Black Power

by Richard Wright

  There is too an element of vicarious suicide in this psychologically complicated business of human sacrifice. The millions who support this bloody ritual know in their hearts that they too might be killed, know that they have no control over the selection of victims. Terror reigns when a king or a queen mother dies, for anyone might be seized and dispatched for service in the shadowy world of ghosts. So the sense of guilt lingers on, becoming a palpable and public thing that spreads and grows and enshrines itself in ritual and ceremony…. The wild and dark poetry of the human heart!

  I’m in my hotel room. There is still no sun. A faint, humid wind blows in, bringing the smell of rain. Then it begins to drizzle; soon the fuzzy water thickens and slanting strings of rain are drenching the red clay. The city is hushed. The rain slackens, then stops; people emerge and cook and wash and talk. At this moment, in a space twenty yards square, I see: carpentering, nursing of babies, pounding of fufu, a game of checkers, children leaping and jumping ampe, a barber shaving a man, a man repairing a pair of shoes, a public letter writer scribbling a missive for a customer, etc.

  Until now I’d not seen the central market of Kumasi at close range; today I decided to descend into the maelstrom. But, before going, I mounted four floors into a European commercial establishment to get a full view of it. It was a vast masterpiece of disorder sprawling over several acres; it lay in a valley in the center of the city with giant sheds covering most of it; and it was filled with men and women and children and vultures and mud and stagnant water and flies and filth and foul odors. Le Marché aux Puces and Les Halles would be lost here…. Everything is on sale: chickens, sheep, cows, and goats; cheap European goods—razor blades, beds, black iron pots three feet in diameter—nestle side by side with kola nuts, ginger roots, yams, and silk kente cloths for chiefs and kings…. In these teeming warrens shops are social clubs, offices are meeting halls, kitchens are debating leagues, and bedrooms are political headquarters…. This is the Wall Street of the Gold Coast.

  Coming on foot, you are aware of a babble of voices that sounds like torrents of water. Then you pause, assailed by a medley of odors. There is that indescribable African confusion: trucks going to and fro, cooking, bathing, selling, hammering, sewing…. Men and women and children, in all types of dress and degrees of nudity, sat, lay, leaned, sagged, and rested amidst packing boxes, metal barrels, wooden stalls, and on pieces of straw matting. As far as my eye can reach is the African landscape of humanity where everybody did everything at once.

  I paused at a place where native medicines are sold in the form of various gnarled and blackened roots. Kojo, who accompanied me, swore solemnly that these roots could cure almost any ailment; you boiled a root—a special root for each illness—in water and you drank it.

  “Did your family ever give you any medicine like that?” I asked him.

  “Nasa, Massa. Not yet.”

  “Well, if your relatives ever give you anything like that, they’ll be making sacrifices to you, asking you to forgive them.”

  Kojo was startled for a moment, then he burst into a loud and long laugh.

  The market’s most amazing stall contained about two hundred black men, women, and children squatting upon many mounds of charcoal. At first I could not make out what was happening, so generally black did the scene seem; only after a few moments’ gazing did I see that the color of the charcoal was blending so evenly with the black skins as to create an over-all impression of pall. Slowly I distinguished whites of eyes staring at me as I stood gaping….

  One part of the market is set aside for the manufacture of the African toothpick, known locally as chewingstick; it’s about four inches long and is kept in the mouth for hours. Men or women walk, talk, work, or just stare off into space, slowly and carefully worrying the end of the stick with tongue about teeth and gums. It’s publicly done, no shame being attached to cleaning the teeth in this manner. Africans regard it about as we regard chewing gum.

  It rained and cleared; then rained and cleared again; now it looks as though it would rain once more…. It rained.

  The rain stops. Gray clouds hang behind the stately palm trees—clouds that glow with a touch of red and gold and silver, turning dark purple as the light fades….

  The evening arrived for my audience with the King. He received me in his palace, dressed in a native costume, a dark blue silk kente cloth draped gracefully about him. He was accompanied by his secretary and he spoke slowly, in a low voice, and again I had an impression of melancholy from him. He was a sensitive man and knew that his day had gone. I wondered how much of a prisoner he was of the rituals and ceremonies of his people. He was well informed: we talked about England, Russia, France, America, the atom bomb, and American Negroes. I asked him about the chance of the institutions of his people weathering the political storm, and he told me emphatically:

  “I warned my people—I told them that they had to learn!”

  While sitting and talking with him, sipping a glass of orange juice, feeling the essential pathos of his position, I remembered that if this old man, seemingly kind, fatherly, should suddenly have a heart attack and die in my presence, I’d be killed, no doubt, by his executioners and dispatched forthwith into the world beyond…. I’d be commissioned, perhaps, to write his biography for the ancestral ghosts of Ashanti!

  Could that happen? Yes; I’d been assured by prominent Ashanti men that if the King died, every paramount chief of Ashanti would be called upon to send his quota of victims and that those victims would be furnished…. Lawyers, doctors, serious politicians, men of sober judgment told me that they would not venture out upon the streets of Kumasi if the Asantehene or any of his relatives died, or if any of the paramount chiefs died; they were convinced that such foolhardiness on their part would be worth a first-class ticket to the other world.

  “What about the Golden Stool?” I asked him.

  He spoke in a low tone to his secretary who rose and got a mimeographed sheet of paper which he handed to me. I glanced at it and it stated clearly that the stool system was a “political fiction”…He made no attempt whatsoever to cling to the old symbols in terms of their supernatural potency.

  “I’ve told my people to change,” the Asantehene said solemnly. “I’ve told them that they’ve got to change!”

  I was more or less convinced now that he was an unwilling prisoner of the religious traditions of his people! He was a Methodist; he had been a clerk in a mercantile establishment before he’d been elevated to his position. He was no doubt struggling to find ways and means to let his people know that he was not akin to any mystic powers; but could he…?

  He showed me his portrait painted in oil by a European artist; it depicted him dressed in his most formal regalia and the canvas gleamed as it reflected the huge masses of gold about his arms, his head, and his legs. I was told later that, on festive occasions, he was so burdened with gold that he could not move, that he had to have help when he stood or walked.

  “It’s our culture,” he told me softly.

  Yes; that was the way the transition was made; religion turned into culture; holy days turned into holidays….

  After an hour I shook hands with him and left, heading in the car for Berekum, which lay about a hundred miles to the north and west. I was accompanied by a local member of the Gold Coast Information Service who, while we lurched over the laterite road, regaled me with information about the royal family. We were entering the tsetse fly region and the forest jungle was not as thick as it had been about Kumasi; the air was less heavy and I felt almost normal for the first time in many days. The heat was there, all right, making you feel that it would push you down, but a horizon opened out to all sides, relieving me of that hemmed-in feeling that the jungle gives.

  We passed a funeral procession in a tiny village and we stopped to observe. A young man had died and he lay upon a litter wrapped in a brightly colored shroud. The women were chanting a funeral dirge and the men who carried the litter all had unlighted c
igarettes in their mouths, the significance of which I was unable to determine. The procession marched slowly over the bare red earth and the colors of the cloths seemed to blend with the bloody red soil and the green vegetation. A brass band blared out a jazz tune and I was startled to see that some of the chanting girls were shuffling their feet in time to the beat of the music. I mingled with the procession for a while and I could smell palm wine on the breaths of the young men. The sun beat down pitilessly, lighting up the somber procession, outlining it against the sky as it moved off with dragging feet, threading its way past sheep, goats, and chickens. The mourners descended into an eroded gully and began to go downhill. I watched them until the vegetation screened them from view….

  “Tell me,” I asked of the young gentleman of the Gold Coast Information Service, “is there a committee or somebody who decides who is to be sacrificed when a member of the royal family dies?”

  “Oh, no,” he told me. “It’s all arranged in terms of ritual. You see, the executioners go about their work at the silent bidding of the Queen Mother. When death strikes one of the members of the royal family, the theory is that the bones of the sacred dead are not satisfied, that they are restless, that they are hungering for life. Now, the ritual goes something like this. The Queen Mother paints her mouth red, which is the Akan sign of acute sorrow. She then enters the room where the executioners are stationed. She does not speak. She sinks slowly to the floor and weeps. That is all. She does not open her mouth; the rest is understood. She is telling them by her silent sorrow that death has claimed one of royal blood…. Death is hungry and must not be allowed to devour another member of her family. Death must be fed the blood he wants, and quickly, or he would take yet another one…. The weeping of the Queen Mother is the signal for the dreaded executioners to go into action….”

  “Just how many deaths are needed?” I asked.

  “That depends upon who dies,” he told me. “And the exact number is a secret. I’ve heard some say that twelve deaths are needed for a paramount chief. Undoubtedly more are needed for the King himself.”

  The car lurched on. I remembered those Bible verses that my grandmother used to quote (Exodus, 29:20):

  Then thou shalt kill the ram, and take of his blood, and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the great toe of their right foot, and sprinkle the blood upon the altar around about.

  And (Leviticus, 17:11):

  For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

  The voice of the Ashanti joins that of the human race in testifying that the human heart has need of blood. And, in the matter of this peculiar need, there is no difference between the agony of the Ashanti and the Christian. With Christ the human sacrifice is offered up symbolically; you merely have to feel it and not do it. Yet, the compulsion derives from the same burden of fear and guilt, a longing to go down and placate the dark powers of one’s heart. The Ashanti sacrifice human beings; Christians offer up Christ maybe 300,000,000 times a day in the form of the mass…. But the blood that flows from the Cross is imaginary blood, magic blood, make-believe blood, and the blood that flows from the knife of the Ashanti is no less magical, but all too real…. The advantage of the white Westerner is that he found a way of killing and dodging the consequences of it; he found a way of stifling that awful need in a socially acceptable way. The African believes straightforwardly; his heart lacks the artful sophistication of the white man who shrank from the direct demands of the heart and found a substitute. Who is right here: the Ashanti or the Christian? I think that both are lamentably right, terribly childlike, and tragically human. Neither has the inner strength to stand aloof from himself and wonder at his dread; neither distrusts his irrational feelings, feelings as wild as the heaving ocean, as demanding as the sweeping and tearing wind. Neither can resolve not to spill blood to still that churning in him which he does not want….

  Thirty-Nine

  Another sultry morning. The sun cannot be seen, but its heat can be felt through the white mist that overhangs the sky. Scores of black vultures wheel silently over the city, moving their revolving circles from spot to spot on the horizon. Sometimes they are high up and far away, sometimes they are very low, so low that you can see their scaly heads and long, sharp beaks.

  I entered Barclays Bank and took my place in a queue before a teller’s window. Before and behind me were cloth-draped Africans. One man had a bundle wrapped in newspaper; it was filled with pound notes; there must have been hundreds of them and they made a gigantic heap. I looked at him; he was unshaven, barefooted, and wore a tattered cloth. I was never able to tell the wealth or social position of an African by his dress. Had he entered a New York bank, dressed as he was and with such a pile of notes, I’m sure that he would have incited the suspicion of the officials of the establishment.

  I started, hearing a noise behind me. I turned and saw a young African leap into the bank through an opened window. I tensed, thinking that maybe a holdup was about to take place. But he walked smilingly forward and took his place in line. Then another African leaped through the window…. I relaxed. It was no holdup; it was simply some Africans’ way of entering a bank. The door was too far and so they just jumped calmly through the window and went about their business.

  At lunch today I was told that the Gold Coast Government was importing prefabricated wooden houses from Sweden. I said that I didn’t believe that, not with all the huge forests that I’d seen in Ashanti. But a young African volunteered to take me to see the houses.

  We drove to the edge of the city and, amidst a plot overgrown with tall weeds, I saw rows of neat, new wooden houses.

  “Is Swedish wood better than Gold Coast wood?” I asked the young man who had accompanied me.

  “No. Our wood is the best in the world,” he said. “We export it everywhere.”

  I approached the houses and examined them; they seemed well put together, solid, but they were uninhabited.

  “With such an acute housing shortage, why are these houses standing empty?”

  “They cost too much; Africans can’t buy or rent them.”

  “Haven’t you got wood like this in the Gold Coast?”

  “Yes; we have plenty of it.”

  “Then it’s possible that this very wood could have come from the Gold Coast?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, other than cut it in lengths, etc., what did the Swedes do to this wood?”

  “I think that they spat on it,” the young man said, laughing. “All we know is that the government awarded contracts to some Swedes to build these houses for us.”

  “Why wasn’t this work done here in the Gold Coast?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot of whispering about graft,” he said, pulling down the corners of his lips. “Look, I want to show you something else….”

  We drove to the heart of the city, upon a hill, overlooking a race track.

  “See that big white house over there?” he asked me, pointing.

  I saw a vast structure that looked like a hospital surrounded by a high cement wall.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “That’s a home of one of the new members of the black government.”

  “He must be rich,” I said.

  “Well, he wasn’t rich four years ago.”

  “Then how did he get that house? Did he inherit it? And what’s a house like that worth?”

  “Nobody knows how he got that house,” the young man said. “But there’s plenty of speculation…. He didn’t inherit any money. A few years ago he was making two pounds a week as a newspaper reporter. The house cost fifteen thousand pounds….”

  “You seem to be hinting at widespread corruption in politics here.”

  “I’m doing just that.”

  “How does
it work?”

  “It’s done mostly through the awarding of contracts for the building of roads, schools, hospitals, etc.”

  “Good God! And who awards these contracts?”

  “A special board created by the government.”

  “How many members are on that board?”

  “Eight.”

  “How many Africans?”

  “Three.”

  “Ah, then the Africans cannot really be guilty of all this corruption. At least, not alone. Do the Africans and the English work together?”

  “No; the Africans manage to do it alone.”

  “But how’s that possible? They’re outvoted five to three.”

  “It’s complicated and when I explain it to you,” he said, “you’ll have to admit that the African boys are smart. Now, there’s a lot of undercover tension on that board between the Africans and the English. On the surface, you’d think that everything was all right, but it’s not. Each side distrusts the other. Now, let’s say that a hospital is going to be built. This board lets it be known that it will accept bids from firms all over the world to do the job. The bids flow in. Meanwhile, the African boys approach the firms submitting bids and tell each firm that it can have the job for, say, three thousand pounds. Of course, the firm wants the job. It pays.”

  “But the Africans can’t guarantee that a firm will get the job,” I protested. “The white members of the board will outvote them—”

  “That’s all been figured out,” he said. “When the board votes the contract (the African boys don’t care which firm!) to a certain firm, they keep the three thousand pounds from that firm and to the unlucky firms they return all the other batches of three thousand pounds!”