Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “The West feels that Communism is the greater danger?”

  “Yes. But the change of attitude on the part of the West has a negative foundation. From the point of view of Westerners, it is the choice of the lesser of two evils.”

  “In short, you feel that the approach of the West now is prompted more by fear of Communism than by love or understanding of the Moslem religion?”

  “Correct; and we know it,” he said emphatically. “And as long as we are in doubt on this point we shall always have our misgivings about the real aims of the West, of which we have had good reasons to be suspicious in our past history. In this case no real success can be expected from a cooperation founded on such weak grounds, with suspicion and distrust on either side ever lurking around the corner. The existing misapprehensions and misconceptions about Islam will have to be rooted out completely if that mutual suspicion and distrust is to be overcome.”

  “If that could be removed, if trust could be reinstated, then would you co-operate with the West?” I asked.

  “If the West would meet us half way, yes,” he said. “The part we shall be able to take in the co-operation, our own views and considerations must be fully taken into account. We cannot be expected just to fall in line and act as we are told. The Islamic precepts and our position as Asiatic countries are decisive factors which cannot be neglected.”

  These are strong words, words colored with passion born of centuries of racial and religious oppression. Mr. Natsir was speaking for more than Indonesians; he was speaking for the world’s four hundred million Moslems. Day by day I was learning to appreciate that one of the greatest realities of Asia was religion….

  “Just what kind of social structure would a Moslem state have?” I asked Mr. Natsir.

  “There will be no need for Communism in Moslem countries,” he said. “Pan-Islam will represent a world force, socialistic in nature, keeping a middle ground between Communism and Capitalism.”

  It was obvious to me that, if you tried to make this man choose between Communism and Capitalism, he’d feel that you were pushing him out of his natural mental orbit. He was more pro-Islam than anti-Communist or pro-Capitalist.

  Later, in reading Mr. Natsir’s political declaration made at Karachi in 1952, I learned that a Moslem state is not a state run by priests or a religious hierarchy. A Moslem state is a state for Moslems, but this does not mean that such a state is a theocracy. Moslems draw sharp distinctions between their kind of religious state and, say, a state in which a king rules by divine right. Every Moslem is a kind of priest; there is no separate church in a Moslem state, hence, there is no question of a separation of church and state. Again I was impressed by the firm rejection by the Asian mind of a division between the secular and the sacred. In the end, the Moslem state was a blur to me. I was told later that my inability to grasp the nature of the Moslem state was not just a personal shortcoming on my part; many young Indonesians were likewise baffled. Yet Mr. Natsir represented a substantial segment of Asian thought and he was not a man to be lured or bludgeoned into changing his stance by offers of machinery, nor would he budge because of fears of Red China…. The emotions of the Natsirs of Asia have been disciplined in a hard and bitter school; those emotions were wary, bruised, distrustful….

  PART II

  Race and Religion at Bandung

  I was now ready to go to Bandung to the conference. Rumors were rife. Everybody was guessing what each Asian and African nation was expecting to gain from its participation. There was no lack of easy speculation and interpretation: it was being said that Pandit Nehru was hoping to emerge from the conference as some kind of acknowledged leader or spokesman for Asia. Japan was expected to walk a tightrope, bowing and smiling to all sides among people over whom she once so brutally ruled, trying to place herself at the disposal of other Asian and African nations, offering her aid as a technical expert, hoping thereby to stimulate trade and retrieve her position as the real leader of Asia. (One Australian journalist commented bitterly: “Bandung means that Japan really won the war in the Pacific….”) Thailand was outdoing every other nation in an attempt to whoop up an immediate war against Red China, now…. Pakistan, tied to the West by treaties, would rather not have been at this conference at all, but came no doubt because she did not want to be accused of breaking Asian solidarity…. Sir John, representing a coalition government in which Communists and Trotskyites made up a vital element, was coming for much the same reasons, being as much concerned about his restless population at home as he was about Red China’s teeming millions. Burma’s U Nu, the popular Buddhist, it was openly said, would seek aid and support for his neutralist attitude. The entire Arab world, headed by Egypt’s Nasser, would be seeking to air its direct grievance against Israel and its indirect case against France. The Philippines, a Westernized Asian nation anchored by the accident of geography amidst powerful Asian neighbors, linked to the West by treaties and to Asia by fear of what the future would bring, would be in the awkward position of having to carry water on both shoulders, would have to talk Right to keep faith with Washington and to act Left to prove that she was still free in her heart and understood the language of her disinherited Asian brothers…. About the Gold Coast, Liberia, and Ethiopia nobody had any real notions; indeed, it was rapidly becoming evident that Negro Africa was the weakest part of the conference. The Belgian Congo was not publicly mentioned, though that geographical prison was on the minds of many people who had never met a native from that sealed-off part of the earth…. I doubt if many of the delegates even knew that Spanish Africa existed…. The Portuguese and their slave system were remote from all minds. And the millions of blacks under French rule in Africa? Nobody but the North African delegates thought of the role that France played in trying to assimilate tribal Africans, pretending to be God to black men already conquered by the fear-systems of religion prevailing long before the logical and selfish French ever showed up….

  The main preconference speculation centered about Red China: How close really was Peking to Moscow? Would Chou En-lai grab the opportunity to use the conference as a whipping post for United States policy in Asia and the Pacific? Would jealous conflicts develop between Nehru and Chou En-lai? Were Asian and religious loyalties thicker than ideologies?

  It was my impression that, with the exception of Nehru, Chou En-lai, and U Nu, no other delegations or heads of delegations came to Bandung but with the narrowest of parochial hopes and schemes. But when they got to Bandung, with their speeches in their pockets, something happened that no Asian or African, no Easterner or Westerner, could have dreamed of….

  The drive up the mountain slopes to Bandung lasted more than four hours and at no time were we out of sight of those brown, Javanese faces. The island of Java has more than fifty million people, a population density not to be matched anywhere else on earth: more than one thousand people to the square mile. In many respects the Javanese countryside reminded me of Africa; there were those same stolid peasants squatting by the side of the roads and staring off into space; there were those same bare-breasted young women with somber-colored cloths—sarongs—rolled and tucked about their waists; there were those barefooted men carrying burdens on poles slung over their shoulders (instead of on their heads as in Africa), making mincing little steps, almost like dancing a jig, so that the jogging of the elastic poles up and down would coincide with their footsteps; there was that same murderous sun that heated metal so hot that it would burn the skin; there was that same bright greenness of vegetation: beautifully terraced rice paddies filled with muddy water and rising in serried tiers toward blue and distant mountains; there were many white mosques and now and then the delicate Gothic spire of a Catholic Church looking fantastically out of place in this near-jungle scenery; and there was that bustling economic activity filling the visible landscape, that frantic buying and selling of matches and soap and tinned sardines, that fateful hallmark of those who have enjoyed the dubious blessing of having had their old, traditi
onal and customary culture blasted and replaced by commercial and financial relations…There was that same red earth, that same attitude of the sleepwalker in the young men who strode along, that same gliding, slowmotion gesturing in the women and children, that fine gracefulness of stance that seems to be the physical trait of people who live in the tropics; only here in Java there was no jungle, no dense wall of dark green vegetation rising fifty or sixty feet into the moist and hot air….

  My friend Lubis was behind the wheel of the car, and the temperature dropped as we climbed into the mountains where volcanic craters could be seen crowned by haloes of white, fluffy clouds.

  “I must take you to see a volcanic crater,” Lubis said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked, surprised.

  “I’m looking for human craters,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Just how many people would you say are intellectuals in Indonesia?” I asked him.

  “Well, somewhere between five and ten thousand,” he answered.

  “And, of that number, just how many, in your opinion, can really think?”

  “Oh, I’d say about two thousand.”

  “The Dutch kept the people stupid, didn’t they?”

  “They did.”

  “Oh, those dear, damned, dull, dumb Dutchmen!” I sang out.

  We laughed.

  “Indonesia,” said Lubis, “is an out-of-the-way place. The Dutch felt that they could do as they liked here and get away with it, and they did just that. They did it for three hundred and fifty years. Then the war came and spoiled their plans. There are Dutchmen who still dream of coming back, but that is impossible. They hate the role that America played in helping us to get our freedom. But, don’t forget, there are some good Dutchmen, some who fought with us, some who became Indonesian citizens. I must be fair….”

  “This society has to be organized,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Lubis agreed.

  “But who’s going to do it? And how? And under whose ideology?”

  “That’s what the fight in Indonesia is all about,” Lubis said. “We must work hard. Now, the Communists can do this job for us; they could put bayonets at our backs and make us work. But we must work no matter who is in control. Since we must work, why not work voluntarily? Why must we have a dictatorship?”

  “Indonesia has taken power away from the Dutch, but she does not know how to use it,” I commented. “This need not be a Right or a Left issue. Where is the engineer who can build a project out of eighty million human lives, a project that can nourish them, sustain them, and yet have their voluntary loyalty?”

  We rolled into Bandung, a city of half a million people, and saw a forest of banners proclaiming Asian and African solidarity; bright posters welcomed delegations to the city. Stout, squat, white-helmeted troops lined the clean streets, holding Sten guns in their hands and from their white belts hand grenades dangled…. The faces of those troops were like blank masks, and they looked at you with black, cold, unresponsive eyes.

  “Horrible, isn’t it?” Lubis asked me.

  “Not so horrible,” I said. “You see, I’ve just come from Spain where you live under the muzzles of machine guns every hour of the day. You get used to it. The machine gun at the street corner is the trade-mark of the twentieth century. Open force is better than swarms of plain-clothes men. You know where you are with a machine gun.”

  Our car was stopped and we had to show our credentials, then we were waved on. I saw that the entrance to every hotel was under heavy guard. The city was organized up to the very hilt in the interests of security.

  “They are taking no chances,” I said.

  “Since that plane carrying the Chinese delegation was downed,” Lubis said, “they are frantic.” He laughed softly. “Did you know this: a few days ago they rounded up every loose woman in the city and hustled them out? It was crazy…. The city is now ringed by crack troops. They don’t want any unexpected visits from bandits. Incidentally, no deliveries of packages will be accepted at any hotel in which delegates or newspapermen are staying—”

  “Why?”

  “Such packages might contain bombs, my friend.”

  We drove past the conference building and saw the flags of the twenty-nine participating nations of Asia and Africa billowing lazily in a weak wind; already the streets were packed with crowds and their black and yellow and brown faces looked eagerly at each passing car, their sleek black hair gleaming in the bright sun, their slanted eyes peering intently, hopefully, to catch sight of some prime minister, a U Nu, a Chou En-lai, or a Nehru…. Then the air was pierced by a screaming siren, heralding the approach of some august representative of some colored Asian or African country. Day in and day out these crowds would stand in this tropic sun, staring, listening, applauding; it was the first time in their downtrodden lives that they’d seen so many men of their color, race, and nationality arrayed in such aspects of power, their men keeping order, their Asia and their Africa in control of their destinies…. They were getting a new sense of themselves, getting used to new roles and new identities. Imperialism was dead here; and, as long as they could maintain their unity, organize and conduct international conferences, there would be no return of imperialism….

  Lubis and I got out at my hotel and swarms of children with Oriental faces rushed forward with notebooks, calling out:

  “Please sign! Autograph, please…!”

  I didn’t relish standing in that homicidal sun and I said quickly:

  “Me, I no write.” I pointed to Lubis. “He important man. Make him sign. Me, I no write.”

  I dashed for the shade of the hotel corridor and the children surrounded Lubis, held him captive for half an hour; he sweated and signed his name, cursing me for having gotten him into such a jam.

  These children did not know who the personalities were; all they knew was that they were colored and important, and so they asked indiscriminately for signatures…. And during the coming week every one would sign his name, from Nehru, Chou En-lai, down to the humblest reporter from Paris, London, or Boston….

  Next morning, April 18, I’d no sooner climbed into the press gallery and looked down upon the vast assembly of delegates, many of them clad in their exotic national costumes, than I could sense an important juncture of history in the making. In the early and difficult days of the Russian Revolution, Lenin had dreamed of a gathering like this, a conglomeration of the world’s underdogs, coming to the aid of his hard-pressed Soviets, but that dream had been a vain one indeed. And many Western writers, H. G. Wells, Lothrop Stoddard, etc., had long predicted the inevitable rise of these nations, but in their wildest intuitive flights they had never visualized that they would meet together in common cause. From a strictly Stalinist point of view, such a gathering as this was unthinkable, for it was evident that the Communists had no control here; this was no People’s Front, no United Front, no Trojan Horse…. Every religion under the sun, almost every race on earth, every shade of political opinion, and one and a half billion people from 12,606,938 square miles of the earth’s surface were represented here….

  The delegates began to file in. In came the Viet-Namese clad in Western dress. (I spied an Indo-Chinese friend I’d known years before in Paris and he seemed unchanged despite his background of war and suffering and revolution.) Three Gold Coast delegates entered, adding a blaze of brightness with their colorful togas. The Burmese entered wearing their soft white caps which had knots dangling at the sides of their heads; their skirts made even veteran newsmen lean forward and crane their necks. The Arabs, with their long white and black robes, seemed outlandish, like men from another world.

  Nehru came in in his white Asian cap and the audience stirred. U Nu entered. Sir John of Ceylon entered. Then Ali Sastroamidjojo, Prime Minister of Indonesia, and the ideological father of the conference itself, entered, mounted the platform, and took the chairman’s seat. Then came Mohammed Ali, Prime Minister of Pakist
an…. At last Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia, mounted the rostrum to deliver the opening address….

  He was a small man, tan of face, and with a pair of dark, deep-set eyes; he moved slowly, deliberately. He spoke in English with a slight accent; he knew words and how to use them, and you realized at once that this man had done nothing all his life but utilize words to capture the attention and loyalties of others. From the very outset, he sounded the notes of race and religion, strong, defiant; before he had uttered more than a hundred syllables, he declared:

  “This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”

  He then placed his finger upon the geographical gateway through which the white men of the West had come into Asia:

  “Sisters and Brothers, how terrifically dynamic is our time! I recall that, several years ago, I had occasion to make a public analysis of colonialism, and I drew attention to what I called the ‘life line of imperialism.’ This line runs from the Strait of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. For most of that enormous distance, the territories on both sides of this life line were colonies, the people were unfree, their futures mortgaged to an alien system. Along that life line, that main artery of imperialism, there was pumped the lifeblood of colonialism.”

  In the third paragraph of his address, Sukarno evoked in a solemn manner a reality that Western statesmen refer to only in times of war or dire stress; he paid tribute to the many sacrifices which had made the conference possible. Implied in his recognition of sacrifice was an acknowledgment that it had been only through men willingly surrendering their lives in the past that a bridge had been made to this present moment. He said: