Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “Do you smoke?” she asked me.

  “Yes. Pardon me. Do you want a cigarette?”

  “No. I don’t smoke. Do you drink?”

  “Yes; sometimes…. Do you?”

  “No; I never drink,” she said.

  She looked off in wonder. She was trying to become quickly acquainted with the most elementary things of life.

  “Your family and the teachers at that mission school watched you pretty closely, didn’t they?” I hazarded.

  “Yes; but all that’s over now,” she said.

  I looked at her and she hung her head and giggled, then she lifted her knuckles to her lips, thinking intensely.

  “I have a sister in America,” she said suddenly.

  “And you want to go there?”

  “If I can.”

  “You go to the movies too much,” I said.

  “But I like movies,” she said defensively.

  The taxi spun round curves. The hot sun splashed on the rickety houses and the crowded streets where young black women, wearing native cloths, carried unbelievable burdens upon their heads. The taxi stopped; I got out and held the door for her.

  “Won’t you come in, please?”

  “I can’t, really.”

  “Meet my aunt, won’t you? She’s there.”

  “I’m sorry, little lady.”

  Her eyes were baffled. She turned suddenly and walked off across the street and entered a vacant, littered lot; she paused and looked back at me, laughing nervously in the hot sun. The taxi driver stared at me, waiting.

  “Come in for a moment,” she begged.

  I shook my head, forcing a wry smile.

  “Good luck to you and be careful,” I called to her.

  She stood still. I moved backward toward the open door of the taxi. Then she turned and ran; she reached a corner of a cement house and paused again, standing a little sideways; she smiled, laughed, then beckoned me with her finger. I shook my head, filled with pathos. She ran out of sight.

  I climbed into the taxi and settled down. The driver sat, not moving.

  “To the Seaview,” I told him.

  “Massa no go with girl?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  He laughed and started the motor.

  “Mary, she want too much money, hunh, Massa?” he asked, wagging his head.

  “Do you know her?” I asked him.

  “Oh, naw, sar!” he said.

  “Then why do you call her Mary?”

  “They all named Mary, Massa,” he told me, and he laughed until his shoulders shook.

  Late that afternoon I visited, in the company of some young Africans, the famous Korle Bu Lagoon, a center of legend and fetish worship situated on the outskirts of Accra. The lagoon was a wide stretch of gray, stinking mud over which a modem concrete highway ran. You could smell the lagoon’s awful stench a few moments before your car reached it, and you also believed that you could smell it for an hour afterward when you were miles away, so nauseating was its odor.

  “But why don’t they do something to cover the thing up?” I asked of my companions in the car.

  “Oh, that’s a problem,” I was told.

  “Won’t the government act?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. If they could—”

  “It’s a simple job. Isn’t there money enough for that?” I asked. “At least they could cover all that slime with a coat of thick oil and mosquitoes couldn’t breed in it. That stagnant water causes typhoid and yellow fever and malaria….”

  “We told you that there’s a story—”

  The story I heard went something like this: Years ago, according to legend, the Fanti tribe was fighting the Accra tribe. The Fanti tribe, so went the story, advanced with a powerful army to the edge of the lagoon but, since it was nearly night and they were tired, they decided to camp and rest till morning…. The Accra tribe, seeing that their enemies, the Fanti, had given up hope of launching an attack, took heart, mobilized their forces, made a few sacrifices, called on their gods, and attacked and won a smashing victory…. And, of course, that victory, according to the calculations of the tribal mind, had come from the helpful spirit of the lagoon which had confounded and confused the Fanti and prevented them from fighting! Since that day the Korle Bu Lagoon has been held in deep reverence; it is thought that a god resides in it. So, when the government decided to drain the lagoon, a crowd of thousands of angry and terrified Accra people gathered, headed by the fetish priests and priestesses, and dared the government authorities to act! And, so far, the government authorities have not acted…. And this reeking lagoon lies within a stone’s throw of the most modern tropical hospital in all West Africa!

  Twenty

  On the tenth of July the Legislative Assembly convened, presided over by the brown-skinned, wigged, robed, and spectacled Sir Emmanuel Quist, distinguished lawyer and elder statesman. The Prime Minister, clad in a smock of the Northern Territories, submitted a motion calling for drastic modifications of the constitution—modifications which would eventually mean a large measure of self-government for the people of the Gold Coast.

  The session was impressive, colorful, but restrained. Most of the Convention People’s Party members of the Assembly wore their tribal costumes; the opposition members were dressed strictly in Western style. Nkrumah, as well as all of his aides who had been imprisoned with him for sedition, wore peaked white caps, the same kind that they had been forced to wear when behind bars; and on the front of those caps was printed in red letters for all to see: P.G., meaning: Prison Graduate.

  The high-ceilinged room in which the Assembly met had been consciously modeled on the British House of Commons and the mood that prevailed was more British than the British themselves could have provided. Most of the speakers droned in voices so low that I could barely hear one half of what was being said.

  At once I was aware of the contrast between this prim atmosphere, this staid gathering, this chaste room and the screaming and dancing crowds that I’d seen in Accra and Cape Coast. Would these men fulfill the hopes of those hopeful people? I was not doubtful or cynical; I was just wondering and skeptical. I was for these men and I found myself hoping that the British, uncannily politically astute, had not already snared this revolution in a net of politeness and parliamentary maneuvering….

  All around the grounds outside of the Assembly were thousands of Gold Coast citizens clad in their native togas and waiting behind long cordons of Northern Territory police. Every time a car rolled up bearing some Convention People’s Party functionary, the crowd would let out a long roar of applause. These were the masses; they had put Nkrumah in power and now they were waiting to see if he would fulfill the mandate that they had given him.

  Inside, with the help of an African newspaperman, I spotted the key Britishers who held the decisive cabinet positions and the balance of power for Britain. There was Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the Governor of the Colony: short, stumpy, aloof, detached, hiding his tension. There was broad-browed, spectacled R. H. Saloway, the Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs. There was P. Branigan, Minister of Justice, Queen’s Counsel, tight-lipped, sharp of features, partly bald, and with the subdued air of a detective. And there was R. P. Armitage, the Minister of Finance, a wisp of hair dividing his bald dome, reserved, determined…. These four Britishers had the armed forces, the money, the administration of the courts, and the foreign affairs of the colony in their hands. The rest of the power was in the hands of Africans. It was truly a delicate balance.

  In the galleries there were almost as many Europeans as Africans and that reminded me that Nkrumah, so far, has had to rely, ironically enough, mainly upon the British for the burden of administering most of the departments of government. The black intellectuals from Oxford and Cambridge were, almost to a man, with the opposition and were, therefore, unacceptable. In coming to power Nkrumah had to import more Britishers to serve in technical capacities than had ever been in the Gold Coast before; the drive toward
self-government had not lessened but increased the number of British officials…. If Nkrumah had not followed this line, his new and varied programs of social reform could not have gotten under way so quickly; in short, he’d not have been able to keep the many promises that he and his party had made to the masses….

  As the preliminaries began, I mulled over the strange facets of this political situation: had the British, having faced many similar situations of revolt in other lands with other people, known the exact moment when to call these black boys into power? There was no doubt but that Nkrumah’s acceptance of responsibility in the government had been to demonstrate to the world the African’s capacity to shoulder the burdens of office. But had he accepted these responsibilities too soon? Might not the famous British gesture of an “act of grace,” the releasing of Nkrumah and his aides from prison, have concealed a knowledge on the part of the British that the new political party and its leadership were not yet quite ripe to rule, and that they would have to depend upon the British? The British would not have been able to rule the Gold Coast without force had they not invited Nkrumah and his party into the government as partners. But the black brother who had been invited into partnership was a weak one, inexperienced…. In other words, the victory of the Convention People’s Party, as astounding and unheard of as it was, had not been really and truly decisive. The British, having their hands upon the money and the police, and having the right to say who could or could not enter the colony, could bottle up the country any time they wanted to. And, though they were quiet about it, the mining, timber, and mercantile interests, all foreign, had their own ideas about what was happening.

  Nkrumah’s speech petitioning Her Majesty’s Government to enact the necessary legislation for Gold Coast self-government was calm, competent, and calculated to appeal to the traditional British pretensions of self-rule for colonies. His most telling point came when he stated that as long as the British ruled the Gold Coast, all the mistakes of the Africans could be laid at British doors. He said nothing to frighten foreign capital; he expressed a desire to remain within the Commonwealth; and I could not escape the feeling that the speech implied an almost formal understanding with the British…. There was nothing inherently shameful in that; any smart politician would have done it. But I could not help but ask myself if it should have been done now—with the national front broken, with the most able men of the country sulking in their corners…? I did not disagree with Nkrumah; I simply and honestly feared for him and his people.

  At the conclusion of the Prime Minister’s speech, prolonged applause broke forth and the Prime Minister was taken outside and lifted upon the shoulders of his comrades and paraded to and fro. The surging crowds behind the cordons of police cheered and chanted:

  “FREE—DOOOOOM! FREE—DOOOOOM!”

  Their faces streaked with white clay as a sign of victory, decked out in wild and gay colors, the women did that slow, snakelike dance, shuffling their feet over the ground, their fingers lifted and trembling in the air, chanting songs, clapping their hands in offbeat rhythms. But I was apprehensive about a reality that lurked behind the reality I saw. I could feel the fragility of the African as compared with the might of the British, the naïveté of the African when weighed against the rancid political insight the British possessed, the naked plea of the African when pitted against the anxieties of man holding the secrets of atomic power in their hands…. And a phrase from Nietzsche welled up in me: the pathos of distance…. The Africans were grappling with a new and different kind of god that could be propitiated only with raw materials: uranium, bauxite, gold, timber, and manganese…. It was not what Nkrumah had said but what he had left unsaid that induced in me a mood of concern, of uneasiness.

  How would the black bourgeois opposition handle this? I’d heard a lot about Drs. Danquah and Busia. I’d been told that they were able men when it came to handling words and this was pre-eminently a battle in which words were the decisive weapons.

  While waiting for the opposition speakers to get under way, I wondered if it would not have been wiser for Nkrumah to have refused to share power with the British, to have allowed the black bourgeois opposition to rule while he enlarged and strengthened his party…. In a nutshell, what was bothering me was the manifest shallowness of the African foundation for the efficient exercise of power. If Nkrumah could have postponed his entering the government, he could have had, when he did come to power—as he inevitably would have!—a power that would have been African power, a control over the country so complete that he could have ruled in the name of his party until he could have trained a new legion of like-minded young men to help him.

  The disruption of the class and social relations of a tribal country that has long been under the fumbling tutelage of a Western imperial power throws up a variety of possibilities, the crux of them being: for whose benefit will the turnover in power be made?

  There could have been a narrow, nationalist revolution made for the benefit of the chiefs, the intellectuals, and the not too numerous black middle class. Such a realignment would have been a restoration, at a higher level, of the tribal power which the British had once smashed, and this power would have had to depend upon foreign mercantile interests. Under such a regime the masses of the people would have fared no better than they had fared before.

  Yet, another revolution could have been made in the name and for the benefit of the Gold Coast and the whole of West Africa; such a revolution, of course, would have been attacked at once by the combined forces of both Britain and France; but, if such a revolution could have maintained discipline within its geographical boundaries and denied the exploitation of its natural resources to foreigners, it would eventually have been able to deal with the Western powers on a new basis. Such a revolution would have been difficult, costly in human life, would have entailed great sacrifices; but, in the end, whether it won or not, the entire black population of West Africa would have been forever committed to the new course, and the fetish-ridden past would have been killed beyond recall….

  Africa needs the West and the West needs Africa; the problem is: How can this exchange of values, services, and materials between Africa and the West be made on a basis that will not outrage the African sense of justice, a basis that assumes the equality of needs on both sides?

  The revolution that was actually made was for the benefit of British capital, the interests of the Commonwealth interlaced with the interests of the Gold Coast; and this revolution necessitated a sharp ability on the part of the participating Africans to know where their interests began and where those of the Commonwealth ended. Already the clash of interests, the ceaseless bickering over definitions of power was a lawyer’s paradise!

  The British-educated, black bourgeois opposition opened with an attack delivered by Dr. J. P. Danquah, lawyer, philosopher, politician, dramatist, and long-time nationalist leader. Short, slow-moving, he rose, shuffled his pile of notes; then, in a well-modulated baritone, he charged Nkrumah with converting the Gold Coast into another Malta. He pecked away at Nkrumah’s motion without ever once getting beneath the surface of the situation. It was evident that he was innocent of the meaning of the twentieth-century industrial world. His concepts were dragged from the nineteenth century and hell and high water were not going to shake him loose from those prepossessions. England had laid her hand upon his spirit and, in spite of himself, he hated England but could not tell how England had grabbed hold of him…. He had no idea how hard and cold were both the white and black men with whom he was dealing, men who were professional politicians and who labored at their craft every waking hour…. (Dr. Danquah gave only his spare time to politics!) He argued as though he were exhorting, say, on behalf of Shell Oil. Not once did he indicate that he felt that the fate of millions of his fellow countrymen was at stake, that they had passionately asked for something for which they were willing to die, that they actually were massed and waiting out there in the hot sun to hear their aspirations put into words.
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  I left the Assembly before Dr. Danquah finished his speech.

  After lunch I recalled that I’d noted many American movies being shown in the city. I’d come across the influence of Hollywood so often in the mentality of the Africans that I was curious to see how they absorbed these artificial dreams. I took a taxi and went to the biggest movie house in Accra. One entered the theater from the rear; I suppose that was necessary because of the absence of sidewalks in front. I bought a ticket for the gallery, for I wanted to be close to the side of the black boys and girls whom I’d seen on the streets.

  The interior was vast, barnlike, undecorated. To find a seat you had to grope your way forward in the dark, bumping into walls and colliding with other people until your hands encountered vacant space. Smoking was allowed and the air was stale. I sat and became aware that an uproar was going on about me and I looked at the screen to see what was causing it. An advertisement was being projected; a bottle of beer was leaping and jumping on the screen as a British voice extolled its merits. The beer bottle tilted and foam gushed from its neck, demonstrating the beer’s wonderful qualities of nourishment, and the audience howled with laughter. Then a black boy was shown drinking from a bottle and the audience hooted and yelled. They seemed amused no end to hear an alien voice telling them about something that was a daily familiarity in their lives.

  This quality of uproarious detachment continued when the main feature was projected. Indeed, the laughter, the lewd comments, and the sudden shouts rose to such a pitch that I could not hear the shadowy characters say their lines. I could not follow the story amid such hubbub and came to the conclusion that they could not either; it soon became clear that the story was of minor interest to them. It was upon each incident that they were concentrating with such furious noise. If a man accidentally fell, they screamed with delight. If a love scene was portrayed, they hooted: