Black Power

by Richard Wright

  The moods born of this apprehension of existence gave birth to a high order of simple poetry. Thus, the Earth Goddess Assaase Afua is addressed as follows on the Talking Drums:

  Spirit of Earth, sorrow is yours,

  Spirit of Earth, woe is yours.

  Earth, with its dust,

  Earth, while I am yet alive,

  It is upon you that I put my trust,

  Earth, who receives my body.

  A funeral song goes:

  I am an orphan, and when I recall the death of my

  father, water falls from my eyes upon me.

  When I recall the death of my mother, water from my eyes falls upon me.

  We walk, we walk, O Mother Tano,

  Until now we walk and it will soon be night.

  It is because of the sorrow of death that we walk.

  Before the coming of the white man, matrilineal institutions conferred upon the African woman a special and mystical position. The queen mothers had the right to veto much of the men’s actions. In the event of the death of the chief or king, she, in consultation with advisors, selected the new head of the clan or state…. With the establishment of the religously patrilineal English power, the chiefs were recognized and the women ignored. Institutions were smashed and no new ones were devised to perform their functions. The coming of the white man spelled the doom of the African woman; as Christianity gained a foothold, she became “free” but with far less real power than she had before. It is not without its meaning that the last military effort of the Ashanti was led by a black woman! And this same fact might well account for the great popularity of the Convention People’s Party among the women of the Gold Coast.

  Forty-Five

  I visited Christianborg Castle which was built by the Swedes in 1657 and taken by the Danes in 1659. In 1679 it changed hands again, being bought by the Portuguese from the Danes, and in 1682 was bought from the Portuguese by the Danes. This swift change of ownership reflected the desperate struggles that went on between European powers in the early days of the Gold Coast. The castle was captured by Gold Coast native tribes in 1693 and resold by them to the Danes a year later. In 1850 it was bought by the British….

  It is at present the official residence of the Governor of the Colony, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke. White, vast, standing at the edge of the Atlantic, it dominates the tropic, sandy, palm-treed landscape. As I entered the castle grounds, the armed Northern Territory guards came to attention. I explained that I wanted to look over the castle. Six of them spoke at once:

  “Me, Massa.”

  They were eager because they wanted that inevitable “dash” at the end of the tour. I mounted the broad, white, spick-and-span steps and stood looking out over the rolling sea….

  “The ships that took the slaves to America and the West Indies…Where did they anchor?”

  The guide pointed to the sandy seashore. “Right out there, Massa.”

  “And where were the slaves kept?”

  “Follow me, Massa.”

  I was led down winding steps until I came into a narrow and dank passageway, then into small dark rooms whose only light came through barred windows.

  “Are these the same windows that the slaves looked out of?”

  “The same, Massa.”

  The walls were incredibly thick.

  “Just how thick is that wall?”

  “Fifteen feet, Massa.”

  I was told that the same iron bolts which secured the doors to keep the slaves imprisoned were the ones that my fingers now touched.

  “How did they take the slaves to the ships? Is there a passageway?”

  “Yasa, Massa. Come.”

  He pointed out the route the slaves had taken when they had been led in chains to the waiting ships.

  “It was that simple?” I asked.

  The guard showed his white teeth in a sad grin.

  “Yasa, Massa. Very simple. But it gone now,” he told me.

  “And maybe you’ll be free, really free soon?”

  “We hope, Massa.”

  I looked at the chapel—it was quiet, dim, ready to cast its spell of awe and wonder….

  “Did you ever worship in there?” I asked the guard.

  “No, Massa.”

  “Are you Christian?”

  “I’se Moslem,” he said.

  “And what about the Christian’s God?”

  “He all right, Massa,” the guard said, laughing.

  I “dashed” him a few shillings and left. Outside, I gazed at the grim stone walls. The dramas that once took place in that castle were forever lost. The slaves sickened and despaired and the white men died of yellow fever and malaria…. I tried to picture in my mind a chief, decked out in cowrie shells, leopard skin, golden bracelets, leading a string of black prisoners of war to the castle to be sold…. My mind refused to function.

  A few days later, with Kojo behind the wheel, I set out to see Cape Coast Castle which was built by the Swedes in 1657, captured by the Danes in 1659. Stormed by the local Fetus tribe, it was taken in 1660; in 1662 the English captured it, lost it to the Dutch, and recaptured it from them in 1664. Less impressive than the castle at Christianborg, it nevertheless shows by its moldering gun emplacements what went on in those days. It is now occupied by state officials, the post office, etc. Slaves had been kept here in dungeons, and then marched to the great slave headquarters of the Gold Coast, the Elmina Castle, and thence shipped to the New World.

  I reached Elmina just as the sun was setting and its long red rays lit the awe-inspiring battlements of the castle with a somber but resplendent majesty. It is by far the most impressive castle or fort on the Atlantic shore of the Gold Coast. Built originally by the Portuguese in 1482 with stones prepared in Portugal, it is approached by a drawbridge which, when lifted, foiled any attack from either natives or Europeans in the old days.

  I crossed the vast courtyard and entered the auction room in which countless slaves had been sold. One had to know how to pick a good slave in those days, for slave traders were tricky men. They shaved all the hair off the Africans, oiled their bodies, making the ill look as good as the healthy. I stood in a tiny enclosure which had slits in the wall; it was here that African chiefs would hide themselves while their captives were being bid for by Europeans. The chiefs didn’t want their victims to know who was selling them…. I saw the dungeons where the slaves had been kept—huge, bare rooms with stone floors.

  No one will ever know the number or identity of the black men, women, and children who passed through these walls, but there is no doubt but that the men who dealt in this human flesh waxed rich. Even today the castle bears marks of crumbling luxury; there are marble sills at many of the doorways; there are lofty, spacious rooms which you know at a glance no slaves had ever entered. The mighty guns that still point toward the horizon and the misty landscape must have cost heaps of gold dust; and the mere upkeep of such an establishment must have necessitated a staggering turnover in human flesh each year….

  Some of the walls are thirty feet thick. Towers rise two hundred feet in the air. What spacious dreams! What august faith! How elegantly laid-out the castle is! What bold and plunging lines! What, yes, taste…. King Prempeh I was kept in a large bare room in one of the towers by the British. I stood gazing into that room and wondered what could have passed through his mind…. How he must have prayed to his ancestors for help!

  Rumor among the natives has it that there is a vast treasure trove buried somewhere in the depths of the castle fortress. I don’t think there is; but the native, remembering the horrible tales of what went on within these walls, likes to think that there is gold dust here, thousands of tons of it. If there is any treasure hidden in these vast walls, I’m sure that it has a sheen that outshines gold—a tiny, pear-shaped tear that formed on the cheek of some black woman torn away from her children, a tear that gleams here still, caught in the feeble rays of the dungeon’s light—a shy tear that vanishes at the sound of approaching footst
eps, but reappears when all is quiet, hanging there on that black cheek, unredeemed, unappeased—a tear that was hastily brushed off when her arm was grabbed and she was led toward those narrow, dank steps that guided her to the tunnel that directed her feet to the waiting ship that would bear her across the heaving mist-shrouded Atlantic….

  Dear Kwame Nkrumah:

  My journey’s done. My labors in your vineyard are over. The ship that bears me from Africa’s receding shore holds a heart that fights against those soft, sentimental feelings for the sufferings of our people. The kind of thinking that must be done cannot be done by men whose hearts are swamped with emotion.

  While roaming at random through the compounds, market places, villages, and cities of your country, I felt an odd kind of at-homeness, a solidarity that stemmed not from ties of blood or race, or from my being of African descent, but from the quality of deep hope and suffering embedded in the lives of your people, from the hard facts of oppression that cut across time, space, and culture. I must confess that I, an American Negro, was filled with consternation at what Europe had done to this Africa….

  Yet, as grim as the picture is, its grimness is somewhat relieved by the fact that African conditions are not wholly unique. The suffering that your people bear has been borne triumphantly before, and your fellow countrymen have shared that burdensome experience of having had their destinies dictated by alien powers, from above, an experience that has knit together so many of the world’s millions in a common consciousness, a common cause.

  Kwame, let me put it bluntly: Western lay and academic circles utter many a hard saying against Africa. In defending their subjugation of Africa, they contend that Africa has no culture, no history, no background, etc. I’m not impressed by these gentlemen, lay or academic. In matters of history they have been more often wrong than right, and even when they have been right, it has been more by accident than design, or they have been right only after facts have already been so clearly established that not even a fool could go wrong.

  I found only one intangible but vitally important element in the heritage of tribal culture that militated against cohesiveness of action: African culture has not developed the personalities of the people to a degree that their egos are stout, hard, sharply defined; there is too much cloudiness in the African’s mentality, a kind of sodden vagueness that makes for lack of confidence, an absence of focus that renders that mentality incapable of grasping the workaday world. And until confidence is established at the center of African personality, until there is an inner reorganization of that personality, there can be no question of marching from the tribal order to the twentieth century…. At the moment, this subjective task is more important than economics!

  Manifestly, as in all such situations, the commencement of the injection of this confidence must come from without, but it cannot and will not come from the West. (Let’s hope I’m wrong about that!)

  Have no illusions regarding Western attitudes. Westerners, high and low, feel that their codes, ideals, and conceptions of humanity do not apply to black men. If until today Africa was static, it was because Europeans deliberately wanted to keep her that way. They do not even treat the question of Africa’s redemption seriously; to them it is a source of amusement; and those few Europeans who do manage to become serious about Africa are more often prompted by psychological reasons than anything else. The greatest millstone about the neck of Africa for the past three hundred years has been the psychologically crippled white seeking his own perverse personal salvation….

  Against this background one refrain echoes again and again in my mind: You must be hard! While in Africa one question kept hammering at me: Do the Africans possess the necessary hardness for the task ahead?

  If the path that you and your people had to tread were an old and tried one, one worn somewhat smooth by the past trampings of many people; had Europe, during the past centuries, dealt with Africans differently, had they laid the foundations of the West so securely that the Africans could now hold Western values as basic assumptions—had all this happened, the question of “hardness” would not have presented itself to me. (I know that some Europeans are going to say: “Ah, look, a black man advocates stern measures for Africa! Didn’t we tell you that they needed such as that?”) But Kwame, the truth is that nothing could have been more brutally horrible than the “slow and sound” educational development that turned into a kind of teasing torture, which Europe has imposed so profitably upon Africa since the fifteenth century….

  The accomplishment of this change in the African attitude would be difficult under the best of circumstances; but to attain that goal in an Africa beset with a gummy tribalism presents a formidable problem: the psychological legacy of imperialism that lingers on represents the antithesis of the desired end; unlike the situations attending the eruptions of the masses in Russia, China, and India, you do not have the Western-educated Africans with you; in terms of mechanization, you must start from scratch; you have a populace ridden with a 90 per cent illiteracy; communication and transportation are poor….

  Balancing these drawbacks are some favorable features: West Africa, thanks to climate, is predominantly black! You can pour a libation to the nameless powers that there are no white settlers to be driven out, no knotty land problem to be solved by knocking together the heads of a landed black bourgeoisie. And, though the cultural traditions of the people have been shattered by European business and religous interests, they were so negatively shattered that the hunger to create a Weltanschauung is still there, virginal and unimpaired.

  If, amidst such conditions, you elect, at this late date in world’s history, to follow the paths of social and political evolution such as characterize the history of the institutions of the Western powers, your progress will go at a snail’s pace and both of your flanks will be constantly exposed and threatened.

  On the one hand, just as you organized against the British, so will other Nkrumahs organize against you. What Nkrumah has done, other Nkrumahs can do. You have made promises to the masses; in your heart of hearts I know that you wish hotly to keep those promises, for you are sincere…. But suppose the Communists outbid you? Suppose a sullen mood sets in? Would not that give the Communists their opportunity?

  On the other hand, I cannot, as a man of African descent brought up in the West, recommend with good faith the agitated doctrines and promises of the hard-faced men of the West. Kwame, until they have set their own houses in order with their own restless populations, until they have solved their racial and economic problems, they can never—no matter what they may say to you at any given moment!—deal honestly with you. Given the opportunity, they’ll pounce at any time upon Africa to solve their own hard-pressing social and political problems, just as you well know that they have pounced in the past. And, also, I’m convinced that the cultural conditioning of the Africans will make it difficult for them to adjust quickly to values that are solely Western, values that have mocked and shamed them so much in the past, values that go against the grain of so much in the African heart…. After all, you have already been down that road.

  Your safety, your security lie in plunging full speed ahead!

  But, how? What methods? Means? What instrumentalities? Ay, there’s the rub…. The neurotically fluttering attempts of missionaries, the money lust of businessmen, the cool contempt of European soldiers and politicians, the bungling cynicism of statesmen splitting up families and cultures and indigenous national groupings at their pleasure—all of these have left the task of the redemption of Africa to you and yours, to us…. And what a task! What a challenge! What an opportunity for creation…!

  One simple conviction stands straight up in me: Our people must be made to walk, forced draft, into the twentieth century! The direction of their lives, the duties that they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the sacrifices that must yet be made—all of this must be placed under firm social discipline!

  I say to you publicly and frankly:
The burden of suffering that must be borne, impose it upon one generation! Do not, with the false kindness of the missionaries and businessmen, drag out this agony for another five hundred years while your villages rot and your people’s minds sink into the morass of a subjective darkness…. Be merciful by being stern! If I lived under your regime, I’d ask for this hardness, this coldness….

  Make no mistake, Kwame, they are going to come at you with words about democracy; you are going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency; plump-faced men will mumble academic phrases about “sound” development; gentlemen of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and standards; in short, a barrage of concentrated arguments will be hurled at you to persuade you to temper the pace and drive of your movement….

  But you know as well as I that the logic of your actions is being determined by the conditions of the lives of your people. If, for one moment, you take your eyes off that fact, you’ll soon be just another African in a cloth on the streets of Accra! You’ve got to find your own paths, your own values…. Above all, feel free to improvise! The political cat can be skinned in many fashions; the building of that bridge between tribal man and the twentieth century can be done in a score of ways….

  You might offer ideology as an instrument of organization; but, evidently, you have no basis for that in Africa at this time. You might, by borrowing money from the West, industrialize your people in a cash-and-carry system, but, in doing so, you will be but lifting them from tribal to industrial slavery, for tied to Western money is Western control, Western ideas…. Kwame, there is nothing on earth more afraid than a million dollars; and, if a million dollars means fear, a billion dollars is the quintessence of panic….