Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “Now, finally everybody is cleared but one boy. He’s average; he’s never been out of the colony. He has only recently been hired. He works on the bodies of the autos; he has just recently learned to use the acetylene torch…. We take fingerprints. It was his job…. We confront him. He confesses—”

  “No coercion used?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “But did he put two and two together so quickly?”

  “You’d be surprised how bright these boys really are,” he assured me.

  “Do you think that brightness is confined to crime?”

  “God, no!”

  This policeman was, ironically, the most liberal-minded Englishman I’d met so far in Africa! As a law-enforcement officer, he had to admit that it didn’t take years or months, but only days, for that young boy to see that if he could cut through the steel of auto bodies, he could also cut through the steel of the boss’s safe and take the money. It was strange that this man who had served for years in Scotland Yard should turn out to be so frank and intensely perceptive! His mind was not encumbered with bulky theories of sociology or anthropology that insisted that certain spans of time had to elapse before people could absorb knowledge. He didn’t complain that Africans were progressing too fast. If he’d allowed his attention to become cluttered up with such nonsense, he’d have lost his job pronto. A policeman has to assume the equality of man; hence, he sees the possibilities of Africa, especially on the level of crime, much more clearly than the Colonial Office or the professors in English universities.

  Now that I’d rented my car, I decided to find out how rapidly the pounds would mount up at the rate of a shilling a mile. Prampram had been pointed out as a typical ancient village and I directed Kojo to drive there. It was raining and the roads were under water most of the way. As we heaved in sight of the village, I saw the usual mud huts with thatched roofs and a few cement houses built up out of blocks. I heard drums beating and I looked out and saw a group of men clad in togas and dancing in the cloudy light of the rainy morning. It was a funeral; an elder had just died. Not far from the men was a group of women, some sitting, some standing, some dancing. I waved and smiled at the men and they waved and smiled in return. There seemed to be no grief; they were all relaxed. Now and then a man would leap out in front of the drums and do a frenzied dance, signaling the gods to look down with favor upon his tribe. Then I started violently, for a musket had gone off right behind my back…. I spun to see what was happening; a man was kneeling, holding a gun from which wisps of blue smoke curled. The gun was pointing toward the sky….

  A black young man came up; he spoke English.

  “Why do they fire those guns?” I asked him.

  “It’s custom,” he said.

  “But there must be some reason for it,” I insisted.

  “Why do you send flowers to a funeral in America?” he asked me, laughing.

  I stared, unable to answer.

  “It must be custom,” I said and laughed too.

  The young man seemed intelligent and willing to answer questions, and so I waded right in.

  “Why are they beating the drums?”

  “The drums ‘talk,’” he explained. “Not everybody now can interpret drum language. But those drums are announcing to the spirit world that the elder is on his way.”

  “Don’t the women sing?”

  “Yes; they sang this morning. They wailed too,” he said.

  The funeral ritual flowed on; they danced war dances, the muskets fired, and the drums beat on and on.

  “Where is the dead elder?”

  “He’s on his bed. Do you want to see him?”

  “Yes.”

  I followed the young man to a paneless window through which I saw a long, black man wrapped in a brightly colored shroud; he was stretched out upon a bed and a white strip of cloth was bound over his mouth.

  “What’s that cloth for?”

  The young man said that he didn’t know.

  “Who handles the dead, that is, prepares them for burial?”

  “The women handle the dead, wash them, dress them, and make them ready for the grave,” he explained. “The women bring us into the world and they see us go out of it.”

  I saw women going to the foot of the dead man’s bed and whispering a few words into his ears. I could not hear or understand what was being said.

  “Are they praying?” I asked.

  “Well, not exactly,” he told me. “They are telling him good-bye. They are giving him messages for their relatives in the spirit world, you see.”

  It was not death as we know it; in fact, it was not death at all. It was a departure.

  The “talking” drums recounted the man’s life, celebrating the trouble he had seen, and they also sought to pacify the “dead” man for the perils he had to encounter in the world of spirits. For there was a transition period from the world of the living to the world of the dead. For a certain number of days the “dead” man’s spirit was supposed to hover in the vicinity of the living as it climbed a steep hill toward the land of his ancestors, and that climb was long and hard. Hence, as the “dead” man had been breathing his last, his soul had already begun, in terms of native imagination, to pant and heave with effort. The death rattle was interpreted as physical exertion; therefore, as the old man was “dying,” his relatives poured water down his throat to help him quench his thirst. (Maybe it actually hastened the poor man’s end….)

  In Africa the “dead” live side by side with the living; they eat, breathe, laugh, hate, love, and continue doing in the world of ghostly shadows exactly what they had been doing in the world of flesh and blood. The Akan feel that the “dead” get lonely in that world and are anxious for the living to come and keep them company. Thus, the pacification of the “dead” constitutes one of their biggest problems of life.

  The drums of state beat on, encouraging the “dead” man to mount the steep hill of the other world. Naked black children stood about, their mouths agape in awe. Already the other world was as real to them as this one…. Instinct ruled here; fear and guilt and doubt and hope held sway in the dismal morning air.

  How did this come to be? It looked simple, but it had its origins in a complicated and subtle balancing of many emotional factors. On my way back to the hotel, I visited a bookstore and bought a stack of literature; I wanted to see what the “authorities” had to say about this. And was there a better way to spend a rainy afternoon in Africa than in reading what they say about their “dead”?

  Thumbing through old pages, one learns that the African does not believe idly in another world; for him, there is another world. Every object in existence has a twin, itself and its ghostly shadow. (Plato seems to have been somewhat primitive too!) The origin of this motion came from his dreams. Did he not move about and see people and objects many miles away when he slept? Just as he is convinced that spirits dwell in trees, rivers, in fact, in all inanimate objects, so a spirit, he is persuaded, dwells in man.

  From this point on, matters become a little complicated. The spirit, known as kra, that dwells in man is distinct from him. In death, when kra leaves a man, it has two possibilities: it can, if the man was old, go straight to the world of spirits. If, however, the man died before his time, if he was unaccountably ill or accidentally killed, his kra would linger on in the world of the living for an indeterminate length of time.

  With the normal “death,” all goes well; the family places food, water, tobacco, alcohol, clothing, etc., at the side of the grave. (Weapons are expressly excluded, for fear that the “dead” would use them harmfully against the living.) But with the kra that lingers, for whatever reason, trouble starts. This kra can “embrace” children and induce illness in them. Indeed, kra have been known to enter into newborn babes, thereby reincarnating themselves. It is, therefore, a matter of conjecture when someone has just died in a family and when someone has just been born in that family if that “dead” man’s kra has returned in the for
m of the new baby….

  Life in the ghost world is an exact duplicate of life in this world. A farmer in this world is a farmer there; a chief here is a chief there. It is, therefore, of decisive importance when one enters that world of ghostly shades to enter it in the right manner. For you can be snubbed there just as effectively and humiliatingly as you were snubbed here.

  From this belief that the “dead” live as we live, the following deduction is simple: to the degree that we love, honor, and revere our “dead,” we must help them to establish themselves in the world of shadows. So, in the end, the extreme sacrifice will be made. If a chief had slaves in this world, his slaves would be sent to serve him in the beyond; and so would his several wives be dispatched to comfort him. Fortunately, most Africans are poor and their duties in the next world will be as modest as they were in this world and they will have no need of many slaves or wives to keep them happy….

  All of these seemingly gruesome duties are performed with awe and tenderness. Make no mistake about that…. Even human sacrifice is solemnly ritualized. What strikes us as being monstrous is done by them with a sense of exaltation. Yet, suppose it’s not done? Ah…. The “dead” do not like neglect, and they are quick to revenge such by returning to the world of the living and snatching you into their dreaded domain. Why the “dead” insist upon acting in this vengeful manner is a question to which the Akan has no clear-cut answer.

  How did these strange notions come about? Yes; it was about time that I dipped into the muddy metaphysical waters of those African intellectuals who had tried to explain these spiritual riddles. And I selected as my guide a learned African who was still living, a man to whom I could talk after I had read his ideas. That man was none other than the leading political opponent of the Convention People’s Party, Nkrumah’s Nemesis, Dr. J. B. Danquah; and forthwith I plunged at last into his The Akan Doctrine of God.

  I hastened to confess that I’m far from being the most suitable person in the world to report on metaphysical doctrines. A fair report on such subtleties requires a man who, through empathy, can follow the curling and dipping of such notions with anxious love. I possess no such love…. In relating the following, I am, no doubt, doing a degree of violence to the astute learning of Dr. Danquah; but, since I’m of another culture, another time sense even, and since I cannot express myself other than directly, this is how it must be.

  The first fact that impresses one in Dr. Danquah’s exposition is his unjustified feeling that he must demonstrate that the African has a religion whose concepts are on par with that of the religion of the Western world. In a manner that smacks of an unconscious apology, he assumes that Christianity is believed superior and that the devotees of that religion are too filled with racial prejudice to acknowledge that the religion of the African is just as good, in fact, according to Dr. Danquah, it is, in some respects, better. I’d agree with the good doctor about this; the African religion has no hell and no sin, and hell and sin have always struck me as bore-some and static conceptions. Africans manage to fuse hell and sin in an organic and concrete manner, and their lives thereby become as charged and exciting as the moving tables and floating trumpets in a séance in a dreary London flat.

  Each race, says Dr. Danquah, apprehends God through a “seed”-quality of ideas; thus:

  “…When the family is the chief idea, things that are dishonorable and undignified, actions that in disgracing you disgrace the family, are held to be vices, and the highest virtue is found in honor and dignity. Tradition is the determinant of what is right and just, what is good and done.”

  The Akan regard the sky and the earth as great gods. The sky-god is the Saturday Sky-God, Nyame. The earth-god is the Thursday Earth-Goddess, Asaase Yaa. But the most important gods to which the people appeal daily are the spirits of the departed ancestors of the clan. Over and above this there are hundreds of minor gods, who, when appealed to, act as intercessors to the higher gods; these higher gods, in their vast concern with other worlds and other matters, do not have the time to give full attention to the prayers of millions of ordinary men….

  The Akan believe that the spirits of his ancestors find a repository in the Golden Stool, which represents the soul of the nation. The head of a Stool is called Nana, and this meaning, rising from the Nana who is chief of the family, goes right on up to the Nana of the Universe, this final Nana occupying the great Stool of all existence. There is, then, a direct line of relation from the head of the family, rising by degrees, to the great god who rules all things. And the bridge between the head of the family and the head of the universe is to be found in the friendly or baleful spirits of ancestors who hover about the families in which they once lived.

  To show how the Akan concept of God operates in a real social sense, Dr. Danquah addresses himself to the baffling problem of the “omnipotence” of God, for, if each head of a family, clan, tribe, or state partakes of God, are they too “omnipotent”? Dr. Danquah says: “…The Akan idea is of a community, continuous with the past, present, and future of his relations of blood. The ‘omnipotence’ of the high-father cannot be greater than the reality of this community. A father, of necessity, is what all his children are.”

  On page 82 of The Akan Doctrine of God, Dr. Danquah clearly, in the name of the West African, rejects some of the most central concepts of Christian religion. Sin and remission of sin are tossed out of the window. Original sin is flatly rejected. The notion that, because two remote ancestors had sexual relations and bore a child, there was imposed upon all mankind a threat of suffering, is, to the African mind, simply ridiculous. And that one can only be saved through God’s grace from this “sin” is something that the African cannot conceive. (He may pay lip service to such in the face of white Christians, but in his heart he knows that it is not true.) That the world is “worldly,” sinful, a place to abhor, is a joke to the African mentality. And that one must belong to a certain church in order to be saved merits a smile from black lips.

  The Akan believe that one comes into the world to try to perfect his soul, and, failing one try, he returns again and again until his soul is ready to join that of the universal. Closer and closer does Dr. Danquah approach the linking of man and God until finally, through incarnation, he sees a blending. On page 95 of The Akan Doctrine of God, he states: “…we have a superman born, but not born as a superman by his parents, but because, and in virtue, of his own previous achievement in a previous incarnation…he may have lived in that same community in his previous life, or he may have chosen or been assigned that community for his present essay in life, believing that a new country, a new environment, lacking in some of the opportunities, and some, possibly, of the resistances of his previous life or community, may afford him just that beneficial advantage and accommodation for actualizing his soul for an accelerated progress towards the good…” And when a man overcomes great odds, distinguishes himself, “that superior nature shines through the superman, as if a god had revealed himself in him…”

  The religion of the Akan is not primitive; it is simply terrifying. And even Dr. Danquah seems to feel that what he claims for the African is a little too tall, for he modestly asserts (page 116): “I do not, of course, recommend to modern European thought to follow the Akan and worship this mystery that explains why any man, at his choice, has it in him to become a god or a beast.”

  Death does not round off life; it is not the end; it complements life. Dr. Danquah’s theories of death are expanded (page 156): “To the Akan, therefore, death is less than a negation of life…It is but an instrument of the higher consummation, a planting or fruition of it.” And then Dr. Danquah gives philosophical dignity to the African mood about death (page 160): “Death, therefore, is not a natural thing. Basically, there is no reason why any man, any being, should die….”

  The door is now wide open for any man to become suspicious when death strikes a loved one; the cause of death seems inexplicable, due either to witchcraft or poison. Dr. Danquah spells it
out clearly: “Deep down in the natural being of man there appears to be an instinct that man is not a dying animal, that he was not made to die, and that he has that in him which ought to keep permanently his vital function working interminably.”

  I come up for air, to take a deep breath….

  These are the broad religious propositions underlying the beliefs of the Akan people of the Gold Coast.

  Twenty-Seven

  I at once, of course, bent my efforts to meet this man. I had the good luck to see him a few days later at a great formal gathering, and, alas, it was to an Englishman that I had to appeal for an introduction to him. And, uninhibited, I told him:

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “What about?” he asked me.

  “About your ideas about the people of the Gold Coast.”

  “What do you want to ask me?” He was equally direct.

  “I’d like to know why you hold such views,” I said. “Why are you with the opposition? What are you really trying to do? What is this business of the African being so different?”

  “How long have you been in Africa?” he asked me.

  “About two months,” I said.

  “Stay longer and you’ll feel your race,” he told me.

  “What?”

  “You’ll feel it,” he assured me. “It’ll all come back to you.”

  “What’ll come back?”

  “The knowledge of your race.” He was explicit.

  I liked the man, but not as a Negro or African; I liked his directness, his willingness to be open. Yet, I knew that I’d never feel an identification with Africans on a “racial” basis.

  “I doubt that,” I said softly.

  “What specifically do you want to ask me?”

  “What’s going to happen here? I’m trying to figure it out. You have lived here; you are African. Can this last? Why are the masses following Nkrumah? He talks a language that they have no background to understand, except his campaign for national liberation. Now, you talk about their religion, the religion they live each day. Why do the masses follow Nkrumah and not you?”