Black Power

by Richard Wright

  The Westernized Asian who spoke that line then struck at England, France, and Belgium:

  “We know the age of European empire is at an end; not all Europeans know that yet.”

  Romulo stressed that there was not one way, but many, in which people could cast off the colonial yoke. He said:

  “Political freedom has been won by many different means. The British surrendered power in Southern Asia because they knew they could no longer maintain it and were wise enough to base their action on reality. The French and Dutch had to be forced to the same conclusion.”

  He was certain that the old system has passed:

  “…everything we know and understand about history assures us that whatever travails the future holds, the old structure of Western empire will and must pass from the scene. Will it expire quietly and in dignity? Will it go out crashing violently?”

  He waded boldly into the racial issue:

  “I have said that besides the issues of colonialism and political freedom, all of us here are concerned with the matter of racial equality. This is a touchstone, I think, for most of us assembled here are the people we represent. The systems and the manners of it have varied, but there has not been and there is not a Western colonial regime which has not imposed, to a greater or lesser degree, on the people it ruled the doctrine of their own racial inferiority. We have known, and some of us still know, the searing experience of being demeaned in our own lands, of being systematically relegated to subject status not only politically and economically, and militarily—but racially as well. Here was a stigma that could be applied to rich and poor alike, to prince and slave, boss-man and workingman, landlord and peasant, scholar and ignoramus. To bolster his rule, to justify his own power to himself, the Western white man assumed that his superiority lay in his very genes, in the color of his skin. This made the lowest drunken sot superior, in colonial society, to the highest product of culture and scholarship and industry among subject people.”

  How has this affected the millions of the world’s colored peoples?

  “For many it has made the goal of regaining a status of simple manhood the be-all and end-all of a lifetime of devoted struggle and sacrifice.”

  Yet Romulo knows how easy it is to be a racist; and he sounds a warning to Asians and Africans to beware of becoming the kind of men whom they now condemn. He said pointedly:

  “It is one of our heaviest responsibilities, we of Asia and Africa, not to fall ourselves into the racist trap. We will do this if we let ourselves be drawn insensibly—or deliberately—into any kind of counterracism, if we respond to the white man’s prejudice against us as nonwhites with prejudice against whites simply because they are whites.”

  What, psychologically, did the policies of the whites do to the people of Asia and Africa?

  “I think that over the generations the deepest source of our own confidence in ourselves had to come from the deeply rooted knowledge that the white man was wrong, that in proclaiming the superiority of his race, qua race, he stamped himself with his own weakness and confirmed all the rest of us in our dogged conviction that we could and would reassert ourselves as men…. Surely we are entitled to our resentment and rejection of white racism wherever it exists.”

  Then Romulo squared up to facts:

  “Yet this white world which has fostered racism has done many another thing. A rich mythology of religious thinking and feeling, a rich heritage of art and literature came from them, and, above all, political thought and an astounding advancement of scientific knowledge also came from them.

  “I ask you to remember,” Romulo told his audience, “that just as Western political thought has given us all so many of our basic ideas of political freedom, justice, and equity, it is Western science which in this generation has exploded the mythology of race….”

  Following Romulo, other heads of delegations spoke: Liberia, Libya, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria, etc. But they added nothing new. It was clear that these speeches had not been arranged, or ordered; it was extremely doubtful if Romulo knew what the others had planned to say…. Hence, a certain amount of repetitiousness drove home the racial theme with crushing force. It was rumored that Nehru had objected to this battery of speeches and I can well believe it, but I doubt if even Nehru knew in advance what the over-all impression of that outpouring of emotion would be.

  It is time now that we turn our attention to this Asian master, Nehru, and the man he was responsible for bringing to this massive international conference, Chou En-lai….

  PART III

  Communism at Bandung

  Communism at Bandung was conspicuous for its shyness, its coyness, its bland smile and glad hand for everyone. Chou En-lai, clad in a pale tunic, moved among the delegates with the utmost friendliness and reserve, listening to all arguments with patience, and turning the other cheek when receiving ideological slaps. In closed committee sessions Russia was attacked time and again and Chou En-lai refused to let himself be baited into answering. Russia had no defenders at Bandung…. Indeed, rumor had it that Chou En-lai had openly said that he did not agree with or support the Cominform; when pressed for his position, he would refer to the four points on the agenda and state that he was determined to keep within the limits of that agenda.

  Yet we can guess at what must have been some of his unspoken reactions. Communism insists that it is a rational science, and Communists boast that their interpretation of history is materialistic. Then what could Chou En-lai have been thinking amidst this ground swell of racial and religious feeling? The speech that he had planned to deliver was passed out in printed form to the press, and he made another speech whose contents indicated that he had had strong reactions. He stated frankly:

  “After listening to the speeches delivered by the heads of many delegations, I would like to make some supplementary remarks.”

  The world had been led to expect that Chou En-lai would try to mobilize Asian support for his claim to Formosa, but he took a directly opposed line. He said:

  “As for the tension created solely by the United States in the area of Taiwan, we could have submitted for deliberation by the Conference an item such as the proposal made by the Soviet Union for seeking a settlement through an international conference. The will of the Chinese people to liberate their own territory Taiwan and the coastal islands is a just one. It is entirely a matter of our internal affairs and the exercise of our sovereignty…. But we do not do this, because our Conference would be dragged into disputes about all these problems without any solution.”

  With that one gesture Chou En-lai surrendered his opportunity to use the conference as a forum for the ideas and policies of Red China. Why? He knew that the time for that was not ripe, that the distance that separated Red China from the religious nations of Asia and Africa was great indeed. Instead Chou En-lai chose another line, an attempt to identify himself with those millions with whom not many Western nations wanted or would accept identification. He said:

  “The Chinese delegation has come here to seek common ground, not to create divergence. Is there any basis for seeking common ground among us? Yes, there is. The overwhelming majority of the Asian and African countries and peoples have suffered and still are suffering from the calamities under colonialism. This is acknowledged by all of us. If we seek common ground in doing away with the sufferings and calamities under colonialism, it will be very easy for us to have mutual understanding and respect, mutual sympathy and support, instead of mutual suspicion and fear, mutual exclusion and antagonism. That is why we agree to the four purposes of the Asian-African Conference declared by the prime ministers of the five countries at the Bogor Conference and do not make any other proposal.”

  It was that simple. Chou En-lai knew that he was addressing lonely men, men whose mentalities had been branded with a sense of being outcasts. It cost him nothing to make such a gesture, to speak words of compassion. He offered no programs of industrialization, no long-term loans, no mutual defense pacts. To the nation
s smarting under a sense of inferiority, he tried to cement ties of kinship. He said:

  “We Asian and African countries, China included, are all backward economically and culturally. Inasmuch as our Asian-African Conference does not exclude anybody, why couldn’t we ourselves understand each other and enter into friendly co-operation?”

  A shrewd man speaking…Yet all was not easy in the mind of Chou En-lai. In Indonesia Moslems had butchered Communists, even though Communists held a balance of power in the present government. The rational Mr. Chou En-lai knew that religious feeling could rise threateningly against him, if it chose. It prompted him to say:

  “…I would like to talk about the question as to whether there is freedom of religious belief. Freedom of religious belief is a principle recognized by all modern nations. We Communists are atheists, but we respect all those who have religious belief. We hope that those with religious belief will also respect those without.”

  But what of subversion? More than ten million Chinese of dual nationality resided in many Asian countries and they constituted a problem. It was here that Chou En-lai made his smartest move and actually surrendered substantial concessions to his neighbor nations; he announced that he was signing a treaty with Indonesia, granting the minority of two million Chinese living in Indonesia the right to choose their nationality…. Brother Chou was most anxious to join this Asian-African church and was willing to pay for his membership. He stated that other Asian nations could avail themselves of similar treaty arrangements. It was a master stroke, and whatever misgivings existed melted not only into a passive acceptance of Red China, but into a kind of grudging admiration for Chou’s good will.

  It must not be thought that it was easy. Sir John and many others lashed out at Chou, blasted Russia’s foreign policy, but Chou stood rocklike, insisting that he was as poor and hard-pressed as they were. In the end the photographers were able to snap pictures of Chou En-lai arm in arm with Sir John…. Needless to say, Nehru ran interference for Chou, fending off those who sought to question him too sharply. Yet, these simple moves do not explain it all.

  Nehru’s motives were clear: he wanted Asian unity. India was an Asian power and what happened in Asia should happen only with the consent of Asians. And such a state of affairs could not be brought about, as Nehru knew, without the co-operation of Red China.

  There was an element of “Asianism” in the whole conference. They had, beforehand, excluded those issues upon which they could not agree, and they had before them an area in which it was obvious that they shared much in common. All Chou had to do was stand his ground and wait with outstretched hands, and they came to him….

  One must understand just what the two positions were at Bandung. The United States, though not present, had its spokesmen for the policy of a “containment of Communism.” Communism was viewed in a rather naive light: eight hundred million people led by militant Communists under the command of Peking and Moscow…. But the Communists themselves viewed their position quite differently; they had a historical perspective and they knew quite well from what quarter they could expect sympathy, recruits, in what parts of the world they could hope for an extension of their power. International Communism had, many decades before, turned its face away from Europe and had concentrated upon Asia, and now it had at long last begun to set its sights upon Africa, “the soft, rotten underbelly of imperialistic Europe,” where there were no loyal European mass populations. Hence Chou En-lai, by promising to behave, had built a bridgehead that had found foundations not only in Asia but extended even into tribal black Africa….

  Hitherto international Communists had not been successful at all in Africa, where a tribal mass, wrapped in poetic dreams, had defied their efforts at ideological indoctrination. Only in the Union of South Africa, where a black industrial proletariat existed, had they made the slightest headway. Now, could the Chinese Communists do what Stalin had not done? Stalin had made many tragic mistakes with the Chinese Communists by his insisting upon the literal application of Marxist dogma. But Mao Tse-tung had organized what was at hand, that is, millions of starving peasants, plus Moslems, Buddhists, Protestants, and Catholics. Nothing succeeds like success and Stalin had had to accept what the Chinese had done, though at Yalta he told Roosevelt that the Chinese Communists were really not Communists. But, Communist or non-Communist, the Chinese were in the Red camp, the allies of Russia. And the question was: Could they do in the rest of Asia and Africa what they had done in China?

  If there was no effective opposition to Chou En-lai at Bandung, among the Asian and African elite, how much more would there be among the illiterate millions sprawled over Asia and Africa? It would be safe to assume that, on the propaganda level, the opposition would be much, much less. For there does not exist any positive program from the Western powers in these areas. Western academic personnel is still discussing whether the Africans have the capacity for self-government, a psychological prejudice which no Communist worthy of his salt would ever carry as a handicap. And the delegates at Bandung felt that profound difference in approach.

  Nkrumahism had already swept the Gold Coast where there was practically no industrialization; a strong, emotional, unorthodox nationalism had held the British at bay and had forced them either to fight a jungle war that would have been akin to the Kenya tragedy or to accept an illiterate and disciplined tribal nationalism…. The British, hungry for dollar exchange (cocoa), had accepted black nationalism. Will the Chinese revolutionaries, with their nonracist, pragmatic background of universalism, accept this new and unheard-of grafting of twentieth century political concepts upon truncated tribal societies? I believe that they will.

  There must have been a lot of scratching of heads in Peking when the five Colombo Powers announced their determination to organize the Asian-African Conference. The Chinese must have known that, if they participated, they would be in the company of men who had perverted Marxism even more than they had. But what of that? Here was a chance for China to surround herself with men and nations who had suffered at the hands of the colony-owning Western states, and, since the United States had not disavowed its support of such states, China then could walk as a fellow guest into an anti-Western house built by a reaction to colonialism and racialism…. It was a gift from the skies….

  Surrounded thus by possible allies in case of war, posing as a champion of the oppressed, proudly identifying himself and his nation with the lowly of the earth, Chou En-lai publicly declared at Bandung:

  “…threats of war can frighten into submission no one who is determined to resist. They can only place the threat-makers in a more isolated and confused position.”

  With those words, an Asian politician had done what was believed impossible. Chou En-lai did not say that he knew the way of eternal salvation; he did not say that he had come to lift up “falling humanity” he skirted any reference to virtue and morality; he simply said that he was willing to share the conditions of life of his black and brown and yellow brothers. But was he honest? If Chou En-lai were a trained and disciplined Bolshevik, then he was lying. And Chou En-lai is a trained and disciplined Bolshevik. Yet he had not said that he believed in what his Asian and African neighbors believed in; he had not pretended to accept their God…. All he had said was that he and his fellow Chinese were suffering, were backward, were afraid of war…. No one could recall having heard a Russian Communist speak like that; no one could recall if the Russian Communists had ever accepted a program drafted by others. One delegate, I was told, had come to Bandung violently pro-West, but had emerged from the closed sessions and had said: “I’m as violently opposed to Communism as ever. But I trust this man.”

  Chou En-lai was invited to Bandung by the authority of the five Colombo Powers. And whose voice is strong in that council? It is the voice of Nehru…. Now, at Bandung, Nehru was in the background, quiet, studied. There was widespread talk of rivalry between him and Chou En-lai, but I did not give much weight to that. These men were intelligent; t
hey had talked over this conference long ago, had mapped out the boundary lines in advance; and that was why there were no serious conflicts at Bandung….

  Why did Nehru make such a strange pact? There are those who say that Nehru is a hypocrite, that he blows both hot and cold, that he says one thing today and another tomorrow. I talked with him and found no evidence of such aberrations. He was logical, quick, observant, and knowing. He is a great man. Of what does this greatness consist? It consists of his being what his country is: part East, part West. If one day Nehru says that the perplexities facing Asia are moral, then he is acting in a Western manner; if the next day he says that the world is gripped by a power struggle, he is looking upon life as an Asian. From his point of view, he is not merely playing with ideas; he is a reflection of what his India is, a halfway house between East and West.

  Nehru’s problem was: How can I find time to build up India? He knew that no Asian or African nation, though independent, was really free as long as it was backward and economically dependent. Then there was the fear that another war would result in the subordination of Asians and Africans again to Western rule…. Nehru sought to solve this question by forging a situation that would be a blend partly of power and partly of morality: the unity of Asia and Africa. What this vast combination lacked in terms of technical and military strength would be made up for in terms of numbers, that is, the body of mankind.

  But such unity involved making indirect alliances with Red China, for there could be no unity in Asia without China. An alliance of Asians and Africans without China would be a hollow one; an alliance with Red China would be risky. But a multinationed agreement with China would, perhaps, give the other non-Communist nations a chance of standing together against China if she were caught cheating…. But would the other Asian and African nations join such a coalition?