Black Power

by Richard Wright

  That afternoon I watched the elaborate mechanical and chemical processes by which gold was extracted from rock. Endless tons of crushed ore ran over conveyer belts and poured into huge revolving bins which emptied into vast steel drums that whirred and groaned, pulverizing the ore for twenty-four hours a day. From crusher to crusher I followed the ore until finally I saw vats in which the ore had been reduced to the consistency of talcum powder. At last I came to that section where, from a shaking table covered with corduroy, water washed down a trickling stream of golden flakes into a metal pail over which stood, stripped to the waist and barefooted, a black boy keeping track of the wet gold dust. Behind him stood an armed Britisher.

  “You chaps must have a time keeping track of this gold, hunh?” I asked my guide.

  “How did you guess that?” he asked me.

  “Because if I were that boy, I’d swallow that gold if I had a chance,” I told him.

  The guide laughed uneasily.

  “The anxiety we have keeping track of this gold!” he exclaimed. “As soon as we discover one method they use in taking the gold out of here, they’ve got another. Talking about eating gold: now and then we do have to have a man assayed. If the armed man at that table simply sneezed, that boy would swallow a handful of that gold dust…. By swallowing a bit each day and recovering it, he’d make a lot of money. It’s smelly but highly profitable….”

  The white and black men lived in separate worlds; the blacks felt that the white men were powerful interlopers from whom to steal was regarded as “getting even.” Though practically all the African workers were illiterate, they had devised many shrewd schemes of getting the gold out of the mine. Those working at the tables from which gold dust trickled had to present themselves for duty completely nude; the company gave them something to cover their bodies. Despite that, they found ways of taking “their share” of the gold.

  One ingenious method the Africans used in getting the gold out of the mine involved the utilization of rats. The boys would catch rats—the mine was full of them!—and kill them and disembowel them and secrete their corpses in nooks and crannies. While working, they would come across bits of gold, or sometimes they’d dig gold out of the quartz with their penknives—I saw veins of gold as thick as pencils!—and hide it until they had a pile worth getting out. They’d take the dead rat, fill his rotting carcass with gold dust, and toss his reeking body atop a heap of debris to be carted upward and thrown away. Bound by clannish ties, they could work like this with little risk of detection by the British.

  One day a British guard saw such a moldering rat arrive at the surface atop a pile of rubbish. He saw a black boy pick up the dead rat with the tips of his fingers, wrinkle his nose in disgust against the foul odor, and fling the rat away. But this time there was something just a little odd about how the rat fell upon the ground. It landed with a thud and lay completely still…. Despite the repelling scent, the guard went to it and kicked it with his foot. The dead rat did not budge; it was too heavy! Examining the rat, the guard found it stuffed with gold…. It was never known which boys had been involved.

  The most typical story of gold stealing related to a tribal boy working in a department where the gold was cast into bars. One day, after a bar of gold had been cast, the African boy—a model worker who had been employed for many years—walked slowly and boldly up to the counter upon which the golden bar rested, lifted it, and started unhurriedly, confidently toward the door…. For a moment the African guards and the European officials were too stupefied to move. When the boy, clutching the bar of gold, reached the door he was, of course, stopped by an armed guard. What puzzled everybody was that the boy exhibited utmost surprise at being interfered with and, gently, tried to disengage himself from the guard. His lips were observed moving soundlessly; he squinted his eyes; but, when he was shaken sternly, he relaxed and surrendered easily enough.

  Questioned as to what he thought he had been doing, the boy told a pathetic story of a long and futile attempt to learn how to become invisible! For a hundred pounds a witch doctor had told him that, if he followed instructions faithfully, he could become invisible and be able to walk out of the mine with a bar of gold…. Having adhered to the witch doctor’s routine, the boy reached that point where, he thought, by saying a certain combination of weird sounds, he could become unseeable to the naked eye. That was why he had so slowly and calmly lifted the bar of gold, why he had walked with such confidence with it to the door, why he had at first ever so gently tried to disengage himself from the guard, and why he had been seen moving his lips soundlessly—he’d been reciting the magic formula to make himself totally invisible!

  The company has made itself completely self-sufficient, self-contained; it has its own water supply, its own powerhouse, its own schools, churches, movies, hospital—in fact, it is more than a company; it’s a little city. Black life and white life flow daily around each other, not touching, yet generating charged currents of cooperation and hostility. There is no doubt but that the black boys who are working here are learning trades, slowly absorbing the techniques of the Western world. Though the government taxes the mines almost 50 per cent, the wages paid are fantastically low and the profits make it well worthwhile for these British to be here.

  It is not the profits that this company makes that worries me; there is a profound wrong here creating a sense of tension and uneasiness. This black world is reflected in the minds of the white world in a strange and warped way, and the white world is reflected in the minds of the black world in a manner that is just as distorted. In the hearts of both races there rages a silent war of pride, of face-saving, of jealousy; attitudes on both sides tend to become total in their hate or distrust.

  I don’t say that this company ought to be made to leave the Gold Coast; the elaborate methods of industrial chemistry, the vast machine shops that are maintained, the punctuality, the order, the cleanliness—all of these are qualities that the African must learn to master. But can he learn them under conditions whose objective configurations smack of intimidation? Of black against white? Of master against slave?

  I observed orders being given an African; I saw him listen, nod his head to signify that he had understood. Five minutes later the African returned and asked for his instructions again! The first time the African had not been listening; he had been exhibiting what he felt was the necessary degree of servility; he had returned the second time for the actual instructions! The emotional and psychological factors involved in the mere confrontation of the African by his white master is enough to reduce his efficiency and intelligence immeasurably. Europeans will never be able to command the same degree of skill, loyalty, devotion, and intelligence of the Africans that the Africans can command of their own people. Centuries of invasion, war, plunder, indirect methods of exploitation have enthroned themselves in tradition, structuralized themselves in institutions, and kept alive the sense of the conquered and the conquerors.

  Repeatedly Europeans of the Gold Coast told me how amazed they were at the manner in which the black politicians of the Convention People’s Party drove themselves night and day. Naïve attitude! Those politicians were working for themselves and they knew no limit to their devotion save sheer exhaustion. It can be said that the presence of this company getting the gold out of the earth with its complicated machinery is helping the African to understand just what he most needs to learn. I’ve no doubt about it. In the compounds erected by the company for the African workers to live in, there is a visible improvement in local standards of living; but the same cannot be observed in the Africans’ moral attitude…. They know that the company leased the land for a song from their illiterate chiefs. In their hearts they do not respect the British.

  For several days now I’ve been observing, without quite knowing it, a living example of clannishness, its meaning, its merits, and limitations. Kojo, my driver, is a man of the Ga tribe. Whenever we arrived in a village or city, Kojo would disappear at night to seek lodging.
But when we entered Bibiani’s company town, a crisis arose. Kojo approached me, frowning, and a little intimidated.

  “Massa, small complaint,” he said.

  “What’s the matter? You run out of money?”

  “Nasa. Like to find my people, Massa. I need help.”

  “Your people?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Yasa, Massa.”

  “You mean your family?”

  “Yasa, Massa. My brothers and sisters.”

  “I didn’t know you had relatives here.”

  “Nasa, Massa. Not proper, you know. But my tribe—”

  “Oh! But how can I help you?”

  “Massa ask big white man where Ga people live.”

  I got the point. I put the problem up to the officials of the gold mine who quickly located a Ga settlement, and Kojo, smiling and happy, was sent there…. The members of all tribes save that of the Ga were strangers to him; he could not quite trust them and would rather have slept in the car than to have stayed among them. Kojo told me that his “family,” when he appeared suddenly like that, fed him, entertained him, took him around to meet and make friends. If you are a tribal stranger, you seek out your tribe and you are taken care of. If you are a European, you seek the shelter of the European community. But an American Negro is an oddity; he has one foot in both worlds and he pays through the nose for what he gets from each.

  The gold-mining officials informed me that the diet of mostly starch that the African workers eat definitely lowers their productive efficiency. After some astute figuring, the mining bosses felt that they could safely open a cafeteria and sell solid food that made a balanced diet at very cheap prices. They made no bones about the fact that it was to increase their profits that they made this charitable gesture; but, to their chagrin, the pumping of more vitamins into the African did not obtain the sought-for aim. The mining officials had failed to reckon with the temperament of the swarms of “mammies” who, with calabashes and boxes atop their heads, waited at the gates of the mine to sell the traditional fufu and kenke to the workers. When the miners began taking their meals in the company cafeteria, they naturally ceased patronizing the “mammies” who forthwith called a meeting and passed a resolution to demand that each wife exact a promise from her husband not to eat in the cafeteria! The cafeteria closed down and the mining officials are now trying to devise other means of eradicating fufu and kenke from the miners’ diet, in short, some subtler means of getting more vitamins into the workers so that the production of gold bars can be increased!

  Forty-One

  On a sunless, sultry morning I struck out for Samreboi, the world’s largest plywood and timber mill, built by the United Africa Company in 1945. I was entering an area where rain had not fallen in two weeks and red dust coated the leaves of the trees and turned them a dull, brownish tint, making the jungle green seem even more dreamlike, unreal. It was around three o’clock in the afternoon when the jungle terminated abruptly and before me lay a vision of paved streets, electric-light poles, painted houses, stores…. I’d arrived in Samreboi.

  “Kojo, drive around a bit. I want to see what it looks like,” I said.

  “Yasa, Massa.”

  It was a vast industrial plant; everything had a look of newness. The roads had been but recently cut through hills; steel structures reared toward the misty sky; paint gleamed on wooden doorways; European cars were parked row upon row; and even the Africans I saw walked with a quicker stride.

  We came to a wooden bridge and Kojo slowed the car to a stop.

  “Important river, Massa. Tano,” Kojo said.

  “Really?”

  I leaped out of the car. The word “Tano” had evoked in my mind a sense of mystery, of ceremonies of purification, and rituals of sacrifice. This was the most sacred river of all Ashanti and I wanted to see it. But, being a stranger, it looked just like any other river to me. It was about the size of the Seine or the Tiber; I walked to the bank and watched the swift, muddy current and tried to feel what others could have felt about this all too ordinary stream. I felt nothing.

  I later learned that, because of this river, no goats could be kept in this area; they were taboo. Only sheep were allowed to graze and to be sacrificed. A person bringing in a goat would find himself in serious trouble.

  I was the guest of an English couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Y, both of whom rushed themselves with almost frantic anxiety to show me this sprawling industrial town. Interspersed between questions of: “Have you had enough coffee?” or “Is there anything you want?” were questions touching upon politics. Mr. Y was delicate and knew that it was considered bad taste to press such matters, but Mrs. Y waded boldly in where even British officials felt it wise not to tread…. Her attempts to determine if I were a Communist or not almost made me laugh out loud at times.

  “The poor company’s losing so much money, you know,” she told me.

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. They haven’t recovered their initial investment.”

  “I’m sure they will eventually,” I assured her.

  “People do not realize what it takes to build a big plant like this,” she confided in me. “Now, there’s the union talking about higher wages already. But they are being paid more money than they’ve ever had in their lives…. What would they have if we had not come here? Don’t you think we’re fair?”

  “Really, I know nothing about local economic conditions,” I lied.

  “Managers of businesses are human beings, just like anybody else,” she said stoutly.

  “I’m sure of it,” I agreed.

  “I say,” she asked me suddenly. “When you are riding from place to place here in the Gold Coast, do you sit up in the front seat with your chauffeur?”

  “Oh, no. I sit in the back,” I told her as if she had affronted me. “He’s my driver.”

  She’d been trying to determine if I felt that Kojo was as “good” as I was! And in such a transparent manner! She had the queer notion that a Communist would have ridden up in the front seat with his chauffeur! And she felt that if I had been a Communist, I’d have told her that I did!

  “Frankly, are you for or against colonies?” she asked me directly at last.

  “When you put it that way, I don’t know what to say,” I told her.

  After all, I was her guest; she was feeding me three meals a day…. How could I tell the lady that I thought that she ought to be back in England…?

  Though the officials at Samreboi were fluently vocal about how much money they had invested in this gigantic undertaking, how efficient was their medical care, how fair their wage scales, etc., they were always silent about their secret methods of regulating the ceilings of wage rates. A shy, well-spoken black boy had whispered some information to me and I checked its accuracy; it was correct…. There existed an unwritten agreement between the mining industry and the timber industry that each would not exceed certain wage rates paid to workers. In short, wages had been fixed through inter-industrial agreements.

  The company holds a ninety-nine-year lease and it employs some four thousand Africans and about sixty Europeans. In the beginning, in 1945, in trying to establish itself here, the biggest problem faced by the company had been the obtaining of food for the African workers, their kind of food; cocoa yam, cassava, groundnuts, palm oil, corn, and pepper had to be brought in each evening. If this diet was not available, the workers left.

  The tribal workers had to be taught how to use complicated machinery. Formerly, I was told, only Europeans operated the huge saws that sliced the many-tonned mahogany trees and a theory prevailed that Africans could not possibly do such work with precision. But now, they were proud to tell me, the Africans were handling all the machines, though the Africans were not being paid what their European predecessors had been paid!

  This timber concession spreads over an area of a thousand square miles; just what had been given the chiefs in return for this vast tract, I could not learn. The region w
as virgin forest and the jungle was so filled with elephants and leopards that it was not safe to go alone for more than two miles, unless one was prepared to defend one’s life against sudden attack. The loggers, as they penetrated deeper into the jungle, came across scattered human bones, blackened and half buried in a carpet of rotting leaves. These bones were no doubt the remains of people devoured by jungle beasts.

  En route to my British host’s home a woman came yelling and running across a field. She was a European.

  “Hold it a second, won’t you?” Mr. Y asked me.

  I called to Kojo to stop.

  “What’s the trouble?” my host asked the woman.

  “Oh, God, I’m so scared,” the woman whimpered.

  “What happened?”

  “They just killed a big snake in Mr.——’s living room—”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, I’m so frightened, I’m weak,” the woman sighed. “They say that snakes travel in pairs, husband and wife. Now, maybe the husband’ll come back and bite somebody…. Do you think so? I’m scared to go home….”

  Overhearing this, I grew slightly suspicious. Maybe the public-relations department of Samreboi was putting over a “big one” for my benefit. Killing a snake in the living room seemed fantastic to me. I’d see….

  “I’d like to see that snake,” I said.

  “But it’s dead,” my host told me.

  “That makes it perfect,” I said. “Let me get a glimpse of this—”

  “All right.”

  We drove about half a mile and came to a white bungalow. A scared steward came from behind the house.

  “I’d like to see that snake that you killed,” I told him.