Black Power

by Richard Wright

  His mouth dropped open and he stared at me, then he tossed back his head and laughed.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  He spoke hurriedly to the two women and they laughed so heartily that they had to abandon their work. The daughter lifted her cloth to her mouth and yelled, then ran away, laughing hysterically. But the mother quickly grew solemn; her supper was being delayed. She called sternly to her daughter and the pounding began again, but the daughter continued to giggle.

  “What are they laughing at?” I asked the electrician.

  “They say machines can’t make fufu, sar,” he told me.

  “Do you believe that?” I asked him.

  It was evident that he did believe it, but he was too polite to want to contradict a stranger.

  “You’ll have to believe it before you can invent the machine,” I told him. “We make bread in America with machines.”

  “Really, sar?”

  “Of course. And you can make fufu with a machine,” I said.

  There was silence. I felt that it would be a long, long time before machines made fufu here. It was not that the young electrician could not make the machine, but I felt that the women would surely have had none of it…. Making fufu with a machine would have been the work of evil spirits. As we moved along, the boy was pensive. I turned and tried imitating that queer, African hand wave and the people waved back at me, smiling, their fingers trembling. Women passed, carrying those huge tins of water on their heads, their necks straight, their eyes proud, somber, and bold, and their lips ready to give vent to an embarrassed giggle. Yet no movement of their bodies so much as caused a tremor of the huge tins of water, which must have weighed thirty pounds….

  We were passing a magnificent woman who sat nursing a fat black baby. The long red rays of the setting sun lit her ebony torso to a soft distinctness. I requested the boy to ask her to let me take a picture. He spoke to her and she nodded her head.

  “Penny, Massa,” she said, extending her hand.

  I fished a shilling out of my pocket and gave it to her. She rose, laughed. I tried to focus my camera and she lunged past me, holding the baby with one hand under its belly, and made a beeline for the mud hut; she was out of sight before I could utter a word. A howl of black laughter echoed through the compound. I stood looking like a blundering fool. She had outwitted me. I laughed too. She had won.

  I walked past compounds filled with black life, naked, dirty, diseased, shy, friendly, curious…. Was it possible that Great Britain had had the power to rule here for 104 years? Three generations had passed and things were like this? Obviously, no one had really tried to do anything. I felt that these people could have created conditions much better than this if they had been left completely alone. It couldn’t have been worse. Yet, from the soil of these people had come an untold fortune in gold, diamonds, timber, manganese, bauxite…. Truly, Nkrumah had a job to do….

  We reached the top of a hill and I stared down at a cluster of compounds. The sky was gradually darkening, but there was still enough sun to light up the black bodies, to make the rusty tin roofs distinct, and to outline the sleepy lagoons. And suddenly I was self-conscious; I began to question myself, my assumptions. I was assuming that these people had to be pulled out of this life, out of these conditions of poverty, had to become literate and eventually industrialized. But why? Was not the desire for that mostly on my part rather than theirs? I was literate, Western, disinherited, and industrialized and I felt each day the pain and anxiety of it. Why then must I advocate the dragging of these people into my trap?

  But suppose I didn’t? What would happen then? They would remain in these slavelike conditions forever…. The British would continue to suck their blood and wax fat. Of that there was no doubt. Yet, there was an element of sheer pride in my wanting them to be different. With what godlikeness we all thought of the lives of others! I yearned for them to break away from this and master machines, dig the minerals out of the earth, organize themselves, grow strong, sovereign…. And why? So that the British would not exploit them, so that they could stand equal with others and not be ashamed to face the world. I wanted them to redeem themselves….

  But was not this, my yearning for them, predicated upon the premises of the British? Was it merely for that that I wanted their lives changed, their beings altered? Well, their lives had been already altered; the faith of their fathers had been taken from them. True, they’d not been admitted into the world that had decreed that their past lives had not been good, and they had played no part in the world that had condemned theirs as being bad. And their participation in that world was what I was hungering for…. Why? Was it just my pride? Just to show the British that these people could do what the British had done…?

  But, if not that, then what? I didn’t know.

  I brooded over the young electrician who walked ahead of me. In that boy lay answers to questions. But could he tell me what he felt?

  “Look, you want your country to be free, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, sar,” he answered, amazed that I should ask.

  “Did the missionaries ever tell you to dedicate your life to freeing your country?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully, then shook his head.

  “No, sar.”

  “But they taught you to read, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, sar.”

  “And after they had taught you to read, you read, didn’t you? And when you read you found out that the British had taken your country? Is that it?”

  “I think so, sar,” he said slowly and evasively. “I know the history of my country, sar. We were conquered.”

  “Did the missionaries ever tell you that you were conquered?”

  “No, sar.”

  “Did they ever tell you to fight for your freedom?”

  “They didn’t talk about that, sar.”

  “But the reading that they taught you, you used it to learn about freedom, didn’t you?” I hammered at him.

  He was beginning to understand. He had understood it before I spoke to him about it, but he had just never put it into words, into ideas.

  “We’ll be free some day, sar. We’ll drive them all out,” he said grimly, under his breath.

  His footsteps had slowed. His eyes were wide and unblinking. Over and over again I found that same reaction: the Gold Coast African loved the white missionaries as long as he thought of them in the category of their teaching him to read and write, but when the same reading and writing brought home to him a knowledge of what the British had done to him, a knowledge of how his country and his culture had been shattered and exploited, he felt a rising tinge of resentment against the missionaries. Unwittingly, the missionaries had placed themselves in a strange position, a delicate position in the minds of the African people. Toward the European missionaries the African held that somewhat ambivalent attitude of love and hate that he held toward almost everything Western. It was easy to love and hate at the same time, but it was hard to talk about it.

  When we came to his home, which was a tin-roofed swish house whose outer walls had been covered with a coating of cement, he introduced me to his mother, then to his grandfather, an old man who was partly blind. His father—the boy was almost tearful about it—was absent. I stood and waited, for no one spoke English but the boy.

  “Who makes the money to pay the bills?” I asked.

  “My father and I work, sar,” he said.

  I longed to go inside the house and look at the rooms, but I felt that I would have been trespassing. One room, he told me, was a kitchen in which his mother washed and cooked when it rained; otherwise, she worked out of doors. I saw that she had finished her fufu and it was laid out in earthen dishes in round yellow balls covered with palm leaves. Everything was neat here; all tools and utensils could be accounted for. The little short broom—made from the veins of palm leaves—was lying against a wall near a pile of rubbish. The fufu-pounder—I never did learn the name for it—was washed and lying
atop the tin roof. Zinc washtubs were turned upside down in one corner of the yard. Nearby was an orderly okra patch. Farther out was a garden of tomatoes which had not yet begun to ripen and each plant was tied to a stake driven into the earth.

  “How old is your grandfather?”

  “Seventy-eight, sar.”

  “Have you any brothers and sisters?”

  “No, sar.”

  “Just you, your mother, father and grandfather?”

  “Yes, sar.”

  “What kind of electrical work do you do?”

  “I’m an apprentice, sar.”

  “And what do you make?”

  “£2. 10/-a month, sar.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, sar. And I pay 15s. a month for transportation, sar.”

  I wanted to stay here and learn this life, to feel it, to try to find out the values that kept it going. But I didn’t like prying out the details. The African had been violated often enough in the dark past. And I had a taxi waiting. The light of the sky was growing darker.

  “Your grandfather, does he remember a lot of history?”

  The grandfather was consulted; when he understood what I had asked, he laughed loudly and nodded his woolly head. The boy translated:

  “He says, sar, that he’s seen a lot of things. Wars and fighting, sar.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” I told the boy.

  I gave him some shillings and shook hands all around. I started back toward the taxi.

  “I’ll come with you, sar.”

  The compounds were noisier now; it seemed in Africa that the days were quiet, but, as night drew on, a clamor set in, increasing as the hours passed. Even the children, who had been somewhat listless all day, now began their games. Was this because of the heat?

  “Tell me: is there any difference in the way the pagans and the Christians live?” I asked the young electrician.

  “I don’t understand, sar.”

  “Do pagans and Christians live together? Or separately?”

  “Oh, we all live together, sar.”

  “How does one tell a Christian from a pagan?”

  He was silent for a moment, looking at me, puzzled.

  “We all live together, sar. Christians go to church on Sundays—”

  “Do you follow pagan ceremonies?”

  “Oh, no, sar!”

  “But when you have holidays, you enjoy them with the pagans, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sar. We do that, sar.”

  I walked slowly beside the boy in the dying light. The swish houses of the landscape were now bathed in soft purple shadows. A candle flickered here and there. So this was the White Man’s burden that England had been so long complaining about? How cleverly the whole thing had been explained to the outside world! How wrapped up and disguised in morality had this lust for gold become!

  “Sar, perhaps you could come and see my father?” the boy asked me shyly.

  I promised him that I would try. When we reached the roadway he was a little downcast that I was leaving him.

  “Study hard,” I told him.

  “Yes, sar,” he said.

  I could see the wistful smile on his shy, tight little brown face as my taxi pulled off into the deepening night.

  Well, paganism and Christianity were all mixed up, blended. It seemed that being a Christian didn’t mean giving up all of one’s former outlook. Then I wondered how a pagan could really surrender all of his paganism when the community in which he lived was still basically pagan. It was a halfway world, all right. There were in both religions elements that the people needed in their lives; the only way paganism could really vanish would be for the total pagan environment to be transformed, and that was manifestly impossible. It would have been demanding of the pagan something that even the Christian had not demanded of himself.

  The more I reflected upon the work of the missionaries, the more stunned I became. They had, prodded by their own neurotic drives, waded in and wrecked an entire philosophy of existence of a people without replacing it, without even knowing really what they had been doing. Racial pretensions had kept them from sharing intimately the lives of the people they had wanted to lift up. Standing outside of those lives, they had thrust their doctrines into them, gumming them up, condemning them, and yet they had failed to embrace those pagans who had turned Christian and who now yearned so pathetically to follow them into their world….

  What would happen when the native began to realize all of this clearly? Some were already doing so, and they felt a deep and sullen anger that was almost speechless in its intensity. I recalled Nkrumah’s having told me with suppressed emotion that the missionaries had been his first political adversaries.

  For centuries this sugared duplicity had held forth; and, because there were so many European national philosophies to justify it, so many European interests involved in it, there had been no one to come forward and call the deed by its right name. Indeed, so intertwined was Christianity with this getting of gold and diamonds that it was not until now that any real crime has been felt—and even by a very few—to have been committed! In Sunday schools all over the Western world little boys and girls were giving their pennies to help save the “soul of the heathen”!

  Yet, as I saw and felt it, the looting of the country of gold and diamonds and slaves had not been the greatest crime that had been committed against these people. Diamonds have no great value when weighed in the scales against human life; and gold, though it figured symbolically in the Akan religion, could be done without and the Akan people haven’t suffered mortally from losing it.

  The gold can be replaced; the timber can grow again, but there is no power on earth that can rebuild the mental habits and restore that former vision that once gave significance to the lives of these people. Nothing can give back to them that pride in themselves, that capacity to make decisions, that organic view of existence that made them want to live on this earth and derive from that living a sweet even if sad meaning. Today the ruins of their former culture, no matter how cruel and barbarous it may seem to us, are reflected in timidity, hesitancy, and bewilderment. Eroded personalities loom here for those who have psychological eyes to see.

  And even when, as Nkrumah’s valiant efforts are directed now, they did finally rebel and strive to throw off the psychological shackles of foreign misrule, they were compelled to attempt it in terms of the values and on the moral grounds of their conquerors…! In a certain sense, even if the Gold Coast actually won its fight for freedom (and it seems that it can!), it could never really win…. The real war was over and lost forever!

  I do not say that the impact of the missionary was deliberately made to coincide with the military and commercial conquering of the Gold Coast people, or that the missionary was a conscious handmaiden in subjecting them to the yoke of economic imperialism. Frankly, I doubt if the oldtime English mercantile pirates were that smart or foreseeing. Their aims, I suspect, were much more limited when they struggled so desperately for a foothold on the Guinea Coast.

  However synchronized or not were the motives of the missionaries with those of the imperial financial interests, their actions could not have been more efficient in inflicting lasting psychological damage upon the personalities of the Africans who, though outwardly submissive, were never really deeply converted to a Christianity which rendered them numb to their own dearly bought vision of life, to the values for which they had made untold sacrifices.

  Nineteen

  My next taxi sortie took me to Tema where a modern port was being built. The government, I was told, has great plans for the transformation of this all too sodden place.

  I got out of the taxi and threaded my way between dark yellow swish huts with thatched roofs. The fishermen had just brought in a huge catch and wherever my eyes fell I saw herring neatly laid out in rows to dry: on roofs, on the red earth, on planks, on stretches of cement. Everywhere were huge black iron vats three or four feet in diameter; across the tops of t
hese vats were stretched metal slats or screens which held herring being smoked, a process that caused a blue mist to rise through the blinding sunshine and hang over the entire village. The stench of fish mingled with the odor of urine and excrement that flowed in an eroded gully down through the center of the village. Flies, satiated, buzzed in lazy clouds. Naked children, gripped by disease, followed me for a mile as I walked to the seashore and looked at the gray and misty Atlantic….

  Returning through the village, I came across a huge black woman sitting in front of her hut; she was obviously ill, her eyes cloudy and her head bent forward. At her side was a bottle of patent medicine and a bottle of gin, both imported from England. I spoke to her through my taxi driver.

  “Is it your stomach that’s bothering you?”

  “Yasa, Massa.”

  I picked up the medicine bottle and examined the label which read: BILE TONIC…. The woman’s stomach was enormous and she was no doubt suffering from some liver complaint.

  “Why do you drink?”

  “It helps me, Massa.”

  “Is it your liver that’s bad?”

  “Yasa, Massa. Doctor say so. Bad liver.”

  I sympathized with her; alcohol was good, but not for what was ailing her. I gave her a few shillings and left. Time and again I had to choke back feelings of compassion in these mudholes. If one allowed one’s feelings to become identified here, one could no longer see anything; in fact, one could no longer think.

  I came across a tiny wooden structure which, I learned, was the village school and church. The children were out at sports and the schoolroom was deserted. I entered and found that clothes had been discarded hastily and thrown upon desks. Desks? I stooped low and examined the strange objects. They were made of soapboxes, had rough, jagged edges, and the sides and ends of the boxes still bore the name and address of the English manufacturer stenciled in black letters. Most of the boxes were about 18 inches in length, about 6 inches high, and about 2 feet across; some of them were so arranged that the opened side ran lengthwise, facing the child, and thus provided storage space for books, etc. Nailed to the bottom of these boxes were four slats of wood chopped from the same kind of packing cases.