“Is this widely known?”
“It’s talked about here and abroad.”
“But how could they risk their drive toward self-government with such petty thieving?”
“Well, for one thing, they’re cynical,” he explained. “They’ve watched the British grab and conquer, so they’ve grown to think that anything that you can get away with is right. And, strangely, tribal customs encourage such attitudes. If one wants a favor, one gives someone something. They deal that way even with their dead….
“But the African thief is not nearly as clever as his European counterpart. The African is still dealing in pennies. What is really bad about it is that the African can’t be made to feel that his stealing is wrong; you can make him cautious, but not repentant. His being conquered and plundered are the two central facts of his life. He feels that he’s an amateur in these matters; after all, he’s never grabbed a country of four million people and milked them for his benefit for over a century….”
Wherever I probed in the Gold Coast I found this sense of having been violated by a stronger power, and that the actions of that stronger power proved that might made right…. And too there was always this question: Can we trust that stronger power to teach us? Since so many of the moves of Europeans have been tricky, must not all of their moves be tricky…?
This distrust manifested itself in a novel manner in Elmina, in 1953, when the local authorities told the people that they were going to “give” them “free” education, good roads, etc. The people agreed quite readily to accept these gifts. But when they learned that they had to pay an increase in taxes for them, they felt that they had been tricked! They were being asked to pay for what had been promised as “free,” as a gift.
Outraged, they massed and moved on Elmina Castle to protest. The British official in charge, serving under a black cabinet, ordered them to disperse. They refused and answered with a shot that killed the white official. The police returned the fire and several natives lay dead…. The rest of the mob was driven off with rifle butts.
A rather peculiar economic structure has served to blunt the sense of the Gold Coast population to the realities of modern industrial life. Out of a population of 4,500,000 (1952 census), there are roughly about 1,500,000 able-bodied males of working age. Yet, the total number of actual wage earners number but 250,000. There are about 1,000,000 petty traders and farmers. Out of the 250,000 wage earners, 93,000 work for the central government, which makes government the most thriving industry in the nation. There are about 40,000 employed in mining gold, diamonds, manganese, bauxite, etc. The strength of the army is roughly 10,000. The United Africa Company employs nearly 6,000.
Most of the menial labor is done by non-Gold Coast Africans. The Krus from Liberia move the night soil; the Nigerians work in personal services. In Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi there is a fairly large middle class composed of teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. It’s estimated that about 200,000 migrants from French territories come each year to work in the mines, to help harvest the huge cocoa crop, and, once they have earned the amount of money that they have their hearts set on—enough to buy a wife or a cow—they return to their native haunts. Next year another and almost entirely new flood of migrants come to take the place of the old wave…. This almost 100 per cent turnover does not, of course, make for efficiency in modern industry. The lessons learned last year are washed down the drain of tribal life….
Capitalism has to buck a strange set of conditions in the Gold Coast. Besides the land being owned by the dead and the widespread distrust of outsiders, there is the jungle in which a man can snatch a living straight from nature herself. If you drive an Akan at a pace that he thinks is too hard, he’ll drop his work and head for the “bush” where he can live, maybe not as well as he could on a monthly wage, but he’ll be living just the same!
In the south, in the Colony area which holds the Ga and the Fanti tribes, one finds many Western attitudes, a high rate of literacy, etc. These people have been in contact with Europe for centuries. The Northern Territories, mostly Mohammedan, contain the most backward elements of the population, though they number more than a million. To the north is grim poverty, nakedness….
The most important native industry is cocoa farming, which accounts for the bulk of the nation’s income. Cocoa was introduced into the country in 1879 by a Gold Coast African returning from the islands of Fernando Po and San Thomé. Beginning with an export of eighty pounds of cocoa in 1891, the Gold Coast today supplies a third of the world’s demand. In 1935 there were 950,000 acres under cultivation; cocoa farming gives employment in all to some 195,000 people, including labor communally derived from African family groups. If the cocoa industry should fail, the nation’s attempt to rise out of its tribalism would be strangled. Farmers, therefore, are today battling desperately to save the industry from a blight called swollen shoot, a disease which reduces the yield of trees and finally kills them. In 1944 the disease had spread over such a large area of the country that it was feared that the industry would be wiped out. The government called in scientists who discovered that swollen shoot was caused by a virus which was being spread by mealybugs traveling from tree to tree, drinking the sap.
The only method found so far to check the growth of this disease is to cut out the infected trees, a method which aroused the opposition of the semi-literate farmers and caused a nationwide political uproar. But it was found that by controlled methods of cutting out infected trees over an eleven-year period, only a loss of about 7 per cent of the trees was sustained.
The government is now seeking a method of registering workingmen, providing them with identity cards, taking their fingerprints, etc. At first the tribal-minded suspected a white man’s trick in this attempt to introduce standards of efficiency and classification of trades; they felt that the government was about to conscript them into a new war and they would not co-operate. But, as time elapsed, they saw the advantage of being identified; from tribal nonidentity, the working masses are now moving slowly toward personal identity, individuality, and responsibility.
An amusing tribal habit came to light in the mines of Takoradi, Kumasi, and adjacent regions. The clan spirit prevailing among the workers made them share and share alike in all details of life. Thus, if a boy felt that he didn’t want to go to work one morning, he asked his tribal brother to work in his stead, telling his pal to use his name. The European bosses didn’t know one African from another; all blacks looked alike to them. This widespread system of masquerading was not employed to cheat; its aim was simply to rest and while away the hours. And the boy substituting for his loafing comrade would not know how to do the work properly….
One of the most serious employment problems in the country concerns the illegal recruitment of labor, a practice which constitutes a hangover from the slavery that was once widely (and to some extent, still is) exemplified in the institutions of the Akan. A loose sort of trade in human beings still goes on; it’s not as blatant as in the old days, but it’s serious enough to make trouble. This illegal recruitment is so skilfully organized along clannish lines that it’s well-nigh impossible, so far, for the government to stamp it out.
At most of the northern borders, beginning with autumn, are unofficial labor agents with trucks, waiting to intercept the half-famished migrant who longs for food and work. These labor agents “buy” these hapless tribesmen by promising them food and lodging for as long as they remain under the tutelage of their “buyers.” The agents finally “sell” the migrant to a cocoa farmer, for, say eight pounds. If the migrant does not like the work, he runs off, though the farmers watch these migrants most carefully. If a migrant succeeds in escaping, the farmer has to “buy” another migrant. In some remote districts there are migrants who have been with cocoa farmers so long that they do not know where to go; in a land of tight clannishness where everybody is related to somebody, these migrants feel that they do not belong to anybody; they become resigned and quite wi
lling to work indefinitely for their keep.
There is an obscure but potent psychological element abetting slavery; the Akan has a terror of his family line becoming extinct, which means, in terms of his religion, that an ancestor’s desire to return to the world through a reincarnation of the family blood stream would be impossible…. Hence, slaves occupy a strange and privileged relationship with African families. The offspring of masters and slaves are considered as a legitimate part of the family. If the family line is threatened with extinction, a slave can and has been elevated to the head of the family, enjoined to keep the property intact, to pass on the heritage to succeeding generations.
There are factors in the attitudes and habits of African workers that make them rather inefficient from a Western point of view. Conditioning, stemming not from a racial, but from a cultural background makes them feel that it is not necessary to measure up sharply to certain standards of performance. This does not mean that the African is lazy; he can work, can extend himself as much as any man when he wants to, but his grasp of the world is as yet too poetic and he is reluctant to pant and sweat to earn a living, especially if the work involves digging gold out of the soil of his own earth for Europeans!
African capitalism is practically nonexistent; it seems that the African possesses little or no desire to launch ambitious financial schemes. He distrusts long-range plans; he is the most materialistic of men, wanting his share now, cash on the line. He is a close and practical dealer in small and petty trading for a quick turnover. Many Africans do not trust banks; life insurance is rare among them. But when they feel that they are working or fighting for themselves, there is no limit to their exertions….
Forty
I must plead guilty to a cynical though cautious attraction to these preposterous chiefs, their outlandish regalia, their formal manners, the godlike positions that they have usurped, their pretensions to infallibility, their generosity, their engaging and suspicious attitudes, their courtliness, and their thirst for blood and alcohol and women and food…. Their huge umbrellas are foolishly gaudy, their never-ending retinue of human slaves is ridiculous, their claims about their ability to appease the dead is a fraud, their many wives are a seductive farce, the vast lands that they hold in the name of the dead are a waste of property, their justice is barbaric, their interpretations of life are contrary to common sense; yet, withal, they are a human lot, intensely human…. Let no one suppose that the knowledge that they possess about human life was lightly gained. Insights of that order are bought dearly, with streams of blood. As rulers of men, they know something that many twentieth-century rulers do not know, or are afraid to acknowledge.
I’d like to feel that, in the hoary days before the coming of the white man, they were superbly conscious of what they were doing in that fetid jungle. But, really, I cannot…. These chiefs dote too obviously on rituals involving babies, adolescent girls, women, mystery, magic, witchcraft, and war. I’d like to feel that they laughed to themselves when they were alone at how they duped their illiterate followers—or did they? Really, I doubt it. They were as illiterate as their simple-minded victims, so how could they have had that degree of reflective knowledge that would have given them the freedom to laugh? The odds are that they believed in it all.
But that guy (He intrigues me no end!) called Okomfo-Anotchi, that joker who evoked the Golden Stool from the sky on golden chains, that guy who drove that sword into the earth and nobody can pull it out, that chap who climbed that tree and left footprints that can be seen even now—he could not have been completely serious all the way! His deceptions are of so high an order that they imply a cosmic sense of humor. I’d like to regard him as being knowing, humanly cynical, compassionate, and deeply mindful of his people’s future; I’d like to feel that when the time came for him to die, he turned his head discreetly to the wall and tried as hard as he could to repress a sad smile. But I’m afraid that that’s hoping for too much. Most likely, when dying, he picked out ten or twelve people to serve him, to keep him company in the beyond….
These chiefs are and were, one and all, scoundrels, some consciously, some unconsciously, some charmingly, and some with ill-humor. Yet, in a world where cause and effect rested upon a basis of magic, they were needed as mediators between the visible and the invisible. It must not be thought, though, that this propensity toward magic originated solely with the chiefs; it was there before they came; in fact, they were thrown up as functionaries as the result of the widespread belief in magic among the common people.
It is striking that all the cases of attempts at magic or witchcraft I heard about in the Gold Coast dealt with someone’s trying to make something concrete happen. By that token, it would seem to me that the best possible demonstration against this thirst for magic would be, at all costs, an overt and highly publicized increase in material production! The African mind works logically, but, in the confines of tribal life, it works with the wrong material: spirits, bones, blood, funny little dolls and sticks…. The will to accomplish is there without doubt, and what makes verbal admonition so futile against belief in magic is that, on the emotional and psychological plane, magic does work, really accomplishes something in terms of suggestion and hypnosis. Omnipotence of thought makes it possible for the native mind to believe that it is transferring these subjective manipulations to the objective realm….
Kobina Kessie, a young African lawyer, a member of the royal family of Kumasi, has lived long in England and views his country’s culture with an admirable measure of objectivity; yet he assures me that the spell of the Stool House, its dread, gloom, awe, dampness, and silence are really impressive and moving things, that while in the Stool House something actually comes over you so deeply and penetratingly that you feel that you are in the presence of the departed. I do not doubt this. Confront me suddenly with a moldering pile of skulls and bones in a dank and narrow room and I would, too, for moments, feel the same. The tribal African thinks that when he confronts you dramatically with a detached human head, and you fall down in a faint, he has demonstrated some awful spiritual power. He divines that it is the spirit in that decapitated head and not the sheer horror that it evokes in you that makes you back up with a look of revulsion.
My last day in Kumasi dawned sultry and sunless. With Kojo behind the wheel, I set out for one of the big gold mines in Bibiani. Again green jungle loomed to left and right as the car lurched, dipped, slanted, curved, and mounted red laterite roads. Swish hut villages swung by, lost in the green uproar of vegetation. Occasionally we crossed a shaking wooden bridge spanning a small, stagnant river. The journey alternated between miles of cascading rain and miles of dazzling sunshine. Flanking the road were those streams of filing Africans, stripped to the waist, plodding along with gigantic and unbelievable loads floating atop their skulls.
Lying amidst dramatically plunging hills, Bibiani is a large-sized village divided into four main parts: the gold mine, the European community, the African community attached to the gold mine, and a native community rotting away in an unhealthy depression beside a huge, muddy, scummy lagoon. One can see the native section, called Old Town, a veritable city of mud, before arriving; it stretches out, dark brown and yellowish, fading toward the towering jungle. Its one main street is gouged with gullies and lined with stores selling cheaply made European goods. Lifting one’s eyes, one sees the European community nestling high up in the cool hills: white bungalows gleaming among the dark green trees. Before the gold mine came, there was no village here; the natives who huddle here now work for the Europeans in their white homes high up in the hills or in their black mines deep down in the hot earth. Bibiani is a company town….
In this gold mine some hundred Britishers direct a labor force of some four thousand Africans. Each year about half of the workers leave and a new batch take their places. Underground as well as above, so many different tribal dialects are spoken that sometimes as many as three interpreters are needed to know what one native is saying. When
a mine sucks in natives from British and French West Africa, a Tower of Babel is truly created. The task of organizing, for political or industrial purposes, such a variety of tribes is stupendous. Floating fragments are these tribal men when they are compared with the tight, corporate unity of the Europeans above them.
I wandered down the narrow, winding lanes between the mud huts in Old Town and saw the bleakness, poverty, and dirt. Indeed, sanitation, just simple animal cleanliness, is the crying need here. The gullies, cut into the red earth by eroding water, were filled with excrement. Flies buzzed lazily in the still, hot air. Physical disorder was rampant; nothing repeated itself; the only time I saw anything in series was when I came across a batch of flashlights for sale.
I glanced up the hill at the gold mine; I could hear the faint, regular, rhythmic clang of the machinery even down here. In the mud huts life was being lived by the imperious rule of instinct; up there, instinct had been rejected, repressed, and sublimated. I passed a tall, naked black boy; he stared at me, at my camera, my sun helmet; then, seemingly unaware of what he was doing, he squatted and evacuated his bowels upon the porch of his hut, still staring at me…. It was clear that the industrial activity upon that hill, owned or operated by no matter what race, could not exist without the curbing and disciplining of instincts, the ordering of emotion, the control of the reflexes of the body. Again I felt that pathos of distance!
I was told that juju interferes with the working day of the men in the mines to a surprising degree. If a boy has a curse put on him by another boy, the cursed boy becomes terrified and must forthwith leave for his tribe to become purified. No persuasion of his more learned brothers or Europeans is of any avail. When ill, though the company maintains a hospital, many African workers prefer their own native witch doctors, believing their illnesses to be the results of spells cast by someone. They do not trust the “white man’s” medicine. And, often, it is only when they are so ill that they cannot resist that many of the miners in this area will accept modern medical treatment.
Black Power Page 35
