Black Power

by Richard Wright

  It was in 1923 or thereabouts that Capt. R. S. Rattray, an English anthropologist, uncovered some of the complex meanings of the Akan rituals and ceremonies and gave English governors and civil servants an inkling of the nature of the beliefs of the Akan people; but, by the time that that knowledge had shed some belated clarity upon the nature of Akan customs, Gold Coast lives and institutions had been so mauled and truncated that the knowledge was all but useless, and any healthy revivification of Akan customs in whole or part was beyond hope.

  The Ashanti, being thus conquered, had to dilute his indigenous religious customs with Christian ones, had to pretend to be Christian in order to live and be left alone…. And the pattern of evasion, doubt, and distrust was set.

  Hence, no one was more surprised than the British, in 1948, at the sudden and violent upsurge of nationalist feeling in the Gold Coast, for it contradicted not only the observations of the trusted civil servants on the spot, but its existence found no explanation or support in British academic circles. Until the coming of Nkrumah, the Gold Coast had been referred to as the “model colony,” that is, a place from which a fabulously high return could be gotten on modest investments without a need to fear native unrest or reprisals.

  Informal conversations with the Gold Coast Information Service officials elicited the following facts: At the very moment when Nkrumah was launching his positive action program that would paralyze the economic life of the colony, a British professor of anthropology in London was briefing a group of civil servants bound for the Gold Coast. He spoke to them somewhat as follows:

  “The Gold Coast is a kind of colonial Eden. You’ll find the natives gentle, satisfied, and deeply grateful for what we have done for them.”

  But when the shipload of civil servants docked at Takoradi, they could hear gunfire raking the streets and they were informed that violence had gripped the entire colony…. It seems that imperialists of the twentieth century are men who are always being constantly and unpleasantly surprised. The assumption of the inferiority of the African, which gave the British the courage to conquer them, was now the very assumption that stood in the way of their seeing what was actually taking place. To enforce docility, they had rammed down African throats religious assumptions which they themselves believed in more deeply than the Africans ever did, and the basic mood of the Africans, of course, always eluded them.

  Fifteen

  One afternoon, after lunch, I walked down to the seashore where the stevedores were unloading freighters. I had to identify myself and get a pass before being allowed into the area where swarms of half-naked men were carting huge loads upon their heads. The nearer I got to the men, the more amazed I became. I paused, gazing.

  Coming toward me was an army of men, naked save for ragged strips of cloth about their hips, dripping wet, their black skins glistening in the pitiless sun, their heads holding pieces of freight—parts of machines, wooden crates, sacks of cement—some of which were so heavy that as many as four men had to put their heads under them to carry them forward. Beyond these rushing and panting men, far out on the open sea, were scores of canoes, each holding twelve men who paddled like furies against the turbulent surf. Save for the wild beat of the sun upon the sand of the beach, a strange silence reigned over everything. I had the impression that the tense effort of physical exertion would not permit a man to spare enough breath to utter a word….

  The wet and glistening black robots would beach their canoes filled with merchandise and, without pausing, heave out the freight and hoist it upon their heads; then, at break-neck speed, rush out of the sea, stamping through soft, wet sand, and run; finally, they would disappear over a dune of sand toward a warehouse. They ran in single file, one behind the other, barely glancing at me as they pushed forward, their naked feet leaving prints in the soft sand which the next sea wave would wash away…. On the horizon of the sea, about two miles away, were anchored the European freighters and between the shore and those ships were scores of black dots—canoes filled with rowing men—bobbing and dancing on the heaving water.

  Another canoe came toward the beach; the men leaped out, grabbed its sides to steady it until it touched the sand; again I saw that wild and desperate scrambling for the merchandise; again they lifted the boxes or crates or sacks or machine parts to their heads and came rushing toward me, their lips hanging open from sheer physical strain. My reactions were so baffled that I couldn’t tell what I felt. What I saw was so useless, so futile, so inhuman that I didn’t believe it; it didn’t seem real. I felt no protest; I was simply stunned, feeling that someone had snatched back a curtain and I was contemplating half-human men as they had labored in the hot sun two thousand years ago with the threat of death or physical torture hanging over them. But I saw no whips or guns; a weird peace gripped the scene….

  The harbor here, I was told, was much too shallow to allow ships to dock; they could dock, of course, at Takoradi, 170 miles away, but that would mean that the various shipping companies would have to send their freight by rail to Accra. That was why this beastly work had to take place; it allowed a higher profit to be made on the merchandise.

  Each of the twelve men in each canoe held a short, splayed oar with three prongs; each man had to dip and pull this oar through the water sixty times a minute if the canoe was to keep afloat and move through the raging current, and each stroke of each man had to plunge into the water at the same time. There were some children working too, but not in the canoes; they waited at the water’s edge and helped their fathers or friends or brothers to lift the heavy loads to their heads.

  Nearby was a young black clerk dressed in Western clothes; he held a sheet of paper in his hands, and, as each canoe came in, he checked it off. I went up to him.

  “Do they make much money working like that?”

  “Each boat earns twelve shillings a trip; that’s a shilling for each man, sar.”

  “How many shillings can a man make a day?”

  “If he works hard, sar, he can make seven.”

  “But why do they rush so?”

  “It costs a ship a lot of money to stay out there, sar.”

  “When do they start work?”

  “At daybreak. Not much sun then, sar.”

  “Do you have trouble finding workers?”

  The young man looked at me and laughed. Then he turned and pointed to a far crowd of half-nude men huddled before a wooden stairway leading up to an office.

  “Do you lose many men in the sea?”

  “Oh, no, sar! Those men are like fishes, sar. But we do lose merchandise—the company and the ships can stand it, sar. They’re insured. Oh, sar, if you saw the beautiful automobiles that go down in that sea—”

  A man passed with a sack of something lumpy upon his head, running….

  “That looks like a sack of potatoes,” I said.

  “It is, sar.”

  “Why aren’t they grown here?”

  “I don’t know, sar.”

  “Is seven shillings a day considered good pay?”

  “Well, sar, for what they buy with it, it’s not bad.”

  He wandered off, jotting down figures on his sheet of paper. I’d seen men tending machines in frantic haste, but I’d never seen men working like machines…. I’d seen River Rouge and it was nothing compared to this hot, wild, and hellish labor. It was not only against exploitation that I was reacting so violently; it frightened me because the men did not seem human, because they had voluntarily demeaned themselves to be spokes in a wheel.

  I walked toward the exit, then paused and stared again at the fantastic scene, seeing it but not believing it. I felt no hate for the shipowners who had contrived that this should be; there was something here amiss deeper than cheating or profit…. My reactions were elementary; the ships could have remained at anchor until they rotted, I wouldn’t have cared. There are circumstances in which human life is no longer human life, and I’d seen one of them. And for this particular barbarity I had no answer, no sch
eme; I would not have gone on strike if I had worked there; I simply would not have worked there in the first place, no matter what….

  I returned to my hotel and lounged in my room. Water seemed to stand in the air. I got up and went into the bathroom and picked up my nail file. Good God…. It had turned red. I looked farther. All the metal in my toilet kit was a deep, dark red. I rubbed my fingers across the metal and a soft mound of wet rust rolled up. What a climate…. What could last here? Suppose the Gold Coast was cut off from the Western world, for, say, ten years? Would not the material level of existence be reduced to that which existed before the coming of the white man? Practically nothing, under British colonial policy, was manufactured in the Gold Coast. Indeed, the only ostensible difference between the environmental conditions of the bourgeois blacks and the tribal blacks consisted in the possession by the upper-class blacks of a mass of imported British products in their homes. The British argument until now has been that the climate ruled out industrial production, but I was convinced that this was a British “rationalization” to keep down potential industrial competition. I was sure that if the British had to industrialize the Gold Coast, they would have found a way of doing it…. Until some effort was made to preserve metal against corrosion, this place was under a sentence of death. And I realized that whatever history was buried in this hot and wet earth must have long since decayed, melted back into the red and ravenous clay. No wonder that archeologists, no matter how long and earnestly they dig, could find little or nothing here. Throw the whole of Detroit into this inferno of heat and wetness, and precious little of it would be left in a hundred years.

  Restless, I wander again into the streets and am struck by the incredible number of mere tots engaged in buying and selling. I’ve begun to feel that, as a whole, there is no period of “youth” here in Africa. Here, at one moment, one is a child; then, almost overnight, at the age of eight or ten, one assumes the status of an adult. Children toil at minding smaller children, cooking, carrying water on their heads, trading in the market place, assuming responsibilities long before the children of the West. Perhaps “youth” is a period of luxury which middle-class Westerners alone could give their children?

  Maybe that was why one so seldom encountered what might be called “idealism” in Africa? Perhaps there was no time for dreaming—and how could one get the notion that the world could be different if one did not dream? Though the African’s whole life was a kind of religious dream, the African scorned the word “dream.” Maybe the plant of African personality was pruned too quickly, was forced to bear fruit before it had a chance to grow to its full height? What would happen to a romantic rebel in an African tribe? The African takes his religion, which is really a waking dream, for reality, and all other dreams are barred, are taboo.

  In the late afternoon a rainstorm broke over the city; it had been threatening for some hours and when it did come, it came down with a violence that made you feel that some malevolent being was bent upon harm. Nature here acts with such directness, suddenness, that the mind, in spite of itself, projects out upon natural events animistic motives. After the first cloudburst the rain settled down to a long, steady downpour. The air was still; I could almost feel the moisture enter my lungs as I breathed. It was not until after ten o’clock that the sky cleared and the stars could be seen, distant, mingled with clouds.

  Again I poked about the alleyways of James Town. Now that the rain had stopped, the gregarious natives were returning to the streets. At corners women were lighting candles and huddling themselves beside their piles of staples. Plantains were being dropped into cauldrons of boiling fat. Finding myself out of cigarettes, I paused in front of a woman.

  “A can of cigarettes,” I said, pointing.

  She stared, then opened a can and took out one cigarette.

  “No; I want to buy a can,” I said.

  She turned and called, summoning help. Cigarettes were sold in round tin cans of fifty each and they were vacuum-packed against the moisture. A young girl came; she and the woman chatted.

  “No; she sell you one.” The girl was emphatic.

  “Why won’t she sell me a can?”

  “She can’t.” Again she talked to the woman in tribal language, then she turned to me once more. “She sell can for one pound.”

  A tin can of cigarettes cost but seven shillings. Was she trying to cheat?

  “That’s too much,” I protested.

  “You can buy three; that’s all,” the girl said.

  I finally understood the crisis that I’d brought into the woman’s life. In this poverty-stricken area rarely did a native buy more than one cigarette at a time, and I had confronted her with a demand for fifty, which was wholesale business!

  I pushed forward in the dark, down lanes of women sitting beside their boxes, their faces lit by flickering candles. As I strayed on I heard the sound of drums. Yes; I’d find them…. Guided by the throbbing vibrations, I went forward until I came to a vast concrete enclosure. The drums were beating behind that high wall…. Could I get in? I went around the wall until I came to a narrow opening. Discreetly, I peered through and saw, far back in the compound, a group of people dancing to drums; kerosene lanterns lit up the tableau. Ought I go in? They were black and so was I. But my clothes were different from theirs; they would know me for a stranger.

  A young man came toward me; he was about to enter the compound. He paused and asked:

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” I said, smiling at him. “What’s going on in there?”

  “You’re a stranger, aren’t you?”

  “Yes; I’m an American.”

  “Come on in,” he said.

  I followed him in, noticing as I passed a row of dim-lit rooms that in some rooms only men were seated and in others only women…. We came to a swirling knot of men and women; they were dancing in a wide circle, barefooted, shuffling to the demoniacal beat of the drums which were being pounded by a group of men near the wall. The ground was wet from the recent rain and their bare feet slapped and caressed the earth.

  “Why are they dancing?” I asked the young man.

  “A girl has just died,” he told me.

  There was no sadness or joy on their faces; they struck me as being people who had to go through with something and they were doing their job. Indeed, most of the faces seemed kind of absentminded. Now and then some man or woman would leave the ring and dance alone in the center. They danced not with their legs or arms, but with their entire bodies, moving slowly, undulating their abdomens, their eyes holding a faraway look.

  “Why are they dancing?” I asked again, recalling that I’d asked the same question before, but feeling that I hadn’t had an answer.

  “A young girl has just died, you see,” he said.

  I still didn’t know why they were dancing and I wanted to ask him a third time. An old man came to me and shook my hand, then offered me a chair. I sat and stared. The lanterns cast black shadows on the wet ground as the men and women moved slowly to the beat of the drums, their hands outstretched, their fingers trembling. Why are they dancing…? It was like watching something transpire in a dream. Still another young man came and joined the two who now flanked my chair. They mumbled something together and then the young man who had brought me in stooped and whispered:

  “You’d better go now, sar.”

  I rose and shook hands with them, then walked slowly over the wet earth, avoiding the rain puddles. Why are they dancing…? And their dancing was almost identical with the movements of the High Life dancing that I’d seen in the outdoor dance hall…. At the entrance I paused and looked back; I was surprised to see that the young man had discreetly followed me.

  “You say that a young girl has died?”

  “Yes, sar.”

  “And that’s why they are dancing?”

  “Yes, sar.”

  I shook his hand and walked into the damp streets, my eyes aware of the flickering candles that stretc
hed to both sides of me. Jesus Christ, I mumbled. I turned and retraced my steps and stood again in the entrance to the compound and saw that the men and women were now holding hands as they circled round and round. The young man stood watching me….

  “Good night!” I called to him.

  “Good night, sar!” he answered.

  I walked briskly and determinedly off, looking over my shoulder and keeping in the line of my vision that dance; I stared at the circling men and women until I could see them no more. The women had been holding their hands joined together above the heads of the men, and the men, as though they had been playing London Bridge Is Falling Down, were filing with slow dignity through the handmade arches. The feet of the dancers had barely lifted from the ground as they shuffled; their bodies had made sharp angles as they moved and I had been surprised to see that they were moving much quicker than I had thought; they had given me the impression of moving slowly, lazily, but, at that distance, there was a kind of concentrated tension in their gyrations, yet they were utterly relaxed. I had been looking backward as I walked and then the young man pulled the wooden gate shut and it was gone forever…. I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me.

  Sixteen

  One heard the word “palm” all day long; you were invited out for “palm chop,” that is, a meal cooked with palm oil. Or you were offered a drink of palm wine or palm gin. I began inquiring into the uses to which the palm tree had been put, and here’s what was revealed: The palm tree bears red berries called palm kernels which, if boiled and cracked open, yield a red and white oil. The red oil is used for cooking and the white oil for the making of many kinds of pomades, soap, etc. The red oil is called palm butter.

  Many of the articles sold by the “mammies” on the streets are wrapped in palm leaves, and the plaited palm leaves are used in erecting fences and screens to keep out the prying eyes of strangers. Roofing of a sort is made from the leaves, and so are decorations, toys, and dishes. The stems of the palm leaves are used to make a short kind of broom with which the African women sweep their houses and yards.