If the American Negro retained, in part and for a time, remnants of his background of traditional African attitudes, it was because he couldn’t see or feel or trust (at that moment in history) any other system of value or belief that could interpret the world and make it meaningful enough for him to act and rely upon it. What the social scientist should seek for are not “African survivals” at all, but the persistence and vitality of primal attitudes and the social causes thereof. And he would discover that the same primal attitudes exist among other people; after all, what are the basic promptings of artists, poets, and actors but primal attitudes consciously held?
Thirty-Four
I left Nkawkaw in rain pouring from a sky that was at the level of the treetops, and the dark green vegetation filled the universe. Rice fields, rubber and coffee plantations, men, women, and children heaved into sight and vanished. I asked Kojo the meaning of those oblong smoking packages held high above the heads of the people and he told me that there were many farmers who, living far back of the highway, had no matches and came down to seek homes having fires; and, when they found one, they lighted their dry sticks or charcoal, wrapped them carefully in palm leaves as protection against the rain, and walked, holding them aloft, going home to make a fire….
The area through which I was passing was thickly populated and was about forty miles from Kumasi, the capital of Ashanti, the home of the most stubborn and warlike of all the Akan people. But, if they were belligerent, they revealed none of it in their facial expressions which, if anything, seemed detached. The hard red clay road was dangerously slippery during rain and the car lurched and skidded. The Africans trudging in the rain had no covering for their heads except those lucky enough to be carrying ballooning burdens of yams or calabashes which, of course, they balanced upon their skulls….
At about eleven o’clock in the morning I came to Ejisu, a village some ten miles from Kumasi. This quiet, drowsy cluster of houses was known in the old days as the “fetish capital” of Ashanti. It was from this village, in 1900, that Queen Ashantuah, the Queen Mother of Ejisu, emerged to lead a vast army against the British in what was to be the fifth and last British-Ashanti war.
In 1896 the British had entered Kumasi with a strong military force whose object was, to quote Wynyard Montagu Hall, a British officer who participated in that campaign, to “put an end to human sacrifice, slave trading, and raiding, to secure peace and security for the neighboring tribes, and to exact payment of the balance of the war indemnity of 1874.” The real aim, of course, was to bring Ashanti into the British Empire by force and to forestall the imperialistic aims of France and Germany. But such intentions could not be publicly stated.
Sir Francis Scott, the leader of the expedition, informed the King of Ashanti, King Prempeh, that he was to submit himself and his people in accordance with “native forms and customs” to the Governor of the Colony, who was then en route to Kumasi.
The Ashanti knew that this meant the end of the sovereignty of their kingdom, but, the British military forces pitted against them being formidable, they complied. King Prempeh bared his body to the waist, the Ashanti sign of humility, and embraced the Governor’s feet, an act of abject surrender which the Ashanti had never suffered before. The British then read a long list of demands which the Ashanti, though conquered, claimed that they could not fulfil.
The King, the Queen Mother, the King’s father, his two uncles, his brother, the war chiefs of Mampong, Ejisu, and Ofinsu were at once seized by the British and shipped to the coast. The Ashanti population was numb with amazement. With King Prempeh in captivity, the British now proceeded to break up the African kingdom, making separate treaties with the tribal states.
The population seethed at what they felt to be a gross betrayal and proceeded forthwith to prepare for war. On March 28, 1900, Sir Frederic Hodgson—with Lady Hodgson, a party of Europeans, and a few native soldiers—entered Kumasi and made his famous demand for the Golden Stool, a demand which the assembled chiefs listened to in silence. The Governor sent a military expedition to hunt for the Stool and, on the 24th of April, the Ashanti signaled their determination to resist with force by cutting the telegraph line between Kumasi and Cape Coast…. The Governor and his party fled to the fort which was quickly surrounded by enraged Ashanti. Natives seized the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, one of the richest in the world.
Many of the Ashanti states remained neutral or actually helped the British, but the tribes around Kumasi answered the call of black Queen Ashantuah of Ejisu and made an unsuccessful attack upon the fort. Meanwhile, the British sent out a frantic call to Central and West Africa for troops. In London the press played up the rescue of the Governor and the “besieged white ladies and missionaries,” but the journalists omitted to mention that the freeing of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation was the most immediate objective of the British military forces….
With an army of 20,000 men fanned out and blocking the approaches to Kumasi, Queen Ashantuah’s aim was to stall and harass the British troops pending the arrival of the rainy season. If, however, the British tried to force their way to Kumasi to free the Governor and his party, she would trap them…. In fact, the holding of the Governor was a deliberate attempt to entice the British to attack the Queen’s army…. The Queen, with her drums of state, her loyal chiefs, and her soldiers, lay athwart the road to Kumasi at a point about a mile from Esumeja.
From the fort the Governor sent native runners with frantic appeals for help. Food and water were dwindling daily. Would those desperate appeals lure the British into the old sly Queen’s trap? She waited in sun and rain, praying for time, offering counsel to her chiefs and soldiers. But the British were wary; they knew that a trap had been laid for them and they camped and waited for reinforcements.
The jungle and the rain, the allies of the Ashanti, created in the British a sense of dread, making them feel that the enemy was everywhere. Illness too took its toll of the white men who looked upon West Africa as “the white man’s grave.” Against the Dane guns of the Ashanti, the British had carbines, incendiary shells, and 75-mm guns. The only advantages of the Ashanti were their numbers and a fanatical love of their country.
As the British troops huddled in the jungle rain at night, they could hear the war drums of the Ashanti and they could not sleep. Continuously threatening attack, with her war drums vibrating twenty-four hours a day, the black Queen launched a war of nerves against the enemy. It was rumored that she was sacrificing human beings to her ancestors, propitiating them for victory. (I checked this in Kumasi and highly placed Africans told me that it was true!) And the British soldiers knew that if they were captured, they would be decapitated and their blood would be smeared on the sacred skeletons of the long-dead Ashanti kings that lay in the dreaded mausoleum at Bantama…!
Throughout the rainy jungle nights the Death Drum of Queen Ashantuah would sound three times:
“BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”
That meant that a victim had been selected, his cheeks thrust through with knives to keep him from hurling a curse at his executioners or the Queen.
An interval of time would elapse, and then the Death Drum would sound:
“BOOM! BOOM!”
And that would mean that the victim was prepared.
“BOOM!”
This single dreadful sound would indicate that the head had rolled from the victim’s body. Most of these victims were captured enemies, slaves, and convicts saved for the express purpose of sacrifice. But this did not lessen the terror struck in the hearts of British troops who shivered and wished that they were home in London or Leeds…. Night after night they listened to those drums and they knew what was happening. And the Governor’s letters appealing for aid, smuggled out by native runners, continued to pour in upon the British troops and commanders.
April and May passed. June came. From Southern Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, Sierra Leone, from England, and from Central Africa British troops were rushing. Above all, the British yea
rned for the arrival of white troops, for it had long been proved that black troops fared badly against the ferocious Ashanti warriors. But how long could the Governor and his party of missionaries and white ladies hold out?
At daybreak on June 23, the Governor, feeling that he could wait no longer, took his soldiers and his party and stole out of the fort, plunging into the jungle, heading for the coast. The Governor felt that any jungle fate was better than falling into the hands of the determined Ashanti.
It was on the 22nd of July that the British threw their fully assembled forces against the Ashanti and finally routed the old Queen and her army, though fighting continued in different parts of the country until the end of the year. It was no accident that a black Queen was the last Ashanti to stand against the forces of Europe in the Gold Coast, for, in the hands of Ashanti women the religion of the nation rested. It was they who instilled in the young the meaning of their rituals, their festivals, and their sacrifices….
Though the Ashanti were defeated, it is doubtful if the British aim of modifying the tribal religion was actually achieved; indeed, one could ask if the British attack did not have as its final result the driving of the tribal religion deeper into the people? Just how many human sacrifices Queen Ashantuah made to propitiate her ancestors to come to her aid are not known; but, if she was offering these hapless victims as atonement to her ancestors, might she not have been led to do so because the British were attacking? It might well be that British policy stimulated precisely what it sought to defeat.
Had the Akan people been able to look objectively upon British achievements, had they been in a position to weigh and judge the value of British institutions without fear of British aggression, they might have voluntarily altered many of their religious practices without outside threat or persuasion. I’m inclined to believe that Nkrumah will achieve in months what the British failed to achieve in many long decades with their smoking guns and “indirect rule.”
Thirty-Five
How different Kumasi is from Accra! A brooding African city, hilly, sprawling, vital…You get the feeling that the white man is far away. The population is about 70,000 and there is a mood of quiet confidence in the air. This is the heart of historic Negrodom; it was from here that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of slaves were marched down to the coast and sold to white traders; it was here that the Negroes stood stalwart against the British in war after war; it was here that the idea of a black empire once agitated the minds of Negroes; it was from here that raids, fierce and unmerciful, were visited upon neighboring tribes—raids that left no hut standing, no men free, no children living, no women unchatteled, no crops growing. It was from here that tribute was levied upon the outlying tribal states—states that were subjected so long and steadily that in time they felt that their loyalty to the Asantehene was being given of their own free will.
It was here that the great fetish men of the kingdom lived, each with his special array of gods, his strange powers; it was here that the bones of the dead kings reposed in brass coffins, each coffin having a “ghost wife,” that is, a woman whose life was dedicated to cooking and serving food to the bones of the dead king…. It was here that the sacrificial victims were brought, their heads lopped off, their blood caught in huge brass pans and laved lovingly over those dead kings’ bones, presumably to give them life, to propitiate their care and love for the stability and prosperity of the Ashanti kingdom. It was from here that calls went out for war—and woe to the chief who refused to furnish his quota of troops, slaves, carriers, gold, and sacrificial victims….
The Ashanti, short, black, reddish of eye and quick of tongue, is a hard man to deal with. He stands rooted in the world of his strange culture and looks out at you, waiting, judging. He kowtows to no standard but that of his own pride. Christian church steeples rise through the white mist from the hills of the city, but the mood of the people is pagan. The symbol of the Golden Stool—upon which no man sits but which itself lies upon its side upon a special throne of its own—is the magic that makes more than a million people one. Ashanti is vaguely Oriental; there is something hidden here, a soul that shrinks from revealing itself. The Ashanti are polite, but aloof, willing to do business with you, but when business is over, they turn from you. They will learn the codes of the Western world and will practice them; but when day is done they go back to their own.
Kumasi is the core of what young Africans love to term “Divine Communism” it is here that the matrilineal conception of the family rules in matters pertaining to inheritance and descent, where the nephew or brother inherits the stool, where, even if you don’t work, you can eat, that is, if you’re black and belong to the clan. It’s here that even until today society is basically religious, military, and political—all one organic whole under a fierce patriarchal leadership sanctioned by the “mystic” powers of woman. The law that obtains in the family is the religion and the constitution of the state. In that society all men are soldiers and are sworn from infancy to die for the state; all women are destined by the magic of the moon and the stars to bear many children, to rear them and transmit to them the religion of the state. No man is free unless he accepts society’s grim mandates; and no man would dream of violating the taboos, which are many and varied; if he did violate them, he’d be put beyond the pale….
With the exception of a mission society here and there, the main streets are lined with European stores: The United Africa Company, the United Trading Company, Barclays Bank, the British Bank of West Africa, Kingsway Stores, etc. As in Accra, there are many Indian and Syrian establishments. African business firms are conspicuous by their shabby triviality. Less vibrant than Takoradi, moodier than Accra, dreamier than Koforidua, Kumasi has huge black vultures wheeling in its cloudy sky all day long.
I stopped at a dank and musty African hotel. Night fell and a clamor rose from the street below my window. Children screeched and played games. Downstairs a band played Western dance music. From far off came the dull throb of a beating drum. Tired, I closed my eyes and, it seemed, a moment later I was awake and staring at a dull, daylight sky.
It’s six o’clock, but the streets are alive. Out of my hotel window I see an African family beginning the day in their front yard, which is a combination of bathroom, kitchen, dining room, and living room. The mother, nude to the waist, is bent over washing dishes in a tin pan that rests upon the red clay ground. An old woman sits on her stool and is combing her hair. Another woman kneels and is fanning a charcoal fire. A man is chopping kindling. Three children are squatting on the red earth, playing. A tall black girl is pounding corn in a vast wooden vat.
Enervated from the heat and dampness, I had to urge myself against my will to visit the offices of the leading opposition paper, the Ashanti Pioneer. The editor turned out to be fluent, putting himself at my disposal.
“How are things looking to you?” I asked him. “How do you feel about these impending changes?”
He drew a deep breath, shot me a glance, then laughed an African laugh; but at once he was solemn.
“What progress we make ought to be built upon our own institutions,” he said. “We have our own traditions. It’s a bad policy to impose the West upon us. Leave us alone to work out our destiny, to develop as our inward bent directs us.”
Mr. John Tsiboe is in his early forties; he is the owner and publisher of his paper which has been appearing for fourteen years.
“What do you think of political parties as instruments of the popular will?”
“For us, the introduction of the party system was much too soon,” he declared. “And that’s the consensus of opinion in Ashanti. Now, it’s not widely known, but the British offered us the party system before Nkrumah came along. We refused it. It clashes with our deepest traditions. We rejected it because it divides us. Our outlook upon life is based upon social cohesion.
“The Convention People’s Party won, but the British are now using that party in the same manner that they once used the ch
iefs. The present government is for British interests; it’s the same situation with the chiefs in reverse….
“Until recently, I didn’t know what politics was. We Africans still don’t know. In its election campaign, the Convention People’s Party painted everybody black and white; all who were for the Convention People’s Party were white, those who were against it were black bribe-takers, agents of imperialism…. Our simple tribal people believed it all.
“Do you realize that, for six weeks during the positive action period, my home and office had to be protected by the police? The Convention People’s Party so incited the population that I lived in fear of my life….”
The more I talked with the Ashanti, the more I sensed tension. These people had once ruled themselves for centuries and now they were embroiled in something which they did not understand, something which they had no preparation to accept. Bewildered and disillusioned, they thought one moment of out-Nkrumahing Nkrumah, of going to the masses and organizing against him; but the next moment they remembered their hallowed traditions of unity and they shrank and felt guilty. They knew that the victory of the Convention People’s Party had multiplied their enemies: they now had the modern, streamlined Convention People’s Party against them and the armed might of the British.
Next morning I visited the British District Commissioner’s office to pay my respects, a formality with which foreigners were supposed to comply. I found a stoutish, brisk, pleasant enough man. Our chat was interrupted when his telephone rang.
“Excuse me a moment, will you?” he asked me.
“Go right ahead,” I said.
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