When a palm tree is cut down, the heart of the palm is eaten and is considered a rare delicacy. Palm wine is made by fermenting the whitish fluid which the tree yields; also palm gin is made, though both palm wine and palm gin are declared illegal, for their alcoholic potency is considered dangerous to health. The tree’s wood itself is used for fuel or building.
I sat at the table in the hotel’s dining room, eating lunch, staring moodily out of the window. In the distance I saw a bright, shining object moving erratically. It looked like a brass pipe or pole; then I became aware that there was a mass of people clustered about the gleaming brass object. What could it be? Sounds of drums, of shouting, of shooting came to my ears. Was there a political disturbance? I rose and ran to the balcony; the mass of people was drawing near and the shooting and the drums sounded sharp and clear through the bright sunshine. A businessman, a German who stayed in the hotel, joined me.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“A funeral,” he said. “And it’s a big one. Must be for a chief.”
“But why are they shooting?”
“They always do that…. Say, you’d better get your camera and go down—”
“Yes!” I said, tearing off to my room.
When I returned to the balcony, a wave of flowing robes, red, yellow, brown, scarlet, and russet was rolling down the street. Huge drums were being pounded by men who sweated and whose faces were tense. Men bearing vast red umbrellas marched and behind them came men holding red flags aloft, then more flags. Men and women came rushing madly from all directions. My eyes darted, trying to encompass the many things that were happening all at once. The men, dressed in red, formed a huge circle in a vacant lot and began firing the muskets they held. A funeral? How was that possible? It seemed more like an advertisement for a circus. Another round of firing into the air made a pall of light blue smoke drift over the field and the acrid scent of gunpowder smote my nostrils. The procession flowed on below me; then my eyes looked to the left. My mouth dropped open. A group of men bore aloft on their shoulders a brass coffin, gleaming and polished until it glittered in the sun. The coffin went round and round….
“Is that really a coffin?” I asked the German.
“It sure is.”
I was afraid that the coffin would fall and smash against the concrete pavement, but, evidently, the men had had long experience bearing whirling coffins on their heads and the coffin spun slowly, the men rushing with it seemingly at random from spot to spot. For example, they’d run to a corner, stop, twirl the coffin, then, amidst shouting, singing, chanting, they’d turn and race with the coffin spinning above their heads in another direction….
I ran from the balcony; I had to see this at close range. Some ritual whose significance I could not understand was taking place. A thousand questions popped into my mind and no answers could even be imagined. I reached the street just as a young chief, borne aloft on a palanquin decorated in brightly colored silks, came by on the bare black shoulders of his carriers. Above him was the usual vast umbrella being twirled by a panting and sweating boy. Now the brass coffin came again, the black men running as they turned it round and round on their heads, and this time I noticed that in front of the men bearing the brass coffin was a half-nude woman, wearing a skirt made of raffia; she had a huge black fan made from feathers and she was swishing that fan through the air with hurried, frantic motions, as though trying to brush away something invisible….
The parade or procession or whatever it was called was rushing past me so rapidly that I feared that I would not get the photograph I wanted; I lifted my camera and tried to focus and when I did focus I saw a forest of naked black breasts before my eyes through the camera sight. I took the camera from my eyes, too astonished to act; passing me were about fifty women, young and old, nude to the waist, their elongated breasts flopping loosely and grotesquely in the sun. Their faces were painted with streaks of white and sweat ran down their foreheads. They held in each of their hands a short stick—taken from packing boxes—and they were knocking these sticks furiously together, setting up an unearthly clatter, their eyes fixed upon the revolving coffin of brass….
Then came another palanquin upon which sat a young boy about nine years old; his face was sad, solemn, and over him too was held a wide, spinning red umbrella. There followed a long stream of women dressed in native cloths, most of them bearing babies strapped tightly to their backs; they sang some weird song in staccato fashion…. Again came the turning coffin of brass and this time I noticed that it too had an umbrella of its own, that a man was rushing and trying to keep up with it, to hold the umbrella over it to shade it from the sun….
The men in red were firing muskets again, and blue, thin rings of smoke hung in the sunlit air. I tried to keep up with the procession, but the men carrying the coffin changed their direction so abruptly and so often that I gave up and stood feeling foolish and helpless in the hot sun, sensing sweat streaming down my face.
I had understood nothing, nothing…. Why were they rushing so quickly and seemingly at random with that brass coffin? The funeral still flowed past me; there must have been five thousand people in it. I looked closer and saw that the faces of the women and children were marked with a reddish paint on the left cheek…. My mind reeled at the newness and strangeness of it. Had my ancestors acted like that? And why?
The men rushing with the turning coffin ran past me again and I stood aghast. I was nervous, feeling that maybe the poor dead man would fall out of the coffin, and I could imagine his being there jolted and bumped as they tossed the coffin round and round….
These people were acting upon assumptions unknown to me, unfelt, inconceivable. Slowly I mounted the steps of the hotel and stood again on the balcony. The funeral was far away now, but I could still hear the vast throng shouting, the muskets firing, the women chanting….
I found myself standing next to an African dressed in Western clothes.
“That’s some funeral, all right,” he said.
“But who’s dead?” I asked.
“It’s a chief,” he told me.
“I can’t understand it,” I confessed.
“It’s not simple,” he said.
“Why do they fire those muskets?”
“Who knows? Some say that they got that firing of muskets from the Europeans during the fifteenth century,” he said. “They have forgotten, maybe, just where they got it from.”
“But the dead man, won’t he fall out of that coffin?”
“There’s no dead man in the coffin,” he said.
“What? It’s empty?” I asked, dumfounded. “Then why are they rushing about with it like that?”
“The coffin has the dead man’s hair and fingernails in it,” he explained. “The body is buried somewhere in secret, that is, after the brain has been taken out—”
“Why bury it in secret?”
“So no one will find it.”
“But why would anyone want to find it?”
“Well, there are several reasons…. You see, a chief’s body is sacred…. If somebody finds it, they can use it, take its power and use it—”
“Then why don’t they stand guard over the body?”
“They’ve got to hide the body; they’re hiding it from the man’s spirit—”
“But the man’s dead,” I protested.
“Yes; but they claim that the man’s spirit is hanging around, wanting to re-enter the body…. The spirit doesn’t want to leave; you see? The body’s the home of the spirit. If the spirit can’t find its home, it’ll keep on traveling—”
“And the man’s brain…? Why do they take the brain out of the skull and hide it?”
“Because they believe that the brain’s the seat of the man’s power. They hide the brain for fear that the dead man’s enemies will get hold of it and take over the role that the dead man played in life….”
“And the hair and fingernails in the coffin?”
“They are substitutes f
or the body. By putting the hair and fingernails in the coffin, the spirit is fooled. When the spirit seeks the body and can’t find it, it then finds the fingernails…. It knows then that the body is gone….”
“And why were those women beating those sticks?”
“That’s to scare the spirit on its way…. And to announce to the spirit world that the spirit is coming.”
“And the running and twirling of the coffin? What does that mean?”
“It’s the same thing…. It’s a kind of farewell that they’re giving to the dead man, you see. But they are trying to fool the spirit away at the same time. Now, they take the coffin, running with it, back to all the places in the city where the dead man had enjoyed himself. The dead man is paying his last respects to his relatives, his friends, and so forth. Now, when they turn, change their direction, zigzag this way and that—that’s to lose the spirit which is supposed to be trying to keep up with the body. The man’s spirit, of course, will haunt the houses of the man’s friends. So, when they rush up like that, spin the coffin, and then rush off, going from left to right, the spirit becomes confused…. You understand?”
Yes; if you accepted the assumptions, all the rest was easy, logical. The African’s belief in the other world was concrete, definite. If there was another world, then the African was about the only man really believing in it; and if there was no other world, then one could maintain an attitude of indifference toward the idea. But if there was one, then evidently one should do something about it. The African sincerely believed that there was another world and he was desperately trying to do something about it.
The tropic night fell suddenly and there was complete darkness; then, after a bit, the sky turned a pale, whitish color and the moon came out, a glowing yellow sphere. My room was damp, hot; I tried to sleep, my mind filled with tumbling brass coffins. I awakened the next morning feeling more fatigued than when I had gone to bed.
It was Sunday and the idea occurred to me to visit a Christian church and see, for the sake of contrast, how the followers of Jesus behaved themselves. The word “pagan” was beginning to have a real meaning for me now; it was against these desperate pagans that St. Paul had fought…. I could understand a Christian service; I knew its assumptions. In my wanderings I’d seen a Wesleyan Methodist church and I was determined to go there.
The service was under way as I entered rather timidly. I didn’t know if they had any special rules or not, so I stood discreetly at the back. A preacher was talking in a tribal tongue, quietly, with no gestures, no passion. To my astonishment the congregation was segregated: men sat on one side and women on another; young boys sat together and young girls did the same.
An usher showed me to a seat. I saw that the congregation wore their native clothes. The church was built of stone, but it had no panes in the windows; there was no need for any, for it never got cold here. The interior of the church was dim and I noticed that the ears of the women glowed softly with gold earrings. What a contrast to paganism! At the forefront of the church was the Cross, the symbol of Christianity, just as the Golden Stool was the symbol of the Akan religion. I recalled that frenzied pagan funeral I’d seen and I was kind of surprised that Protestant religion still existed. There was no fierce joy here, no dread, no anxiety; everything was taken for granted. The preacher’s voice droned on sedately, mildly. If religion partakes of the terror stemming from the proximity of human life to eternity, to an absolute otherness, then there was, by a hell of a long shot, much more genuine religion in that barbaric pagan funeral than I could feel in this quiet, bourgeois Christian church!
The choir rose and sang and I was disappointed. There was none of that snap and zip (and a little sexual suggestiveness!) which American Negroes manage to inject into their praises to God. The tones and volumes fell flat, and the singing was namby-pamby, singsongy, nasalized. The mood of their worship was a longing to be socially correct, and I felt that it was a crime to take a vital and earthy people like these and thwart and blunt their instincts—instincts which they sorely needed in their struggle to live against the odds of nature and the British! Even though the men and the women wore their native clothes, it was easy to see that they were striving to be middle class. Why was it that Christians always seemed to have money and comfort, when the symbol of Christ, half naked and bleeding on the Cross, evoked a sense of suffering in the world?
Being areligious myself, I preferred the religion I looked at to be interesting, with some of the real mystery, dread, and agony of existence in it. I’d much rather have heard the kind of singing that Paul Laurence Dunbar described in his poem “When Malindy Sings”:
She just opens her mouth and hollers,
“Come to Jesus,” ’til you hear
Sinners’ trembling steps and voices
Timidlike a-drawing near;
Then she turns to “Rock of Ages,”
Simply to the Cross she clings,
And you find your tears a-dropping
When Malindy sings.
But that Gold Coast hymn evoked in me merely a cough of embarrassment behind my cupped palms….
Of course, the pastor no doubt would have unctiously told me that there was no need now to suffer, that Christ had felt it all for us, had suffered the supreme penalty and had set us free by an act of grace. But was there not somewhere in such a rationalization a sneaking evasion, a dodge? How the Christians had their cake and ate it too! O poor pagans who lived the naked terror of life, spurning all the symbolic substitutions, without steady incomes, without comfortable clothes! They had no Christ to die for them; they had to sweat and suffer it all. My sympathies were with the pagans; the pagan was my kind of a Christian, the kind that the Christians hated and feared….
I left the church and got out into the sinful streets where naked little boys confronted you, begging for pennies. It would be to these that the future would have to look, these whose souls had not been stunted, whose sense of earthly pride had not been intimidated, and in whom the will to live still burned with undiminished fervor.
Religion has been only one aspect of the means by which the Gold Coast has been maintained as a captive nation for more than a hundred years. Just as the early Portuguese traders had sought to keep out sundry strangers, so the British have not been unmindful of stray foreigners or alien ideas knocking about in a domain so rich in gold. This isolation of even the Gold Coast intellectuals from the currents of modern thought has kept them from realizing how universal were their predicaments. With the exception of Nkrumah, the actions of their politicians were not informed by lessons drawn from other peoples and other countries; and, until the coming of Nkrumah, there was no attempt on the part of the British government officials to dramatize or publicize local events and enlist the comment or scrutiny of interested outsiders.
Another means by which the Gold Coast African had been led astray was by the British insistence, almost to the point of absurdity, upon the highest possible academic standards and qualifications for all kinds of work. This in itself, of course, was not at all bad; but the manner in which it was used was more a means of control than a means of enlightenment. Prior to 1948, education in the Gold Coast was not even remotely related to practical accomplishment or functional efficiency, or even to a comprehensive grasp of life; it smacked more of status, manners, class standing, “character,” and form…. The African leaving Oxford or Cambridge found all doors in Africa open to him; in an illiterate society, he was at once at the top of the heap; he did not have to accomplish anything to merit his position; it was his by right of his having absorbed certain acceptable qualifications…. Education therefore assumed a kind of religious tone capable of conferring upon its devotees, like the act of conversion, all the boons of life, of civilization. The result was that the psychological distance between the educated and uneducated became almost absolute in character, and among the illiterates there developed an attitude toward education that reeked of yearning, of pathos, of a ludicrous waiting….
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Conditioned to give as little of himself as possible when working for the British, living amidst a prodigious jungle abounding in great heat and humidity, the Gold Coast African has never been too strong an advocate of manual labor; and the British stress of “education” and “qualification” tended to reinforce in him the feeling that the most humiliating thing that could possibly happen to him was that he would have to work with his hands for a living. One of the first lessons that Nkrumah had to drive home was that technical education was not only respectable, but that it was one of the indispensable conditions for national freedom.
Of the value of the teachings of the missionaries as a technique of colonial control, Mr. W. E. G. Sekyi, president of the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, said explicitly:
“I’ve no way of telling what the average individual missionary was thinking when he preached his white paganism to us. All I can tell you is that such teaching and preaching supplemented and complemented the schemes of the merchants and the men of the colonial office. Its effect was to break the military traditions of our tribes. The missionaries used to inveigh against ‘Black Christmases,’ human sacrifices, etc., but they knew that our society was one organic whole, and that if you broke one part of our customs, you influenced them all. Their aim was to destroy our capacity for self-defense. Wherever the seeds of the Christian doctrine fell, the will to resist was weakened. And the missionary was careful in propounding his ‘glad tidings’ to us; he never went so far as to instruct us in regard to the concrete steps that we could take to become self-sufficient. His propositions dealt with the soul and obedience. Always he stopped short of imparting that kind of information that would lead to activities that made for self-reliance and the independence of our people….”
Black Power Page 16