Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “Many people are blaming the present attitude of Indonesians upon the Japanese. What was the attitude of the Indonesians toward the Japanese?”

  “The Japanese were not loved here,” he told me quietly. “We killed more Japanese than we did Dutch. One of the most decisive factors in the Indonesians’ winning of independence is something that is not well known abroad, not at all. And that was how the Dutch behaved when the Japanese came in. They caved in. The Dutch were scared; they bowed; they wept; they begged; they all but crawled…. And we Indonesians said to ourselves: ‘If the Dutch are that scared of the Japanese, then why ought we be scared of the Dutch?’ Dutch fear of the Japanese was a powerful psychological element in our resolve to fight the Dutch for our freedom.”

  Sjahrir told me that the Dutch “could dish it out, but that they could not take it.” When released from the notorious Japanese internment camps, the Dutch, completely lacking in imagination, and looking like wretches, went back to the homes in which they had once lived and to the factories that they had once managed and were amazed to find that the Indonesians had taken over…. They demanded their homes, their factories, and their jobs back and were stunned when no one obeyed them.

  “Will you be at the conference at Bandung?” I asked him.

  “No. I’m with the opposition, you know,” he said. Then he laughed and added: “I don’t want to embarrass the government.”

  “Is there a Communist coup pending here?” I asked him.

  “No!” he said flatly.

  “Why is such an impression being created abroad?”

  He laughed and did not answer.

  I next asked Sjahrir if he considered himself a professional politician and he replied:

  “I suppose you could say that I am. I’ve never had any other job than that of fighting for my country in my life. The only steady employment I’ve ever had was when I was Prime Minister. Most of the other years of my life were spent either in exile or in prison.”

  “What about production?” I asked, already surfeited with gloomy facts.

  “It’s dropping month by month,” he admitted. “Things are not good.”

  “It’s politics,” I suggested.

  “Yes; politics and too many parties,” he confessed.

  I respected Sjahrir. I felt that his heart was wedded to the cause of his country. We chatted for more than an hour, but he was affably cautious. He was one of the leading opposition men, and he did “not want to embarrass the government.” In Europe it was rumored that men like Sjahrir lived in daily fear of their lives; if that were true, then Sjahrir gave me no confirmation even when I asked him bluntly if he feared for his life. An hour’s friendly conversation is not enough time in which to get to know a man, and, when that man is an experienced politician, a man surrounded by enemies, an intellectual, one has to be careful in making hasty judgments. Sjahrir was sane, balanced, poised, yet I could not escape the impression that he was basically a Western Socialist, honest, fair, good-hearted, and filled with a love of freedom. But was he the man to tame the Indonesian tiger? Could he unite eighty million half-tribalized human beings, 70 per cent of whom were illiterate, most of whom were sunk either in a theistic Moslem religion that had yet to bear the acid test of modern industrialization or in an animistic grasp of life that riveted the attention more upon the poetic than the practical aspects of existence? Were housing, health measures, finely spun concepts of freedom the implements that could spur a nation that had been for three hundred and fifty years under the iron heel of Dutch rule to an attitude of alert pragmatism? I had the feeling that he wanted to build soundly, solidly, yet the situation in which he found himself reeked of urgency; the people were not waiting for the government to build schools, they were creating them themselves; their loyalties were being bid for by America and China; the future and its shape were uncertain and the people felt that they had to choose now; the Constitution had not been implemented and a kind of civil war was going on against both Indonesian bandits and foreign capital…. What would happen in the next few years would surely set the mold for the future of Indonesian life. Was not Sjahrir a man for a future time, when these basic problems had been solved? I could not imagine Sjahrir instilling in these millions a sense of their historic destiny…. It would take other and specal kind of men for that work.

  That evening I inquired of my host, Mr. P., what was there that one could do or see in Jakarta at night, and he informed me that there were no night clubs, no bars in the city.

  “We are Moslems and we are not a drinking people. We dance, but not in night clubs. There are but few Europeans in the city now. They are going home, or being sent home, at the rate of twenty thousand a year. There’ll be but fifty thousand Dutch left at the end of this year. Night clubs are definitely European establishments; so, when the Europeans go, so do the night clubs.”

  As I had discovered in Africa’s Gold Coast, so I found in Indonesia that almost every item in the home in which I was staying had been imported from faraway Europe. There is a nervous kind of dependence bred by imperialism: not only are the people taught Western law, ethics, and finance; but they are encouraged to develop a taste, yea, a need, for goods which are only to be had from the European mother country. Then, when the natives rise and make a revolution in the name of the values of the West, they find themselves trapped, for they cannot build even a modern house without Western aid. The psychological agony that Indonesia suffers was created by a situation compounded of a fear of the return of Western technical capacities which they feel they need, which in their hearts they adore; yet, how can they have the co-operation of the West and at the same time fend off what they feel to be the desire of the West to dominate? In some Indonesian hearts the fear of the West is so great that they are willing to forego all advantages of Western technology, but they know that in doing so they are leaving themselves open to re-enslavement…. It is not an easy attitude to hold when you feel that, when you reach out for something you want, you will be clutching bait embedded upon a sharp and cruel hook….

  One morning I went into the Ministry of Information for my press card; all the faces behind the desks were dark, as dark as mine…. At one desk I saw a white American newspaperman leaning forward intently and putting up an argument, and the dark Indonesian official to whom he was so urgently talking was obviously not listening and had already made up his mind as to the kind of negative answer that he was going to serve up to the white American…. But the moment that the Indonesian official’s dark face turned to me there was another and different attitude. His manner changed at once: I was one of his kind; I’d endured the humiliations that he and his people had endured. So, while the white American waited, I got my press card at once. I was a member of the master race! Well, there it was…. I’m not proud of it. It took no intelligence, no courage; in the situation that obtained, it was the easiest thing to do. It was racism. And I thought of all the times in the American South when I had had to wait until the whites had been served before I could be served…. All you have to do in a situation like that is relax and let your base instincts flow. And it’s so easy, so natural; you don’t have to think; you just push that face that is of an offensive color out of your mind and forget about it. You are inflicting an emotional wound that might last for years, that might be handed down to other generations; but why worry about that? You are safe; there are thousands around you of your color and, if the man who’s been offended should object, what the hell can he do? I was disturbed. I was not proud of what had happened, but I understood it. It was racism; there was no doubt about it; but it was a defensive, reflective kind of racism. And there are so many people of my color on earth, so many millions of colored people…more than there are of white…. The racism I saw that morning had had its origin not in the desire (I think) of the colored man to put the white man in an embarrassing position, to sting and hurt him; it was simply a question of color, which was an easy way of telling friend from foe. But the Indonesian official ha
d not instituted this thing; it had been taught to him by faces as white as the American face that he had spurned. That was how the whites had felt about it when they had had all the power; all dark skins were bad and all white skins were good, and now I saw that same process reversed….

  Will Asians and Africans, being as human as white men, take over this vicious pattern of identification when they become, as they will, masters of this earth? Racism is an evil thing and breeds its own kind. Yet, it would be truly human if the Asians and Africans did, for they have much greater cause for doing so than the white man ever had. They would be acting out of a four-hundred-year tradition of racial conditioning…. After all, the colored races never did anything to the white races to call down upon their heads the centuries of brutality and exploitation that the whites have meted out to them. But the most important point is: Can the colored races, for the most part uneducated and filled with fear, forget so quickly the racist deeds of the white races as they strive to free themselves from the lingering vestiges of racial subjugation? I’m not advocating racism or even trying to justify it; racism is a loathsome thing. I’m just trying to explain how easy it is, and with what justification the colored races can and will, to some extent—depending upon how ignorant and emotionally wrought up the whites have kept them—practice racism, a racism that they have been taught too bitterly and too well.

  It would be a naive and childlike white Westerner who, seeing the dreadful racist peril now confronting him, would say: “But I don’t feel like that any more. I’m perfectly willing for racism to stop. I’ll support any legislation to eradicate racism.” But, unfortunately, life is not that simple. Contrite words cannot now stop profound processes which white men set in motion on this earth some four hundred years ago; four hundred years is a long time…time enough for habits, reactions, to be converted into culture, tradition, into a raison d’être for millions….

  In the future there will be white men who will look into black and yellow and brown faces, and they will say to themselves: “I wish to God that those faces were educated, that they had lived lives as secure and serene as mine; then I would be able to talk to them, to reason with them…” But then it will be too late.

  In my goings and comings about Jakarta, meeting this person and that one, I was told that an Indonesian servant, when he is hired by, say, white Americans, is embarrassingly obsequious, that, upon entering a room, he will bow low, lifting both hands as though in prayer, and then walk with his right hand and its five fingers pointing toward the floor, crossing the room in the presence of his superiors. While serving food, the domestics will form a long line, then kneel and creep past the table, each holding a dish in his hands and wait with lowered eyes until the master has served himself. And they crawl away on their knees. These practices, I was told, were not originated by the Dutch. They constitute a heritage stemming from hoary Javanese feudal traditions. It need not be added that the Dutch did not find such tokens of groveling unpleasant, and these practices prevail today even in the homes of many upper-class Indonesians.

  As humid Indonesian days unfold, I make many tiny discoveries…. Instead of toilet paper, the Indonesians use water; a small bucket of water is placed in each toilet. Toilet paper is hard to come by, having to be imported from Europe. Families not well-off enough to afford buckets will place several beer bottles of water discreetly beside the commode….

  Indonesian bathrooms are strange contraptions indeed; I tried futilely to determine how they originated. There is no bathtub as such. In middle-class Indonesian bathrooms there is a shower which works when there is enough water, which is rare…. Mostly you will find a walled-off enclosure about four feet high in which water is trapped as it drips from a faucet. Water pressure is lacking, and in this manner a reserve of water is kept on hand. It is necessary, most times, in order to bathe to take a tin pan and wash towel, soap yourself thoroughly, and, afterward, dip out of the walled enclosure enough water to dash over your head and body to rinse off the soapsuds.

  The classic bathroom joke in Jakarta concerns an American businessman who got, by mistake, into one of those walled-off water-traps and actually took his bath, an act which necessitated the forgoing of all bathing for the Indonesian family in whose house he was an honored guest. The hygienic-minded American had polluted the supply of water for the entire family for the entire day.

  Amid all of this disorder and uncertainty, it is odd how daily habits are adhered to; for example, shoes are regularly shined, even though gangs of bandits may be roaming the countryside. Slow-moving, barefooted boys slink into your room and appropriate your shoes and spend precious hours polishing them. Of course, it could be argued that there are not many shoes to be shined in a nation where most of the population goes barefooted, and that shoe-shining takes up but a tiny part of a servant’s day. Even so, it indicates the degree to which certain parts of the population have been conditioned to Western habits. But, against this background, these habits take on a kind of caricatured aspect of the Western world….

  Since the state is weak and has but little authority, what keeps things going? The answer is: the animal habits which Indonesians share with the rest of mankind. The day is divided not so much into hours as into periods in which one sleeps, eats, works, etc.

  “When will Mr. So-and-so be in?” I would ask.

  “I really don’t know, sir. But he’ll surely be in about one. He has to eat, you know.”

  “Has Mr. So-and-so returned yet?” I’d ask.

  “No, sir. But it’s far past his bedtime and so he’ll be in soon.”

  There are really no office hours; you must depend upon the biological functioning of the people to determine when you can see them.

  My friend Lubis took me to see Dr. Mohammed Natsir, former Prime Minister, and one of the leading spokesmen for the idea of the Moslem state. He is young, about forty-seven, and is the head of Indonesia’s largest political party, the Masjumi. I found him alert, friendly, open, relaxed, with a ready smile. He told me frankly that he was hopeful about the future, that there was absolutely no foundation for the widespread, irresponsible talk about a pending Communist coup, and that he was sure that Indonesia would have democracy, “not the kind of classical democracy known in the West, but still democracy….”

  “You make a distinction between East and West?” I asked.

  “Of course. Our approach, because of our background, must be somewhat different,” he said.

  Mr. Natsir told me that he felt that the most important event of the twentieth century was the liberation of Asia and parts of Africa, but he did not think that Asia and Africa should form racial or political blocs against the West. He was positive that there did not exist in the general population a mood of hostility toward the white nations.

  “We just want them to let us build up our countries,” he said. “We want to keep our freedom. When we mobilize our people to reconstruct our countries, the white Westerners must not project out upon us their own sense of guilt. The whites cannot see us as we are because of what they have done to us. First, they sent us their missionaries; then they sent their mercenaries; and in the end they sent their military…. We call them the three M’s of imperialism and we are on the lookout for them.”

  In talking to Mr. Natsir, I felt, as I was to feel when talking to many Indonesians, that concepts like Right and Left, and ideologies in general, did not figure decisively in his thinking. I had the feeling that the Indonesian Moslem had a personality that was intact, poised, healthy, and largely free from neurotic conflicts. These eighty million Indonesians, 90 per cent Moslem, had not been tampered with too much by missionaries as had all too many Africans. There was none of that uneasy shifting backward and forward between two worlds of values and two spheres of psychological being. Yet I was confronted with a religious statesman, a man who would perhaps some day rule or exert no small degree of influence upon his country.

  “I’d like to try to give the Western reader some idea of this Mosl
em state which is the object of your policies,” I told him.

  “I’ve explained all about that in a speech I made in 1952 before the Pakistan Institute of World Affairs in Karachi,” he said. “I’ll give you a copy of that speech. But there is nothing in Islamic teachings that would clash against any ethical or moral precepts of any other religion. We believe in the Koran; it is our guide, our Bible, you might say.”

  “But you are classed as a colored man by the West,” I told him. “And yet you are religious. Now, many people fear the world of Islam. And that world is colored.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “If the Moslems hope to cooperate with other peoples of the world in the interest of peace, we shall have to realize that an appreciation of the virtues of Islam is greatly lacking outside of the Islamic world, and that even amongst Moslems there are many misconceptions of the true aims and purposes of the Islamic teachings. Centuries of abject submission to foreign rulers have destroyed the prestige of the Moslems the world over as well as their sense of self-respect. Nevertheless, the Western world having once experienced the power of the sword of Islam has never lost sight of the potentialities contained in the Moslem world. The endeavors of the Moslems in the nineteenth century to achieve their resurrection in a united world of Islam (the Pan-Islamic movement) was met with suspicion and apprehension by the nations of the Western world as a menace endangering their power over colonies, the providers of precious indispensable raw materials for the prospering of economic life in the mother countries….”

  “Do your intellectuals feel this economic consideration?”

  “How could we not feel it, since it was the main motive?” he asked me.

  “Has the West changed its attitude and habits in this connection?” I asked him.

  “It has had to,” he said, laughing. “The course of history has brought about a resurrection of the Moslem world, and we are gradually coming into our own again. The Western world, after having belatedly found out that Islam is not the peril the world has to face, is now soliciting our cooperation to preserve peace and ward off the peril of a calamitous third world war….”