Black Power

by Richard Wright

  But the British had neglected to take fully into account that some of the Gold Coast boys would be beyond the confines of British influence, that some of them would soak up Marxism and would return home feeling a sense of racial and class solidarity derived from the American Negro’s proud and defensive nationalism. Above all, the British did not take into consideration that the Gold Coast boys could take Marxism and adapt it to their own peculiar African needs. For three decades the Russian Communists had tried to penetrate Africa, sending agent after agent into the jungle, and Nkrumah had, in five short years, so outstripped them that their ideas had become, by comparison, backward!

  The indirect rule of the British had, unwittingly, created the very conditions which Nkrumah had organized. And the British had adopted that indirect method of ruling so that the religion and customs of the masses would remain undisturbed…. To operate their mines, their timber concessions, and their mills, the British had regimented African tribal life around new social and economic poles, and the exhortation of the missionaries had slowly destroyed the African’s faith in his own religion and customs, thereby creating millions of psychologically detribalized Africans living uneasily and frustratedly in two worlds and really believing in neither of them.

  But could this liquid emotion be harnessed to modern techniques? And from where would come the men to handle the work of administration when self-government came? Would Nkrumah have to impose a dictatorship until he could educate a new generation of young men who could work with him with a willing heart? Or would he have to rely upon the dangerous collaboration of the British until such could come about? I’d seen the basis of power in the streets of Accra, but could it be used? And how?

  And that fierce optimism? Where did it come from? What justified it? Of course, the Gold Coast had about 4,000 British in a population of 4,000,000 blacks, and one could actually forget that Europe existed.

  Last night I hadn’t had time to question myself closely regarding that snakelike, shuffling dance, that strange veering and weaving of the body…. That there was some kind of link between the native African and the American Negro was undoubtedly true. But what did it mean? A certain group of American anthropologists had long clamored for a recognition of what they had quaintly chosen to call “African survivals,” a phrase which they had coined to account for exactly what I had observed. And now, as I reflected upon last night’s experience, even more items of similarity came to me: that laughter that bent the knee and turned the head (as if in embarrassment!); that queer shuffling of the feet when one was satisfied or in agreement; that inexplicable, almost sullen silence that came from disagreement or opposition…. All of this was strange but familiar.

  I understood why so many American Negroes were eager to disclaim any relationship with Africa; they were being prompted by the same motives that made the Irish or the Jew or the Italian immigrant more militantly American than the native-born American. The American Negro’s passionate identification with America stemmed from two considerations: first, it was a natural part of his assimilation of Americanism; second, so long had Africa been described as something shameful, barbaric, a land in which one went about naked, a land in which his ancestors had sold their kith and kin as slaves—so long had he heard all this that he wanted to disassociate himself in his mind from all such realities….

  The bafflement evoked in me by this new reality did not spring from any desire to disclaim kinship with Africa, or from any shame of being of African descent. My problem was how to account for this “survival” of Africa in America when I stoutly denied the mystic influence of “race,” when I was as certain as I was of being alive that it was only, by and large, in the concrete social frame of reference in which men lived that one could account for men being what they were. I sighed; this was truly a big problem….

  Restless, I sought the streets of Accra just to look at Africa. And while strolling along I found, for the first time in my life, a utilitarian function for nappy hair; the clerks and school children stuck their red and yellow pencils in their hair in order not to lose them, and they never did, so close and secure did their kinks cling to those pencils. Some children carried their ink bottles and schoolbooks on their heads, their arms swinging free as they walked. I saw a little girl peel an orange to eat it; she broke the orange in two, put one half of it upon her head and proceeded, as she walked along, to eat the other half; when she had devoured it, she reached up nonchalantly and got the remaining half of the orange and commenced to nibble away at it.

  Bracing myself to encounter rebuffs, I strayed off the main thoroughfares and entered a maze of warrens—compounds—enclosed by stone walls. I blinked; before me was a scene crowded with scores of men, women, children, and everything seemed to be happening at once…. The over-all impression was that the black human beings had so completely merged with the dirt that one could scarcely tell where humanity ended and the earth began; they lived in and of the dirt, the flesh of bodies seeming to fuse insensibly with the soil.

  On a nearby stone wall were scores of lizards, red, green, gray; and, when I moved, they scuttled to safety. Chickens moved slowly and unafraid among the children and pecked at piles of refuse. Here and there a sheep or goat stood sleepily. Mangy dogs lay in the sun. A woman was kneeling upon the ground, frying some kind of meat in a smoking pot of deep fat. A girl was pounding fufu with a long wooden pole, plunging the pole into a wooden vat in which was a mixture of boiled plantains, yams, and cassava; now and then she paused and added a little water to the yellow, doughlike mass, then pounded again…. Still another girl, just a few feet from the fufu-pounder, was squatting and tending a bubbling pot that cooked over a pile of stones enclosing a tiny flickering fire. Two men, standing opposite each other, were washing a huge tub of clothes, running their hands down washboards that rested in the same tub…. Another was mending a pair of shoes. A tiny little nude girl was grinding red pepper on a stone. A fat woman sat nursing a baby at her right breast while she idly and unconsciously, staring off into space, toyed with the teat of her left breast with the fingers of her left hand. A tiny boy minded some ears of corn that were roasting over an iron grill. Off to one side a group of little girls was playing a strange game that consisted of jumping up and down and clapping their hands—a game called ampe which fascinated me no end as long as I was in Africa. The legs of the girls were skinny, their black shoulder blades stuck out at sharp angles, and yet their supply of physical energy seemed inexhaustible.

  I took out my camera to photograph the scene and the children let out a warning yell that made every face jerk toward me. At once the women began covering their breasts and the boys rose and ran toward me, yelling:

  “Take me! Take me!”

  Chances of a natural photograph were impossible, and, not to disappoint the children, I snapped a picture or two of them. I turned to leave and they followed me. I walked faster and they began to run, yelling:

  “Take me! Take me!”

  I hastily turned a corner, hoping that they’d fall behind; but they came on and on, their ranks swelling as they ran. It was not until I was some five blocks from the compound that they began to fall out, one by one, and return. Didn’t their mothers miss them? Wasn’t there anyone to look after them? To let tiny children of four and five years of age have that much freedom filled me with wonder….

  I entered a store to buy a black bow tie and I found that I could barely make the African clerk understand me. My American accent must have indeed sounded strange to his ears which were used to British English spoken with a tribal accent. I had to repeat myself several times before he could grasp what I meant.

  “Who owns this store?” I asked him.

  “A Syrian,” he said, pointing to the rear.

  “Do Syrians own most of the stores?”

  “Naw, sar. The Indians own some too.”

  “How are they to work for?”

  “All right now,” he mumbled, eying his Syrian boss.

  “What do
you mean by now?”

  “I mean since the CPP, sar,” he said, referring to the Convention People’s Party.

  “How was that? Why did they change?”

  “They were scared that we’d take power and chase ’em out of the Gold Coast if they didn’t behave, sar,” he told me.

  Before the coming of Nkrumah there had been much racial tension between the Africans and the Syrians, but, with the mounting tide of clamor for self-government, the Syrians had abruptly changed their attitudes toward the masses of the Africans, and the Syrians were now considered the largest and steadiest contributors of cash to the coffers of the Convention People’s Party….

  When I was back upon the streets again I was impressed by what I felt to be a sense of fragility, of delicacy almost, of the physique of the people. For the most part they were small-boned, of medium height, well-developed muscularly but tending toward slenderness. I had an intuitive impression that these people were old, old, maybe the oldest people on earth, and I felt a sense of melancholy knowing that their customs, laboriously created and posited for thousands of years, had been condemned as inferior, and shattered by a strong and predatory nation. The delicate strands of that fragile culture, so organically dependent upon the soil and climate of West Africa, so purely woven out of the naked impulses of naked men, could never be reconstituted. We had to depend upon guesses and folklore to determine what that culture had once meant to them. True, they still clung, in secrecy and shame, to the ways of their fathers; but, surrounded by a new order of life, they didn’t and couldn’t believe in them as they once had.

  I was pleased to see that, with but a few exceptions, they did not deliberately disfigure or deform their bodies, distend their lips, or force huge holes in their ears or nostrils. Once or twice I did see women who had induced strange swellings on their skins in order to beautify themselves, but that was rare. (I divined later that their religious customs made such deformations abhorrent to them, for they felt that one’s chances of passing, when one died, into the other world depended somewhat upon the degree to which one’s body was intact. Circumcision was taboo among the Ashanti, and, among those close to the royal family, the spilling of a woman’s blood was also strictly forbidden. An intelligent African doctor told me that no wife of the King of Ashanti could submit to any operation, no matter how urgently needed.)

  Wilted from the heat, I made my way back to the government bungalow and found a strange young African waiting at the door to talk to me.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked him.

  “Dr. Wright—” he began.

  “Please, I’m no doctor of any kind,” I told him.

  “Well, sar,” he said, smiling. “I work for the English family next door….”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re an American, sar? Aren’t you?”

  “Yes; I am.”

  “Maybe you can help me, sar? Please,” he begged.

  “I’ll try. But what is it?”

  “You see, sar, we don’t like the British. I met American soldiers during the war and they were nice, sar,” he explained. “Now, sar, I want to educate myself. I want to take a correspondence course from America and I need help, sar.”

  “Just what sort of help do you need and what kind of a course do you want to take?” I asked.

  “I want to be a detective, sar,” he said.

  “What?” I thought that I hadn’t heard him.

  “A detective, sar. Like the ones you see in the movies,” he made himself explicit.

  “And you want to take all of this in the form of a correspondence course from America?”

  “That’s right, sar,” he said, smiling, glad that at last I’d understood him.

  “Now, just how can I help you in that?”

  “Well, sar, money is controlled here. I went to the post office, sar, to buy dollars and they wouldn’t sell them to me. They said that I’d have to go to a bank, sar. Well, I went to the bank and they said no; they wouldn’t sell me dollars, sar. They said I’d have to get the government to okay my application for dollars. Then I went to the government, sar, and talked to a young Englishman.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Sar, he said I couldn’t have any dollars…. You see, sar, the English are jealous of us. They never want us to do anything, sar….”

  “Why wouldn’t the Englishman let you have the dollars?”

  “He just wouldn’t, sar. He said that I could take a course in how to be a detective from London, sar.”

  “From London?” I echoed.

  “Yes, sar; that’s exactly what he said, sar.”

  I looked at him, at his pleading eyes, at those half-parted, waiting lips, at the slight stoop of respect in his bodily posture.

  “Come onto the terrace,” I told him.

  He followed me and stood respectfully as I sat.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  “Thank you, sar,” he said, sitting.

  “From where did you get this notion of becoming a detective?”

  “In a magazine…. You know, sar. One of these American magazines…. They tell about crimes. I got it right in my room now, sar. Shall I get it for you, sar?”

  “No; no; that’s not necessary. Now, just why do you want to become a detective?”

  “To catch criminals, sar.”

  “What criminals?”

  He stared at me as though he thought that I’d taken leave of my senses.

  “The English, sar!” he exclaimed. “Sar, we Africans don’t violate the law. This is our country, sar. It’s the English who came here and fought us, took our land, our gold, and our diamonds, sar. If I could be a good detective, sar, I’d find out how they did it. I’d put them in jail, sar.”

  It was all clear now. But the pathos of it stilled my tongue for several moments.

  “Didn’t the British tell you not to spend your money taking courses in detective work from either New York or London?” I asked him.

  “Naw, sar. They just wanted me to take the courses from London, sar,” he said. “But the English courses wouldn’t tell me all the truth about detective work, sar. They know better than to do that, sar. Oh, sar, you don’t know the English!”

  “In other words, the English wouldn’t give you the real lessons in detective work? Is that it? They’d keep the really important secrets from you…?”

  “That’s it, sar! You can’t trust them, sar!”

  “To whom would you give this evidence of the criminality of the English?”

  “To all the people, sar. Then they’d know the truth. And I’d send some of it to America, sar.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’d know, too, sar.”

  “And if they knew, what do you think they’d do?”

  “Then maybe they’d help us, sar. Don’t you think so, sar?”

  “Why don’t you try studying law?” I asked him, seeking some way to get his feet upon the earth.

  “Law’s all right,” he said hesitantly. “But, sar, law’s for property. Detective work’s for catching criminals, sar. That’s what the English are, sar.”

  “Just how did you get hold of this magazine?”

  “My Massa brought it home, sar.”

  “And when he got through with it, you read it?”

  “Yes, sar. But he threw it away before I took it, sar. I got it out of the dustbin in back,” he told me circumspectly.

  “Look, let me tell you how most detectives get to be detectives,” I said. “They start out as policemen and work their way up. Or they start out as stool pigeons…. Do you know what a stool pigeon is?”

  “Yes, sar. I know that from the movies, sar.”

  “American movies?”

  “Yes, sar. I see a lot of them, sar.”

  “Well, a stool pigeon tells stories on his friends, on anybody and everybody. In that way the police come to trust him. In time, if he’s really good, he might become a detective. It’s not really a good job for you.”

&n
bsp; He was baffled; for a moment he hung his head in thought.

  “But I want to be a detective, sar,” he said insistently.

  “But how can I help you?” I was dejected.

  “Well, sar, you can sell me some dollars,” he said. “I need seventy-five dollars to pay for the first course, sar.”

  Where could I start with the boy? His view of reality was warped; it was composed of fragments of Hollywood movies and American pulp magazines and he had lived his life so far from such manufactured dreams that he was unable to tell what was plausible or implausible in them. And all of this was fed by an inflamed sense of national oppression; he felt that the least move he made to better his condition would be thwarted by the British who were the focal point of the organization of his hate, a hate that would always be his excuse if he failed, no matter what he tried to do or how badly he did it. As long as the Union Jack flew over his country, he could always blame the British for everything.

  “Why don’t you ask some of the rich Africans to help you?” I suggested.

  “Oh, them, sar?” He actually repressed a sarcastic laugh.

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “They are worse than the British, sar.”

  I saw now that I had to be careful in talking to him, for he had a ready category in which to put anybody with a black skin who disagreed with him. The black man who opposed him was a British collaborater.

  “How are they worse?”

  “They keep away from their black brothers, sar.”

  “Look, I don’t have any dollars with me in cash. I’ve only travelers’ checks. And they can’t do you any good,” I told him.

  I studied him. Maybe he had been prompted by the police to ask me for dollars? No; his story sounded too pathetic to be false, too understandably human to have been calculated.

  “Can’t you do something, sar, please? I’m not begging; I’ve saved the pounds, sar. I can give them to you.”