Black Power

by Richard Wright

  The impulse to organize for economic betterment has thrown up a multitude of occupational organizations whose membership is composed of fish sellers, carpenters, shoemakers, chauffeurs, seamen, sugar sellers, cooks, stewards, gold-and silversmiths…. (Busia’s Social Survey Sekondi-Takoradi). It seems that these organizational efforts are really an attempt to fill the emotional void in their lives left by their former tribal identification. The African, even when he comes to the city, hangs onto his feeling about death for a while; hence, large funerals are a much desired end to one’s life. Dr. Busia reports that two recent funerals in the city cost £85 14s. 10d., and £87 12s., respectively. Items for these funeral celebrations included: whiskey, beer, mineral water, palm wine, gin, food, a silk shroud for the corpse, etc.

  Upon my arrival I ordered Kojo to drive me around so that I could get the “feel” of the city. Riding through what seemed a respectable quarter, I heard the yelling of men, women, and children.

  “Find the place where that noise is, Kojo,” I said.

  “Where they act wild, Massa?”

  “Yes.”

  The car turned and drove into a crowded compound. I got out and stood stockstill, unable to believe my eyes. Though the streets were paved and the houses were made of cement, I was witnessing the wildest funeral I’d yet seen…. There was an unpainted coffin in the background, near a veranda, resting on the bare red earth. Around this coffin about twenty men were running and sweating and panting and jabbering furiously. Their eyes were smeared with some black substance and their mouths were dabbed with red. Crisscrossing their foreheads were white strings of cowrie shells, cutting deep into the flesh. In each right fist was a long, evil-looking knife. They were naked to the waist and a grass skirt covered their buttocks. Around and around in a circle they went, chanting; but, at some signal, they would all halt, crowd about the coffin, pointing to it, stamping their feet; they puffed their cheeks and swung their heads from side to side with intense passion. Then they would resume their running in a circle….

  A woman, presumably the dead man’s wife, went to the coffin and pointed to each nail. Strangely, the nails had not been driven home; it was as though they were expecting the dead man to push aside the lid, rise, and live again. Then the woman knelt and placed a small bottle of clear liquid at the head of the coffin.

  To one side was a row of men beating drums, blowing horns, and brandishing sticks. Some people were prancing, others dancing, while the onlookers made wild and meaningless grimaces with their faces. I jumped; several muskets had gone off in back of me. I took out my camera and focused. A painted man came running to me.

  “You take no picture!” he said, turning hurriedly away.

  But another man yelled:

  “No; no…. Stay here! We want you take picture!”

  I stopped. I explained that I was an American, that I wanted somebody to explain the meaning of the funeral rite to me. I waited while they consulted among themselves. Finally they said that I could take two pictures. But, as I tried to focus my camera, the first wild man who had objected rushed forward, waving that awful knife….

  “Take no picture! I kill you!” he screamed.

  The others caught him and held him. I stood, undecided.

  “You work for British!” the wild man yelled.

  “I’m an American!” I yelled back.

  “You lie! You work for British!”

  “I’m an American!” I screamed, hoping that the crowd would sympathize with me.

  But the crowd looked on with detached curiosity and I knew that they would not have moved a finger if that crazy man had got ever so close to me with that knife. I started backing discreetly off.

  “Naw; don’t go—Stay and take pictures!” another man said.

  I thought hard. People who carry on in this manner over a dead man’s body might just as well get the idea into their poetic heads that I was some kind of a ghost, or a prospective sacrificial victim. One flick of one of those monstrous knives would yank me straight into the other world. I managed two more shots with the camera, but my sweaty hands were trembling. The wild man was struggling to get free from his pals.

  “He be drunk, Massa,” Kojo warningly whispered to me.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I turned and started toward the car, almost colliding with a tall, handsome woman.

  “Take me,” she said.

  “Hunh?”

  “Take me,” she said again, putting her hands on her hips.

  I got out my camera; I’d take a shot of her just to show this wild and mean-tempered crowd that I was a sport, a well-meaning sort of fellow….

  “No, no,” the woman said, blocking my lens with her hand. “Take me, me,” she repeated.

  I blinked. Then I understood. She was selling and she thought that I would buy.

  “Nuts,” I said, whirling and making for the car.

  The crowd guffawed. The painted men were still rushing in circles about the coffin. I got into the car, slammed the door and locked it. The “take me” woman was smiling invitingly.

  “Let’s get away from here, Kojo,” I said.

  A fairly well-dressed man came to the door of the car and tapped on the window glass. Cautiously, I lowered the window an inch.

  “You’d better go,” he said.

  “I’m going,” I said. “But what in God’s name are they doing?”

  “They’re trying to frighten away the dead man’s spirit,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, rolling the window up again, tight.

  The motor roared; the car pulled off and I felt better. I lay back and closed my eyes and tried to relax. I don’t know if those painted men with their long knives were successful in scaring away the dead man’s spirit or not; all I know is that they sure scared the hell out of me…. Next day at noon I told Kojo to drive nonstop to Accra.

  Forty-Three

  I cast my accounts and found that I was near the end of my pounds. Since the 4th of June I’d been reacting to the reality of Gold Coast life every waking hour.

  Through a travel agency I booked passage for Liverpool for the 2nd of September, which gave a few days’ breathing spell and allowed me time to visit the forts and castles on the way back to the port of Takoradi.

  In response to an advertisement I had inserted in a local newspaper asking to buy an out-of-print book, R. S. Rattray’s Ashanti, I received a neatly written reply informing me that the book was to be had; and, at once, I set about locating the gentleman who held the book I so urgently wanted. His address was in care of an educational institution; but, when I applied there, I was told that:

  “This gentleman comes here for his mail sometimes, but we don’t know him.”

  “You receive his mail and don’t know him?”

  “We do that for many people, sir,” a mild black man told me. “You see, many people have no fixed place of abode.”

  “But I thought that that only applied to juvenile delinquents—”

  “Oh, no, sir. Many respectable people have no work and, consequently, no home.”

  “How can I locate a man with no fixed place of abode?”

  “You can’t, sir. You’ll have to wait. He’ll show up.”

  “But I need him urgently.”

  “Why do you need him urgently?”

  “He has a rare book for sale. I want to buy that book.”

  “Oh, just a book, sir?” he asked, surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can’t help you, sir,” he said.

  I left my address, which was a post-office box number, with the official and told him to tell the man possessing the book that I wanted to see him at once. A few days later I got a note asking me to telephone a certain number; I did. It was my man with the rare book. I instructed him to meet me in a bar.

  He came wearing a dirty native cloth, holding an oblong, flat package wrapped in frayed newspaper under his arm. It was the rare book. I’d thought that maybe a thin, hungry-looking
professor would have come; I hadn’t expected this rather rough-looking fellow…. I bought the book, then asked him:

  “Haven’t you got an address?”

  “No, sar.”

  “Where do you sleep at night?”

  “I got a big family, sar.”

  “Where does your family live?”

  “All along the coast, sar.”

  “Your family, your clan, or your tribe?”

  “My family, sar. I’ve many brothers—”

  “Blood brothers?”

  “Yes, sar.”

  “Are these brothers sons of your mother?”

  “Not quite, sar, you see…. But men are brothers to me, sar, blood brothers.”

  “What’s your tribe?”

  “Ashanti, sar.”

  “And your blood brothers are Ashanti men?”

  “Yes, sar. We know and help each other, sar.”

  “But, why?”

  “Because we are brothers, sar.”

  “But how did you get to be brothers?”

  “We grew up together, sar.”

  The men with whom he had shared life were his brothers; men of the same generation were brothers. They knew a look and feel of the world that other men of other generations did not know. I watched him stuff the money somewhere under his dirty cloth, pull on his battered hat, and walk out. A man with no address? A nomad…. I regretted that I had not had time to talk with him…. And he hadn’t seemed worried. He had brothers, not the sons of his mother, but men to whom he felt a blood relationship, brothers who fed him when he was hungry, let him sleep when he was tired, consoled him when he was sad…. He had a large “family” that stretched for miles and miles…. I tried to visualize it and I could not….

  Forty-Four

  To think about Africa is to think about man’s naïve attempt to understand and manipulate the universe of life in terms of magical religion. Africa, until now, was religious. Africans hold their lives as being sacred. And it is ironical that the men of Europe who plundered this continent for four hundred years did it in the name of religion! It was religion against religion. That is the only manner in which the insane thirst for gold and slaves could possibly have felt itself justified. The white masters of Africa were and are remarkably akin, emotionally and spiritually, to their black slaves.

  The African conception of life is neither evil nor criminal; it is simply pitiably human. His conception of the state is symbolically derived from his love and reverence for the family. The state as well as the universe are symbolically conceived of in a way that is but a sweeping projection of his concept of and feeling for the family. To understand the Akan idea (and it’s a pretentious, inordinately vain one!) of the state, one has to unite two distinctly different ideas: the family and the universe.

  The African does not distinguish absolutely between good and evil. No matter how malignant he thought some of the “spirits” of the universe were, he never succumbed to feeling that the world as a whole was evil. Maybe he has more than paid for that mistake, a mistake that was squarely on the side of the angels.

  It was only when adversity drove him to feel evil that he felt it, and the white men of Europe contributed more than their fair share to that psychological process by their wars and oppression. One would have thought that Christian Europe, discovering people serving God in an Old Testament style, would have been deeply mindful of the fact that only a nuance separated their religious beliefs from those of the African. Compassion could have served here better than scorn or bungling uplift….

  The state is owned by a female king, just as a child is regarded as being owned by its mother; the state is ruled by a male king, just as a family is headed and its affairs managed by a father. Hence, female kings are founders of states, the “mother” of everybody in the state; the female companion of the king is called queen mother, though she is not actually the mother of the king at all; she is either his sister or some other worthy female.

  The symbolic nature of these relationships have been rather well worked out in a book entitled The Sacred State of the Akan, by Eva L. R. Meyerowitz (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). Though some Ashanti intellectuals sneer at what this book has to say, it does fill a void when one tries to explain what meets the eye in the Gold Coast. Thus, to the queen mother the emblem of the spiral, the sign of birth and motherhood, has been assigned. The female king is also considered as the daughter of the moon, for the moon is regarded as having given birth to the sun. The sun is then the king and the moon the queen…. Now, I don’t believe any of this, but I see nothing barbarous in it.

  The moon (that is, the sense of woman) created the universe and in that universe are seven aerial bodies—the Moon, the Sun, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Consequently, any state or universe that wants to rule must have seven parts…. The universe is regarded as being a mother and the basic origin of all things, families as well as solar systems. A woman’s giving birth, her menstrual period, her moodiness and irrationality—all of this tended to envelop women in an atmosphere of general awe, justifying the Akan mind in projecting out upon her a contradictory and dubious mixture of honor, fear, worship, and loathing.

  The moon, being the color of silver at times, made them feel that the mother must be symbolized by silver; and the sun, being yellow, made them think that the man was symbolized by gold. When a queen died in the old days, silver dust was stuffed into all the opening of her corpse: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, anus, vagina. And when a king died, gold dust was packed into his eye-sockets, etc.

  These primal symbols, derived from the reality of mother and father, female kings and male kings, created many of the Akan details of life. The female kings introduced lamps, codes for women and girls, laws governing sexual offenses, etc., and the male kings and his advisors, in the name of their ancestors, elaborated laws and rules for the state, war, trade, etc.

  The Akan people believed these poetic conceptions, the only conceptions available to them. Blood relations were replaced by mystical ones which were believed to be based upon “blood.” In this manner came about the matrilineal conception of descent and inheritance. It was an intuitive grasp of life dictated by endemic wisdom, tracing relations between objects that really had no relations, but establishing such relations by similarity, proximity, succession, etc. I still do not believe a single word of all of this, yet I do not endorse the killing of a single flea if that flea happened to believe it. I cannot say that imperialism is right because it blasted the lives of people holding such notions….

  The king is the son of the sun, and is, thus, sacred. The king’s greatest dangers are death and unclean women in their menses; hence, the king’s food must always be cooked by men; if a menstruating woman touches a king, rites of purification and sacrifices must be made. The king wears sandals to keep his feet out of touch with the earth which contains the countless bodies of the dead.

  Since he partakes of the divine, the king never really dies; his soul becomes a part of that in which it resided before it was born, that is, the sun; and that “blood” part of him becomes an ancestral spirit which can, with proper ritual, words, and sacrifices, be evoked to enter those things which were once the intimate possessions of the king. Indeed, these spirits are conceived of as being capable of eating and drinking. All of which explains libation pouring, etc.

  The corpse of the king in the old days was allowed to decompose under ritualized conditions. It was placed in a coffin which had holes in its bottom and then the coffin was set over a pit; when the body fluids had all dripped out, the remainder—the sodden bones—was taken from the coffin and scraped, dried, oiled, and the skeleton was strung together, bone by bone, with thread spun of gold. These skeletons were then wrapped in costly cloths and taken to Bantama where they were jealously guarded. A stranger intruding into such a place would be instantly slain….

  All of this seems bizarre to me; I can’t conceive of myself ever believing any of it; but, still, I don’t agree that people
who do believe in such ought to be declared biologically inferior!

  It is thought that forty days after the death of a king, his soul reaches heaven or the African counterpart of such a place; and a great deal of joy is evinced at that period by the general populace.

  The Akan, acting upon the division of the sexes, erected two corresponding attitudes to denote them: ntoro implies the male principle of life, and abusua the female principle. Ntoro is the semen of the male and it is believed to possess the power of bestowing spiritual qualities of a male sort. Abusua is the blood of the woman and it is transmitted to the offspring, and, it is believed, it is only the woman, in conception and birth, who transmits blood and all of its magical qualities to the child. This is the erroneous conception that buttresses the matrilineal descent and inheritance, and the practice of exogamy to some degree in some clans of the Gold Coast.

  The ntoro outlook actuated the impulse to create armies, to wage war, etc.; the abusua outlook prompted the religous role of woman. Both outlooks, hedged about with numberless taboos, account for the sexual segregation that cleaves African society in twain. Out of ntoro and abusua have come a multitude of gods and rituals and ceremonies, the dreaded apex of which is human sacrifice. For example, from ntoro, meaning semen, comes a deep and mystical regard for water, lakes, lagoons, rivers, etc. From abusua springs the conviction that blood, menstrual and otherwise, possesses powers allied to the hidden energies of the universe. With the fiery sun and silver moon as an eternal background, gold and silver assumed powerful meanings. Throughout Akan society emotional values are attached to these colors and projected onto objects, natural or fabricated, having those colors or some shades of them. Kola nuts, being red (like blood or gold), occupy a higher place of esteem than just ordinary nuts; brass, resembling gold, is used to decorate state chairs if gold itself is not obtainable. This is why Africans regarded the worthless trinkets of the Europeans with such delight. It wasn’t simple-mindedness that made them feel that the beads were something for which one exchanged gold. It was religion….