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Black Power

Page 24

by Richard Wright


  “I see the great influence of the tribe in politics,” I said. “But how is it done? How does the party latch onto the tribal life?”

  “All right…. We live in a queer way in Africa,” the doctor began his explanation. “Our inheritance is matrilineal, coming from the mother’s side of the family. When a man takes a wife, he cannot leave the family and live with her; he has to bring her into his family. She becomes a daughter in his family in addition to being a wife. She comes under the authority of the family. The family is supreme in Africa; its authority is unquestioned. That is why no European girl can fit into our families. They are acceptable, but they find it impossible….

  “When a head of the family joins the Convention People’s Party, the entire family joins. And families in Africa are large. The head of the family has the final say; his word is law. If a chief is Convention People’s Party, then the entire town is Convention People’s Party…. Say, did you know that Nkrumah is a Tufuhene…?”

  “A what? What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a Fanti term…. It means Warrior Chief.”

  “But that’s just an honorary title, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s serious?”

  “Of course it is,” the doctor said. “Now, the origin of the Convention People’s Party came from the Gold Coast Youth Organization, which was led by Gbedemah, Ako Adjei…. Nkrumah was the spirit of the group. He knew how to set off herd reactions, and the clan and the family formed the basis for his drive for power. His aim is to replace the chiefs entirely, and eventually the British also….

  “I believe that Nkrumah believes in the same qualities that he arouses in others. I’ve tried to question him about these things, and when I did, he evaded me, he hemmed. He has seen clearly the kind of life we lead and he is out to organize it…. He has learned how to sink roots into this tribal life and he intends to rule. He is on his way to wipe out the identity of people like me…. It’s not democracy. I know he has the masses with him, but it’s not democracy. The real center of power in our society was in the hands of the chiefs, but Nkrumah has smashed all that….”

  “Why are you opposed to this, Doctor?”

  “I’m not a political man, but I’m opposed to it.”

  “Why? Why don’t you serve the people? The people need you, men like you….”

  “It’s not right,” he said.

  “What are you saying?” I asked him. “Whatever power there is in the Gold Coast, they’ll need men like you. They are your people; serve them—”

  “The people must be educated—”

  “Granted,” I agreed. “But why not let them be free first? It would have taken a thousand years to educate them at the rate the British were going. The Americans were once a colonial people too. But they didn’t wait until all of their people were educated to make their bid for freedom. They took their freedom and then educated their people. This is a question of power…. Either you feel that you ought to be free or you do not.”

  “Educate the people and then let them be free,” he said and laughed.

  And I knew that that laugh was to cushion the shock of his attitude.

  “What do you think’s going to happen here, then?”

  “There’ll be a blowup, a sudden change,” he argued. “This cannot go on. You cannot build anything solid on a basis of mass hysteria.”

  “In what way will it blow up?” I asked. “It’s certain that the country’s united against the British. The British have no roots or parties here. Therefore, if there’s to be a blowup, it’ll have to come from either African opposition or British-supported African opposition. You know that the African opposition’s too weak to act alone. Would bourgeois Africans fight Nkrumah for the British?”

  “I don’t know how it’s going to happen; but it won’t last,” he reiterated. “This is no way to build a nation—”

  “Doctor, my mind is open about that,” I told him. “You know what happened in Russia. Ideology aside. You know what happened in Germany. In Spain. In Italy. In China. In Argentina. Those were not accidents or the actions of evil men. And a lot more is involved than the problem of education. People are tired of the old, traditional forms of living. All about them they see and sense the possibility of change. The people who should make that change—men like you—do not make it. Then along comes someone who sees that it can be done and he does it. You cannot expect a vacuum to remain unfilled. Don’t blame Nkrumah. I’m not partisan. I’m objective. Nkrumah’s doing what should have been done long ago; that’s why he was able to do it so quickly and easily. The cost of that kind of social change comes high; many things go by the board…. This seems to be the reality of the twentieth century…. Now, since other nations have proved that the masses can absorb education quickly, why not the masses of the Gold Coast…?”

  “I’m willing to admit that the masses can absorb technical education quickly….”

  “Isn’t that decisive?”

  “What about the values—?”

  “The old values go,” I argued. “The new ones are created as men strive to live, as men’s needs prod them forward…. I’m not so much for Nkrumah as I am for the right of the masses of people to cut loose from the past, and since Nkrumah’s leading them from the past, I’m for him. Man, I’ve looked at your villages. They and the people in them are rotting…. It’s a living death. Only when men break loose from that rot and death and plunge creatively into the future do they become something to respect. Life then becomes a supremely spiritual task of molding and shaping the world according to the needs of the human heart—”

  “That’s not going to happen in Africa soon,” he told me, shaking his head.

  “And did you think that Nkrumah could happen so soon?” I countered.

  “It’s a matter of time—This is too fast!”

  “How do you know how fast people can develop? Has it ever really been tried? Tested? All right, make Africa a test and see. No matter what you do here in your fight for freedom, as long as it’s for freedom, you can’t lose….”

  We were going at it so hot and heavy that I didn’t notice that it was almost one o’clock. During lunch there was a lull. I’d at last talked freely to my first intellectual African; he didn’t agree with me, but at least he knew what I was talking about. My position in the Gold Coast was indeed strange; the Convention People’s Party was afraid to talk freely and frankly to me, yet I was for them in a more fundamental sense than they could accept. And it was only with the opposition that I could talk freely, and they disagreed with me!

  Must it always be that the middle class must go down to defeat complaining and rejecting reality…? I’d seen the same thing in Buenos Aires…. There I’d had to consort with the decadent nobility who sat huddled and afraid in their huge houses, cursing, swearing that peons could not operate telephones, could not run railroads…. Industrialization had made the world simple, yet those who opposed the masses operating that world dared not oppose industrialization. Why, their profits came out of it…. One’s respect for man sank as one watched this same stupid drama re-enact itself from country to country, almost without variation.

  Was Dr. Ampofo’s attitude the only contribution that English education and missions had given to the upper-class Africans of the Gold Coast? The doctor knew, of course, what Britain had done to his people, how it had shattered their culture; he knew, deep in his heart, that Nkrumah’s overthrowing the chiefs came only after Britain had long undermined the very basis of tribal life, that Nkrumah had only deliberately and self-consciously dealt that system its last blow….

  What bitter pathos churned in the hearts of the African middle class! How they felt that Britain, their idol, had let them down! Yet, what could Britain do? She had no roots among the masses of African people and yet she had heavy investments in gold, timber, diamonds, bauxite, manganese…. She had denounced Nkrumah as dangerous, but, when faced with losing her material interests, she, like Jesus, conferred upon the
black rebel an “act of grace”…Britain had acted to save not right, not hope, not honesty; she acted to defend her interests. And that is as it should have been. One’s real quarrel is that the British could never say so frankly. Maybe they didn’t know how to….

  Twenty-Six

  If I was to continue my taxi excursions into the “bush,” it was now clear that I would have to rent a car for a long period. I finally approached a Swiss car-rental agency whose officials told me that a car that could withstand a “bush” trek would cost me twenty pounds a month, plus the driver’s salary, plus the cost of gas and oil; and, beyond a twenty-five-mile radius of Accra, I’d have to pay a premium of a shilling a mile because of bad roads; further, while on trek, I’d have to maintain the driver’s food and lodging…. I resolved to rent the car and keep rolling until my money melted, and then I’d go home.

  While in the offices of the car-rental agency I noticed that the Europeans dressed much more simply and comfortably than the Africans. The whites were striving to keep cool in the torrid heat, but the petty bourgeois black clerks and secretaries, etc., wore heaps of woolen clothes to draw a highly visible line of social distinction between themselves and the naked, illiterate masses. An educated African could not afford to be seen dressed comfortably, that is, in sandals and a toga; he had to dress like the British dressed in Britain! And the Britisher wore shorts and T-shirts!

  Having rented a car, I began to plan a tour of the triangle enclosed in the lines drawn between Takoradi, Accra, and Kumasi, an area that held three-fourths of the nation’s wealth and population; and, what was more, it comprised a big slice of the high rain forest, the real jungle.

  But, if I went on trek, where would I sleep, what could I eat? The Americans I questioned had no suggestions. I approached the Prime Minister’s office and was urged to talk to the British. I balked. I’d come to be with Africans and I was being shunted into the hands of the British! I brooded for a couple of days and, in the end, I knew that I either had to depend upon the British to see the interior or go home….

  I presented my request to the Gold Coast Information Service and was told that they would draw up an itinerary for me in a few days’ time. Meanwhile, I hired a chauffeur, an ex-middleweight champion of the Gold Coast, Battling Kojo, black, quick, and loyal. I was advised that I needed someone of his pugnacity if I was to be on my own in the jungle.

  I waited, fighting against a never-ending sense of enervation. I was eating a normal amount, but the food seemed to give me no strength. I was told that vegetables grew so swiftly in this hot and red earth that they were not really nourishing! Lettuce refused to form a head here. Corn shot up so quickly that the ears became full-sized before the grain matured on the cobs. Other vegetables turned into soft, pulpy masses. Among the Europeans, tropical ulcers were common and they were forever dosing themselves with vitamins. Fresh milk and butter were unknown, being shipped from Europe in tins. The threat of sleeping sickness from the tsetse fly was so acute to both cattle and humans that no large herds of cattle were kept. From the Northern Territories cattle were marched five hundred miles down to the coastal area and when they arrived they were gaunt, tough, and weak-eyed from the long trek in the awful heat…. In the hotel restaurant I’ve never been able to tell from the taste the kind of meat I’m eating.

  The heat makes insect life breed prolifically: mosquitoes, ants, lizards, and myriads of other creatures swarm in the air and underfoot. A lump of sugar left in a saucer will draw ants in an hour even to the second floor of a stone building in which stewards are constantly cleaning. Everything seems to develop faster here; life gushes up in a careless profusion; the universe seems in a state of biological hurry, as though nature were prodding and driving all living organisms beyond their normal rate of reaction.

  The cheapness of labor clutters the landscape with odd sights. One sees gangs of black workmen cutting grass with long cutlasses. Couldn’t it be done with machines? Sure; but labor is cheaper than machines, and machines get rusty and wear out. The problem of the repair and upkeep of the laterite roads has also been solved in a fashion that indicates that men are cheaper than materials. The torrential rains wash out the roads periodically and, instead of anchoring the roads in beds of rock or cement, which is expensive, large gangs of workers are kept constantly busy shoveling the soil back into place.

  I’ve not seen a single wood carving or art object since I’ve landed in the Gold Coast. The advent of the missionary has driven underground much of the religious expression of the tribal people; they no longer allow it to be known that they fashion those odd, elongated ebony figures that Europeans seek so ardently. In the eyes of the new black Christians those figures hold no value; they are obtainable, I’m told, but you will have to convince a chief or a fetish priest that your interest is favorable to tribal life. Instead of many gods, the Gold Coast African now has one Who is nailed to a cross and Whose image is stamped out by mass production.

  Just as he has been shamed into hiding his religion, so has the Gold Coast African attitude toward political symbols become more Western than the West’s. One day I was asked to comment upon the unofficial (of course!) designs for the new flag which the Gold Coast will adopt when freedom comes. After examining all kinds of newfangled geometric patterns, I said that I could not conceive of a Gold Coast flag without a “stool” upon it. What? My African listeners were speechless with rage and indignation. The “stool”? Never! They were sick and tired of “stools”! But, I argued, look at America. The thirteen original colonies had hated their colonial status, but, when they designed their flag, they were confident that they would eventually be free and they included in their flag a symbolic representation of their original colonial status…. You too, I argued, will some day be so far removed psychologically from this struggle that you will look back and want to acknowledge your early religious and national symbols…. But, no, never…!

  I was invited to a party and did not want to go, but somebody whispered that I’d meet some of the local CID men and the head of the Accra police, a Mr. X. That decided me. I’ve long been interested in the psychology of policemen; of all the functionaries in a country, they share the outlook, the fears, the aims, and the attitudes of the group holding power. Enforcers of the law generally partake of the impulses both of the lawmakers and the lawbreakers, and they are mostly men devoid of illusions.

  Mr. X was about my height, nervous, talkative; in fact, he resembled a foreman in a factory; he looked anything but a policeman. We were immediately drawn to each other: he wanted to know what I was doing and I wanted to know what he was doing, and we spent most of the evening talking together.

  “Just what do you do here?” I asked him.

  “My job is to keep law and order in this city,” he asserted with pride.

  “Is it difficult?”

  “No more difficult here than it is anywhere else,” he told me.

  “But I thought that Africans were so different that you’d have to use special methods to catch them….”

  “Not a bit of it,” he argued. “The same thing that makes an Englishman steal makes an African steal. There’s but one slight difference: the African is more prone to be prouder of his theft than the Englishman—”

  “How do you account for that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But he just is.”

  “Maybe the black criminal thinks he’s right….”

  He blinked, then asked:

  “In what way?”

  “Well, it’s his country, you know. Maybe he thinks he’s evening up scores.”

  “Maybe,” he said thoughtfully. “But, for my part, it is his country. I’m here just to do a job—”

  “Does that include training Africans to take over the enforcement of law and order?”

  “Absolutely. We’ve got them right now studying in Scotland Yard.”

  “Do they have much chance to get experience in London?”

  “No; they’re sent back here for tha
t.”

  “Do you find any emotional differences between an African murderer and an English one?”

  “Well, what I told you about stealing goes also for killing. The African feels that he has done right, most of the time,” Mr. X explained. “If an African kills his woman, it’s because he feels that she deserves it. He’d scorn running off and hiding. He even takes a kind of pride in telling why he did it. You don’t get much of a sense of guilt out of them.”

  “Does that stem from tribal influence?”

  “Maybe. He kills her because what she did was not right—”

  “Under what law would he be tried? Tribal or English?”

  “Under our laws.”

  “I don’t want you to divulge any of your confidential matters, but tell me: suppose a crime has been committed and you are called in. What do you do?”

  He thought a moment.

  “I’ll tell you about one…. A few weeks ago a safe was robbed here. The safe belonged to a European auto firm. They had a repair shop. The metal of the safe was cut through—”

  “With an acetylene torch?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That smacks of New York or Chicago.”

  “Of course it does. Now, my job was to catch the criminal. Who did it? I can’t be bothered with fancy theories. I have a practical job to do. Who cut into that safe and took the money? Now—”

  “Maybe a European or an American safe-cracker came ashore…. Truly, no black boy could do that, unless he has had experience. It’s a daring feat—”

  “That’s where you are wrong. First of all, we know pretty well who comes into this colony. There are no American or European safe-crackers within reach. So, I must concentrate upon the Africans.

 

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