Black Power

by Richard Wright

  That must have been how much of the discussion went. These men were desperately angry and serious. The hot emotions that bubbled in their hearts bordered upon violence, made them tense and anxious. Their impulses were turgid and blind. Yet, despite their fury, their manner was controlled, calm. These men were spiritually homeless and they were ardently seeking a home for their hearts.

  But there were no fetish priests present. The traditional big black pot with a roaring fire beneath it, the kind of pot which white Westerners like to imagine that missionaries are parboiled in, was absent from that jungle meeting. These black men did not even believe in spirits; indeed, they didn’t even lend credence to what is popularly called the “Other World.” The truth is that these six desperate black men were all educated products of Western universities; upon all of them had been conferred degrees in law, literature, and political science from the universities of France, England, and America. Why, then, were they angry? Why were they meeting secretly in the dead of the night in a jungle where the only sounds were the muted cries of wild beasts?

  These men were meeting to plot what they felt to be the freedom of their country, their nation. What? What “nation”? What “country”? When were there ever nations in Black Africa? History dimly tells us that maybe there existed some few Sudanic black kingdoms some hundreds of years ago, but surely no black nations in the modern sense of that term existed in Africa in historically recent times. Then what did these six black men mean by the “freedom of their country,” their “nation”?

  You can see that, from the outset, this simple story takes on historical, cultural, and psychological complexities and obscurities. From where did these six black men ever get the notion of building something that had never existed before in Africa? Were they irrational? Were they dreaming? Or were they merely wishing? It was infinitely more recondite than that. But, even so, did not their sanguine desire for nationhood clash mockingly with the impersonal, indifferent jungle density that lay all about them? Was not there something ironically incongruous in their yearning to belong to a modern nation when their black brothers and sisters, millions upon millions of them, lay sleeping a sleep that was sounder than that sleep of which dreams form the mysterious curtain?—a sleep of ancestor-worshiping religion which made their invisible fathers, long dead, more real and more powerful than the earth upon which they walked—that earth which they tilled—that earth that sustained them from day to day? How foolhardy were these six men, lonely and glutted with bitter pride, to dare even to think of pitting themselves against the mental crystallizations of thousands of years! Who were their friends? Surely not the British, not the Western businessmen, not the Protestant or Catholic missionaries. And who were their allies? Surely not the Communists, for the Communists had long ago adamantly decreed that there had to exist an industrial proletariat to lead the revolution. Who understood them? The sociologists? If so, I’ve yet to read an account from them of how these men really feel. The psychoanalysts? Vaguely, perhaps; but surely not in terms of any concreteness that would serve to make their turbulent state of mind sympathetically known. What audacity did these six black men have to think of challenging the deep-rooted traditions which even white missionaries and white social scientists of the Western world had failed to change or modify during long centuries of effort? Don Quixote was a sane and balanced man compared to these six black revolutionaries!

  But, stop and think a moment. Their dreaming and plotting for the “freedom of their country” flew into the face of even sterner realities than the religion of their people. These men lived in the Gold Coast, an area about the size of En gland; it was administered by a much-vaunted British civil service behind which, protecting it, was the ever-present threat of force represented by British district commissioners, soldiers, police, etc. And, beyond this show of force, lurked the British navy and army, which could, upon the whim of a moment’s notice, change the government or suspend the constitution. The stealthy British CID was omnipresent, smelling out the least vestiges of subversion.

  How in the name of common sense, then, could these six black men, unarmed and penniless, even think of establishing a nation of their own in the teeth of British opposition and the stagnant traditions of their own people? What an absurdity! Were they not like unto children? One laughed at men like that. Or one pitied them. They would never succeed. Their situation was more than hopeless. Hadn’t they better come to terms with their people, quell their hot passions, obey the wisdom of the British and live peaceful, useful, good, sound lives? Why attempt the impossible? Oughtn’t they progress slowly, soundly, according to the way in which the Western world had progressed? Oughtn’t they to think of taking decades to build a nation, yea, centuries even?

  Yes, these men knew all of these cogent arguments, but they had long ago firmly decided that they could no longer wait. They were being prompted and spurred by elements, strange and compounded, that lay deep in their own personalities. They were hungering for something that had not come into reality and they had gotten the impulse of that hunger from the white men who had ruled them, from the white missionaries, the white military, the white mercenary—the three white groups which the Asians and Africans call the three M’s of imperialism. These six men had been swept out of the orbit of influence of their tribal life and into the sphere, no matter how loosely, of the Western world. At long last the colonizing efforts of your forefathers were bearing their strange fruit. Hence, these men, though black, were not really, in a strict sense of the word, traditional Africans at all. They were black and they lived in Africa; but, at heart, they were really more akin to Europe than to Africa. Their outlook upon the world and their feel of life had been toned by Western values.

  If we are prepared to understand how Westernized these six black men were—and their Westernization would have to differ profoundly from yours, for they had become Westernized under corrosive conditions of partial servitude—then we are ready to understand something else about them that is even more surprising.

  These men were caught in a psychological trap; they were living in a situation in which they did not really belong. They had been plucked by the hand of the white man out of their tribal societies, educated in Western institutions, and then thrown back into the jungle to sink or swim. They knew the West from the outside; and now they saw and felt their own society from the outside. They shared a third but not quite yet clearly defined point of view.

  Living the daily life of the tribe and with their heads filled with Western values, these men saw the Gold Coast in what light? To understand how they saw life, you must open your minds and imagination. Though the guns of the British navy and the tanks of the British army were pitted against their aspirations, and though the stagnant traditions of their people loomed as an almost insuperable barrier to the realization of their demands, these men, from the angle of vision afforded by their unique position, saw something in the structure of the society of the Gold Coast colony that made the task that they had in mind much easier and simpler than you would suppose.

  True, they knew that they could not face the invincible might of the British army, navy, and air force and win. That was out of the question. And they knew well that the ancient traditions of their people were strong and deeply entrenched. But these men, as I have said, were Westernized. THEY HAD ANALYZED THE RELATION OF BRITAIN TO THEIR ANCESTRAL HOMELAND. They knew exactly where Britain was strong and where she was weak, how British minds worked and what British values were. They knew how to distinguish between what the British said and what they really meant; standing outside of Britain, they knew the sharp difference between British professions of idealism and British behavior. They had long grown used to hearing the British say one thing and do the opposite. They knew, at bottom, that the British respected only strength, would react, in the main, only to a fait accompli. They were no fools, these black men; they were hard, tough; and they were willing to sacrifice their very lives to test the validity of the reality that they had
discovered through Western instrumentalities of thought.

  As we know, the population of the colony was more than 90 per cent illiterate. In the urban parts of the colony, due to Western influence, there had set in a deep and chronic disorganization of family tribal life, and the British, who had wrought this atomization of family life, seemed happily ignorant of it. Hence, there existed large masses of tribal individuals who owed no deep allegiances to anybody or anything—masses that were free to be organized—masses that constituted an ironic British gift to the black national revolutionary. And the traditional tribal structure, though intact as a functioning frame of emotional reference from day to day, had been dealt a mortal blow by the religious, mercantile, and military interests of the West. In sum, a kind of void, emotional and psychological in nature, existed in the social structure, and only a few Africans even, seemed aware of it.

  But, ah, you may say, you are overlooking something of vital importance. Britain is strong in Africa because of the work, sacrificial and dedicated, of her many missionaries. Christianity has friends among the masses of Africans.

  Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Let’s take a quick and close look and see how Christian values resided in the tribal heart. The first thing to be noticed is that the very essence of the African drive for nationalism stemmed from the influence of Christianity itself! Had the missionary not gone meddling in Africa, the mores of the millions of blacks would have remained intact. What the missionary failed to do was replace effectively what he had torn out of the African heart. That void that he had created could be felt in all of its terrible intensity only by the African who endured it, and it was that African who was now moving resolutely toward setting his emotional house in order.

  Before the coming of the missionary, the African’s tribal life had been wholly religious; the introduction of Christianity had reduced the volume, if I may be permitted to put it that way, of religion, not increased it. Hence, the African’s contact with Christianity had freed him for action. But what kind of action? That was the question. So these black Christian friends of Britain were filled with ambivalence; they felt that they had been seduced by Britain and then abandoned by her, and now they hated her as much as they loved her.

  The white missionaries, the white military, and the white mercenaries, because of racial antipathies, kept apart from the natives, refusing to live or mingle with them on a basis of social equality. And the few educated blacks who collaborated with the British also lived aloof from their own black brothers. The white British civil service, in which a few qualified blacks participated, also quarantined itself from the native population. Thus, upon the most casual inspection, more than 90 per cent of the native population lived remote from the British. Psychologically, Britain existed somewhere on Mars as far as the native Gold Coaster was concerned. Britain was an image, dim and misty, or completely nonexistent, in their minds. Even to say that 90 per cent of the population was loyal or disloyal to Britain was to talk in terms of unrealities. The truth is that the masses of the Gold Coast people didn’t feel anything for or against Britain; they lived, labored, procreated, and died. This stagnant state of affairs was called Pax Britannica, and it had been most carefully, deliberately, and profitably arranged.

  Why was Britain, then, in the Gold Coast at all, since her relationship to the bulk of the population was so tenuous and remote? I’ll answer that question, though I know that my answer will make many of you bristle. And I’ll tell you what those six black revolutionaries thought and felt about why Britain was there. The absolute consensus of attitude of the black life in the Gold Coast, Left and Right, Christian and pagan, insurgent and conservative, was that Britain was there to get what she could of the natural resources of the colony. These six black men did not contemplate this bald and cynical fact with any degree of hate or bitterness; the awful thing was that they were calm about it; it seemed natural to them that Britain should do this, and a British education had enabled them to arrive at this negative interpretation of Britain’s role. Were these black men, then, aware of any contradiction in Britain’s attitude toward them? They were. One African explained his bafflement about the British by saying:

  “They send us to universities and urge us to study, but the moment they grant us a degree, they become afraid of us.”

  Another young African expressed himself as follows:

  “They continuously stress that we become qualified, but when we become qualified, they tell us that they like the uneducated native better, that the naked tribal man is noble and unspoiled.”

  But why had Britain bothered to educate a few Africans in the Gold Coast at all? Should not these blacks have felt grateful for that British effort? Strangely, they felt no such thing. They had intuitively grasped that there was something odd about the desire of the British missionary to remold their minds into the patterns of white men’s minds. The missionaries had explained that their preoccupation with the native was prompted by “love,” and the African, living a deeply communal existence, had never been able to fathom that aloof, nervous, and condescending “love.” They sensed that it was a self-centered concentration of the white man upon himself rather than upon them that caused him to propound his doctrines. In short, they felt a kind of psychological selfishness and guilt in the white man. Now, you can be sure that the British felt no such selfishness or guilt, but I’m only informing you what the blacks felt about it, and how they felt is the decisive thing here. You’re entitled to your view and the blacks are certainly entitled to theirs.

  The first step, therefore, that these six black men resolved to take was to deny to Britain the right to take the raw materials from the colony. A tall order, that, for six black penniless men to execute. Yet, a further analysis of the relation of Britain to the Gold Coast quickly revealed that, though that task was difficult and improbable, it was not at all impossible. These six black then knew their Marxism, but it is important to remember that they were not really Marxists. They handled Marxist thought self-consciously, standing outside of it, so to speak; they used it as an instrumentality to analyze reality, to make it meaningful, manageable. (But the moment they felt that that Marxist thought was no longer useful, the time when it no longer applied to their problems, they could drop it. Marxist ideology was a tool to them, a tool to be used and then cast aside. Need I remind you again that these men were free in their hearts? By enslaving them, Britain had liberated them. These men did not regard any system of ideas as creeds in which one had to believe; ideas were weapons, techniques. Ah, you British Prime Ministers, do you think you are masters of reality, of men? You must need have such confidence, or your empire building could not have been done. But life is more complicated than even a British Prime Minister thinks! You set out to civilize men and you produced personality types never hinted at even in your nightmares.) The Achilles’ heel of Britain in the Gold Coast was, according to the analysis of these black nationalists, economic, and, if they could only somehow bruise that economic heel, half of their battle would be won.

  Oh, do you suspect the cunning hand of Moscow here? If you do, you only confirm that your conditioning and reactions are traditional, popular, and natural. When the British—to anticipate my story a bit—heard of what these six black men proposed to do, they sent in their CID spies to rout out all the Red cells that could be found. For long months the CID searched, questioned, censored the mails, imposed curfews, and probed, but not a single Red cell did it discover.

  But how could these six black men paralyze the economic life of the Gold Coast and deny to Britain the raw materials that she wanted? Well, again, a most casual analysis of the relation of the British to the native revealed fatal weak spots. The only good roads that existed in the colony ran from the mines and timber mills to the seaports, and there were but few of them. And the actual number of loyal, educated blacks in the colony was some few score. In the last analysis, the relation of Britain to the Gold Coast depended upon the functioning loyalty of these few score. It wa
s as delicate as that. Suppose, then, that those few score black bourgeois men were discredited, were driven from their positions of influence and favor, what would happen? The answer was so simple as to be startling. The British would be compelled to depend upon those tough-minded revolutionary blacks, whether they liked them or not, who had organized and thus had control of the native masses. So the strategy was obvious: Knock out the few educated bourgeois blacks who were loyal to the white British administrators, and those administrators would then be faced with a mass of four and a half million tribal blacks many of whom could not even speak English and whose loyalty was more to their dead fathers than to the power of Britain. The British would then be faced with a choice: They would either have to deal with the new spokesmen of these four and a half million tribal-minded men, or shoot their spokesmen and then rule the black masses by sheer naked force.

  But can bombs produce cocoa? Can machine guns cut timber? Can bayonets dig the gold out of the mines? Can tanks unearth the bauxite? The answer to these questions was the crux of what those six black men had to decide that night in the jungle, and they decided that Britain badly, desperately, needed the gold, the timber, the bauxite. They guessed right. For, when the chips were down, the British said: “Let’s talk business.” The British turned their backs upon poor Jesus Christ hanging there upon the Cross and took out their fountain pens and sat down at tables with the black revolutionary leaders and began to add, divide, subtract, and multiply.

  Now I come to an odd part of my story. Those six sweating black men in that jungle, discussing and planning and plotting the freedom of a nation that did not exist, resolved to bind themselves together; they agreed to call themselves: The Secret Circle.* Then they swore fetish, a solemn oath on the blood of their ancestors to avoid women, alcohol, and all pleasure until their “country” was free and the Union Jack no longer flew over their land. They swore fetish to stick together.