes a reality. Men create the world in which they live by the methods they use to interpret it….
Even the astute men of the British Colonial Office, classic imperialists though they are, are no exceptions to this involved process of self-deception. Indeed, after holding the Gold Coast in their complete power for decades, having had access to the entire life and customs of the people, they reacted until very recently to the beliefs of the Africans more or less on the same basis that the Africans themselves reacted.
For example, in March of 1900, Sir Frederic Hodgson, Colonial Secretary of the Gold Coast, addressing the King of Ashanti and his chiefs and aides, asked for the surrender of the Golden Stool in the following words:
“…Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment? I am the representative of the paramount power; why have you relegated me to this chair? Why did you not take the opportunity of my coming to Kumasi to bring the Golden Stool, and give it to me to sit upon?…”
The Africans had sunk the harpoon of their own indigenous assumptions deep into the Englishman’s heart! The Golden Stool, of course, was not a seat to be sat upon; not even the King of Ashanti did that. Says W. E. F. Ward, in his A History of the Gold Coast, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948, p. 304): “…It [the Golden Stool] contained the soul of all Ashanti; and the Ashanti could no more produce it to be sat upon by a foreigner than a Christian bishop in the Dark Ages could be expected to invite a barbarian conqueror to feast off the communion plate at the high altar of his cathedral…”
It seemed that Sir Hodgson believed in the magic of the Golden Stool, that is, in the mystic power presumably inherent in its possession, as much as the poetic Africans did, and his rash demand brought war between the English and the Ashanti in its wake….
Black Power Page 14
