What? Fetish? Ah, you will say: “These black men were not as Western as you claimed.” Yes, they swore fetish. Well, why not? They were scared of the British. They were scared of their own people—their brothers and sisters who would not understand what they were trying to do. And, above all, they were scared of one another. Suppose one of their number informed the British of what they were planning? All of them would either be killed or imprisoned. Hence, though Westernized, these men swore a blood oath to stick together, not to betray one another. We now come to a twilight zone in my story, a zone that will make the reality here more complicated still. I have contended that these men were Westernized. They were. But they lived amidst tribal conditions of life and they reacted to ancestor-worshiping values each day. Thus their world was compounded half of Europe and half of Africa. When they desired to see reality in terms of its external and objective aspects, they thought and felt Western; when they had to deal with their own emotions, they felt and thought African. They lived in two worlds. BUT THEY DIDN’T REALLY AND DEEPLY BELIEVE IN EITHER OF THOSE WORLDS. THE WORLD THAT THEY REALLY WANTED, THE WORLD THAT WOULD BE THE HOME OF THEIR HEARTS, HAD NOT YET COME INTO BEING. So, while standing outside of both worlds, so to speak, they were manipulating aspects of both worlds to create the one and single world that they really wanted.
Now I know that you’ve heard that, when you educate an African, he talks like a European but feels like an African still. White racists contend that a Western education with an African goes only skin deep. All of this is much too simple. The African, when educated in the West, is really neither European nor African. The truth is that he has yet to make himself into what he is to be. So there is really nothing so astonishing about our six black men swearing a blood oath to be loyal to one another; it is no more astonishing than when Western white men cross themselves just before they send a bombing mission to seize the Suez Canal, or when the President of the United States gets on his knees and prays to God just before he issues the order to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Both the African and the white Westerner are partly rational and partly irrational: that is, all men are somewhat infantile. The other man’s God is our devil, and our God is usually his devil. What makes other men seem outlandish to us is our lack of imagination. We all, both black and white, both Easterners and Westerners, have our blind spots. Conditions of life shape our attitudes and give us our values.
This incongruity, this mixing of tribal and Western values, runs like a red thread through the whole story I’m to tell you. Watch this curious intertwining of tradition with modernity; study these Western blacks dealing self-consciously with their tribal religions; contemplate polygamy blending with Puritanism; marvel at the sprouting of socialist thought in a jungle where no working-class ideology existed to support it; try to grasp this strange transition of politics turning into a passion whose intensity partook of the religious.
My story of Gold Coast nationalism can now run swiftly, for I’m reasonably sure that you sense or feel the substratum of emotion, idealism, and self-vindication out of which this nationalism was forged. In most discussions of movements of this sort, you’ll hear descriptions of constitutions, of the principles of democracy, etc. In short, you’ll hear Westerners, who feel that only their assumptions are valid for all people, at all times, and everywhere, tell you how the lower orders of mankind are gradually beginning to resemble them. In contrast to that approach, I emphasize the primal impulses that give birth to such movements toward freedom. I’m telling this story, if you don’t mind, from the black man’s point of view.
One of the men who comprised The Secret Circle was named Nkrumah. Educated both in Britain and America, he had been sent for by the heads of the United Gold Coast Convention to act as secretary, and it was he who objected most strongly to the snobbish and reactionary leanings of the educated black elite. Resolved now upon a course of bold action to organize the energies of the entire population, Nkrumah launched a drive to broaden the basis of the United Gold Coast Convention. Nkrumah became the leader of The Secret Circle. How did that happen? Did he declare himself as leader and impose himself upon them? No. His followers declared him leader. Naturally, he was qualified for this role by his superb organizing and speaking abilities; but, by his colleagues fastening their hopes upon him, he was lifted to the position of almost a deity. Listen carefully to what I’m explaining and perhaps you’ll get some insight into the tendencies toward, and origins of, authoritarian or dictatorship governments. The concrete nature of the situation throws up such phenomena. The “cult of the personality” was not invented in Moscow. The longing for someone to be The Leader stems from the very nature of the human material involved. We can say that Nkrumah and his talent for leadership were captured by his followers. He could not say yes or no. These masses needed someone upon whom they could project their hopes, and Nkrumah was chosen. There came moments when, had he refused to act, they would have killed him. Do you recall the story of the Dying God? Gods must serve men, or they are killed.
Nkrumah’s labor to strengthen the popular basis of the United Gold Coast Convention coincided with the spontaneous efforts of a subchief (of a tiny state called Ga) to lower the price of imported goods. Early in 1948 a colony-wide boycott was launched against foreign merchants. Now, let me explain that the boycott against foreign merchants and the efforts of Nkrumah were not allied. They were independent ventures, but both were heading in the same direction. This is not going to be the last time that I shall call your attention to spontaneous factors leaping up from the life of the Gold Coast natives and coinciding with the leadership of Nkrumah. More than anything else, these spontaneous features of support proved to The Secret Circle that they were headed in the right direction, that their analysis of Gold Coast reality was correct. One had only to give a determined push against the structure of political and economic rule of the British and that rule went toppling.
The boycott was effective and, within one month, the European business firms were on their knees. The members of the Government and the heads of European business firms met and pledged an immediate reduction in the retail prices of imported goods. But, during the days that followed, when the populace went shopping in the stores that sold imported goods and naively expected to find a reduction in retail prices, they found the old prices intact. A mounting anger swept the colony. Spontaneous demonstrations flared against the firms selling European goods. In the afternoon of February 28, 1948, a delegation of ex-servicemen, chanting slogans and waving banners, marched on the Governor’s castle in Christianborg to present their grievances. The police ordered the demonstrators to disperse and they refused. The police opened fire and killed three black veterans of British campaigns in India and Burma. The news of this killing spread, and an infuriated populace began to loot the foreign firms. Arson and street fighting ensued and, during the following days, violence gripped the southern half of the colony. Twenty-nine people were killed and about two hundred and thirty-seven were injured.
From this it seems that the analysis of the reality of the Gold Coast made by The Secret Circle was sound. They had not discussed democracy; they had not talked of trial by jury; they had not debated the merits of free speech. They had assumed that they and their people were being cheated, that the whole of their lives had been caught in an economic trap which allowed the British to buy from them at low prices and sell to them at high prices! And the moment the finger of The Secret Circle touched that sore spot, an explosion resulted.
And what did the British think of all this? It was all a plot sponsored by the men in Moscow, of course. Surely the nobility of their intentions could not set off reactions of hate and violence of that magnitude. Therefore, find the Red culprit! They, the British, were doing good, saving the heathen, uplifting fallen humanity, etc. So find the devils who were meddling with their civilizing mission!
The Governor declared a state of emergency. A curfew was imposed. The leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention sent cables
to London petitioning the British Colonial Secretary to create a commission of inquiry to study the underlying causes of the disorders; they also demanded an interim government. The Governor countered this move by arresting the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention and banishing them to the barren Northern Territories where they were incarcerated separately for fear that they would meet and plot. But the British had never really understood the mentality of the people they were governing; the black leaders immediately called upon the loyalty of their black guards and established instant communication with one another and their followers. The tribal brotherhood forged by The Secret Circle was proving too much for the British. Another government, as yet unrecognized and invisible, had come to exist in the Gold Coast and the British were oblivious of its reality and power. Yet they were alarmed, and feared that the local black soldiers and police were not loyal, so they imported troops from Nigeria.
As a result of the appeals made by the new revolutionary leadership, the core of which was The Secret Circle, the British Colonial Secretary in London appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the sudden flare-up in violence and to recommend constructive measures. The commission was named after its chairman, Aiken Watson, and it took testimony in April of 1948; the arrested leaders were released so that they could give evidence. In June of that year the commission issued a report that declared the old constitution outmoded, urged a new constitution embodying the aspirations of the people, and endorsed a ministerial type of government patterned on those obtaining in the dominions. Thus, the commission confirmed the diagnosis of Gold Coast reality that had been made by The Secret Circle.
But, when the Governor, in December 1948, appointed a constitutional committee of forty Africans under the chairmanship of a famous black jurist, the now Sir Henley Coussey, apprehension set in. The constitutional committee was composed entirely of upper-class chiefs and lawyers, and the younger nationalist elements of the population were completely ignored. The pattern of British class snobbery that The Secret Circle so loathed was about to be saddled upon them again in a new manner. Nkrumah’s immediate following urged him to leave the United Gold Coast Convention and set up a rival organization that would embody the real aims and feelings of the masses. But Nkrumah hesitated. He did not wish to split the unity of the people.
When the constitutional committee began its work on the twentieth of January 1949, trade unionists, students, the women traders of the streets, and the nationalist elements launched a vehement protest against the exclusion of their representatives. Nkrumah hastily organized a committee of youths, and sent a team of young men touring the country to raise three demands: (1) universal adult suffrage; (2) a fully elected legislature with a fully representative cabinet; and (3) collective ministerial responsibility.
The fat was in the fire. Naturally these demands were beyond the aims of the black bourgeois leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention. And Nkrumah had been pushed by his followers to take this extreme step. He had had either to take it or forfeit his leadership; though the leader, he was really a kind of captive, a prisoner of the hopes and passions of his people. This is an important point to remember, for all else in this story—and its aftermath has yet to be enacted—rests upon it or will be influenced by it. Politics in these non-Western societies proceeds in a manner quite unknown to us where wages, parties, newspapers, printing, plumbing, and public opinion shape the deeds of men.
The rich black doctors, lawyers, and politicians reacted with fury, as was to be expected. What was this man, Nkrumah, doing? The naked ignorant masses had no part in politics and government. The right to vote, they argued, ought to be conditioned by how much money or property you had, for money and property indicated how much you knew, how dependable and responsible you were. Hadn’t John Stuart Mill and John Locke said so? And was not England great as proof of what Mill and Locke had said? Who would dare gainsay the august wisdom of the savants of the mighty British? A tramp like Nkrumah and his wild-eyed boys of the streets of the disorganized harbor towns? How absurd! But they failed to take action against Nkrumah in time, for they were convinced that, if they only talked to him in a fatherly manner, he would change. These rich and sedate blacks were the psychological prisoners of their assumptions; they felt that even the sun agreed that their ideas were the only good and valid ones. They enjoined Nkrumah to stop his agitating, and Nkrumah, deciding to cast his lot with his people, countered by going even further into radical departures. In his newspaper, The Accra Evening News, which had been launched in September 1948, he vehemently demanded a democratic constitution. The rich blacks reaffirmed their disdain for the masses. The differences could not be bridged. Nkrumah, urged by his supporters, resigned from the United Gold Coast Convention and launched and announced, in August 1949, the Convention People’s Party and stated his intention of staging “Positive Action” based on non-violence—a political stroke that fitted the mood of the country.
It was a gesture that called for tribal unity, brotherhood, sacrifice, and a rebirth of the ancient sense of the people’s continuity of being in its traditional form. But, at the same time, Nkrumah announced the following modern socialistic aims: Housing, technical education, road building, health measures to reduce infantile mortality, the liberation of women from traditional fetters, the building of co-operatives, and a campaign of mass education to wipe out illiteracy. A mixture, eh? It was. The tribal traditions were emphasized at the very moment when they were being organized toward goals that would eventually nullify them! No wonder the British and the rich blacks were dizzy with bewilderment. The ancient national dress of the Gold Coast, togas draped about the body in Roman style, was worn with a new pride now in every village and street of the country. And yet the methods of urging the population to struggle for national freedom and socialism were couched in terms of fleets of trucks with loudspeakers, brass bands, pamphlets, and mass meetings where oxen were sacrificially slain to appease the spirits of the dead ancestors! The chiefs, under their brilliant umbrellas, dribbled palm wine and gin upon the earth as they recited libations to the departed in the name of socialism! Men with six wives came forward and saluted and endorsed a social order that would reduce the number of their wives to only one! (Yet these men had no intention of giving up their many wives.) Women, hitherto regarded as chattels, came out of their compound kitchens and danced and sang in the streets. The Gold Coast African greeted the dawn of the twentieth century in his community by pounding his tom-toms with wild frenzy.
Disorder? Irrationality? Foolishness? The antics of children? No wonder the British recoiled with consternation, and no wonder the rich black nationalists sided with the British in sheer horror and fear. But let us take a closer look at this disorder, this irrationality, this foolishness, these antics of children. What else could have happened but what did happen?
In terms of Western assumptions, there existed no foundations for classical democracy in the Gold Coast; that is, if one defined democracy only and merely as a voting choir of literate property owners who believed that there was only one God, only one Jesus, and only one Holy Ghost. That, in all honesty, has to be admitted. But, in 104 years of British rule, and during a stretch of historic time dating back to the fifteenth century, France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Portugal had held sway over the people of the Gold Coast and had made no effort to establish any such foundations for democracy. Hence, the easiest criticism to hurl today at the inhabitants of the Gold Coast is: “You are not ready for self-government!” And the Gold Coaster can reply: “Whether we are ready or not, in accordance with your notions, is not important. We’re acting.” And that is exactly what Nkrumah had decided to do.
Nkrumah was—and all the basic facts were with him—proceeding upon the assumption that the subjective lives of his people had been smashed, that the missionaries had rendered the lives of his people meaningless, that the merchants had trapped them in a manner that rendered them more and more impoverished, emotionally and materially, e
ach day, and that the guns of the British, though they were there in the name of public order, were weapons that intimidated the very foundations of the personalities of the people toward whom they were pointed. Nkrumah’s drive for self-government was more than merely a scheme to grab selfishly at the reins of political power. It was a mandate to his people that they were not intrinsically inferior, no matter what their present condition of life was, to the rest of the human race—an implication that British rule had long sought to implant in them. More, Nkrumah gave sanction to his people that, though their outlook upon life and their tribal customs differed drastically from those of the Western white man, their customs and outlook did not justify their being conquered and held abjectly as economic hostages for centuries. He encouraged his people to believe that, though they were lagging behind in the race for progress, they needed no outside tutors to intimidate them with guns while monitoring their daily lives.
What was, then, Nkrumah’s task? Merely to ask that question is to step beyond the confines of this story. But we must hint at it. Nkrumah’s task was much, much more than merely to drive out the British. He was calling his people from their Eden-like allegiances to their dead fathers and inspiring them to believe that they could master the ideas and techniques of the twentieth century. He was attempting to empty out the rich increment of the overburdened emotional consciousness of his tribal brothers and fasten that consciousness onto the brute, stark, workaday world in which it existed; and, at the same time, incite that consciousness to manipulate that world in the interests of his own deepest humanity.
On September 15, 1949, certain British officials actively entered the fight against Nkrumah by filing a series of libel suits, charging him with contempt of court. He was fined £300, a truly staggering blow for a newly created movement supported by penniless tribal people. But, within a matter of hours, the sum was raised voluntarily by the people of the streets. This act, more than anything else, convinced Nkrumah and his aides that their people were back of them, and they intensified their drive for self-government.
Black Power Page 72
