A CRITICAL BACKGROUND
“Some ancestor of mine came from that selfsame coast I trust and begat with some Englishman who was a blacksmith I hear. Thus—my English name—and ‘my African Loyalty.’ ”
—LORRAINE HANSBERRY,
notes on the anniversary of
Ghanaian independence
I do not know when, specifically, Lorraine Hansberry’s abiding interest in Africa began, but it is certain that by the time I met her she was, at twenty-one, one of a handful of Americans who could be said to be truly knowledgeable in the subject. Africa had been a conscious part of her almost as far back as consciousness itself. And this was no accident.
She remembered vividly seeing newsreels of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia when she was five, and crying over them and, when the Pope blessed Mussolini’s soldiers, being told by her mother “never to forget what Catholicism stood for.” She recalled hours as a girl spent “postulating and fantasizing … over maps of the African continent.” In an unfinished partly autobiographical novel she wrote:
In her emotions she was sprung from the Southern Zulu and the Central Pygmy, the Eastern Watusi and the treacherous slave-trading Western Ashanti themselves. She was Kikuyu and Masai, ancient cousins of hers had made the exquisite forged sculpture at Benin, while surely even more ancient relatives sat upon the throne at Abu Simbel watching over the Nile.…
She recalled studying news photos out of modern Africa and turning to the mirror—“searching, searching for a generality.” But Lorraine said of the heroine: “She did not find it and therefore did the next best thing: she embraced all Africa as the homeland.”
It is possible that her earliest serious influence in this regard was that of her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, one of the world’s foremost scholars of African antiquity, whose preeminence is only now beginning to emerge out of imposed academic darkness as the once Dark Continent itself moves toward the center of world events. Through Professor Hansberry’s classes and living room in the 1940s passed such students as Nnamdi Azikewe, first president of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and others soon to become the founders and leaders of new African nations. In 1963, Nigeria dedicated the new Hansberry College of African Studies at Nsakka in honor of Professor Hansberry.
In 1951 Lorraine Hansberry was a young woman on fire with black liberation not only here but in Africa, an insurgent with a vision that embraced two continents—and notebooks filled with jottings like the following:
Sometimes in this country maybe just walking down a Southside street.…
Or maybe suddenly up in a Harlem window.…
Or maybe in a flash turning the page of one of those picture books from the South you will see it
—Beauty … stark and full.…
No part of something this—but rather, Africa, simply Africa. These thighs and arms and flying wingèd cheekbones, these hallowed eyes—without negation or apology.…
A classical people demand a classical art.
She was a voracious reader of everything in African studies she could lay her hands on: such works as Jomo Kenyatta’s great sociological study of the Kikuyu, Facing Mt. Kenya; Melville J. Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past; W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Folk Then and Now; Lorenzo D. Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, which traced the survivals of West African languages in the Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands; and Basil Davidson’s Lost Cities of Africa, which described the great civilizations that were to surface in Beneatha Younger’s brash (but factual) announcement in A Raisin in the Sun that her “people … were the first to smelt iron on the face of the earth … performing surgical operations when the English were still tattooing themselves with blue dragons!”
At the time, she was completing a seminar on African history under Dr. Du Bois, who, among his innumerable accomplishments, was the father of Pan-Africanism, the man who, as a disillusioned delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference, initiated the first world Pan-African Congresses. Under Du Bois’ tutelage, she wrote a research paper on “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History and Its Peoples.” References in Les Blancs to “chopping off the right hands of our young men by the hundreds, by the tribe” were, in fact, based upon the actual “preventive” methods King Leopold employed to eliminate resistance. And when in the play she mentions Stanley and Livingstone, the point of reference was not characters seen in a movie, but in Stanley’s case a man whose work she had actually studied.*
As first a reporter, then associate editor, of Paul Robeson’s monthly, Freedom, Lorraine shared offices in the early fifties in the building at 53 W. 125th Street, with, among other instrumentalities of the black freedom struggle in that day, the Council on African Affairs, and thus found herself a frequent close working associate of such men as Du Bois, W. Alpheus Hunton, Director of the Council, and Robeson himself. Through the offices of Freedom and into our home in those years (and after) came incredible young men and women, exiles from South Africa and the Rhodesias, exchange students from Kenya, the Gold Coast (as colonial Ghana was known then), Sierra Leone and Nigeria, not a few of whom were to become leaders in the fight for independence, and some no doubt to die in colonial prisons. And often we would find ourselves by their sides on picket lines before the United Nations or one or another European consulate in protest of South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre, the French war in Algeria, or—uppermost in all our minds in those days—the British campaign in Kenya, where mass concentration camps, terror bombing and the strafing and burning of villages were employed a dozen years before Vietnam. Lorraine was a close observer of the five-month trial of Jomo Kenyatta, spokesman of the demand for land restitution and self-government in Kenya. At street-corner meetings in Harlem, as in the pages of Freedom and frequent letters to the press, she questioned whether the trial, and in fact the entire British campaign, was in fact directed at the sporadic and, until Kenyatta’s arrest, quite isolated incidents of so-called “Mau-Mau” terror (as Lorraine would point out, the words “Mau-Mau” do not exist in any East African language), or at Kenyatta’s powerful and fast growing Kenya Africa union, whose mass public meetings were attracting hundreds of thousands in the months preceding his incarceration. She circulated petitions for Kenyatta’s release from banishment to a remote desert village, and later shared with the visiting Tom Mboya her sense of triumph when Kenyatta at last stepped from exile to the prime ministership of his nation.
I remember how odd it seemed to some in those early years to hear Lorraine talk with absolute certainty of the “coming” upsurge for independence. For in those days not much had changed in a continent that seemed as Dark and remote from twentieth-century revolution as ever. There was occasional talk of plebiscites, promised in unheard-of places and, of course, the wars in Kenya and Algeria—about which Albert Camus was predicting, in the unthinkable event of independence, “a land of ruins and dead which no force, no power in the world, will be capable of reviving in this century.” But apart from that, not much. The African in shirt and tie, much less with gun or Constitution or governmental robes, remained an “exotic” stranger on Western horizons, while few indeed were those Americans, black or white, who linked their destiny to Africa.
Thus, when A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959, it must have puzzled many—though not those who knew the author—that out of the lips of a Southside chauffeur in his first moment of envisioned (if drunken) grandeur on the Broadway stage, should suddenly spurt the call to greatness of an African chieftain to his “Black Brothers … [who] meet in council for the coming of the mighty war!” Or that the chauffeur’s teenage sister should march on stage in a full-fledged Afro. Or that, most baffling of all, into their ghetto tenement home should stride an African student with dreams of “freedom,” “revolution,” and the solidarity of colored peoples—to sweep the sister off her feet and become, in the process, the playwright’s most articulate spokesman.
But Raisin was only the precursor. For, two weeks before it opened, Lorrai
ne Hansberry, in her first formal public address as a writer, defined the course that, for her, lay ahead:
… more than anything else, the compelling obligation of the Negro writer, as writer and citizen of life, is participation in the intellectual affairs of all men, everywhere. The foremost enemy of the Negro intelligentsia of the past has been and in a large sense remains—isolation.… The unmistakable roots of the universal solidarity of the colored peoples of the world are no longer “predictable” as they were in my father’s time—they are here. And I for one, as a black woman in the United States in the mid-Twentieth Century, feel that I am more typical of the present temperament of my people than not, when I say that I cannot allow the devious purposes of white supremacy to lead me to any conclusion other than what may be the most robust and important one of our time: that the ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African peoples and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever.
From these words to Les Blancs—the first major work by a black American playwright to focus on Africa and the struggle for black liberation—the path was inevitable.
Les Blancs first began to form in the playwright’s mind sometime in the late spring or summer of 1960. Her earliest workbook jottings refer to “the return of Candace for her mother’s funeral” and the confrontation between her brother Shembe (as she spelled it then) and Abioseh over the funeral. (Interestingly, “Candace” was also the name she gave the heroine of her semiautobiographical novel All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors.) The notes indicate that Tshembe was a committed revolutionary as first conceived; they describe a confrontation with an American newspaperman, and conclude with a projected scene in which Eric, the youngest brother, “chooses Shembe and with sister blows up Mission—and the past.”
It was not, however, until May 1961 that the elements began to move into focus and the play to find its final shape and title. This was in immediate visceral response to Jean Genet’s celebrated drama Les Nègres (The Blacks), which had its American premiere that month. The title was chosen half in jest, for the work-in-progress bore no direct relation to the Frenchman’s tour de force, not in style or technique, nor certainly in the events and characters depicted. Yet the pun masked a deeper concern. More than anything else, she considered The Blacks “a conversation between white men about themselves.” A needed conversation perhaps, important in that for the first time it dared to face the depths of the problem and the hatred which three hundred years of the rape of Africa had produced. But nonetheless a conversation haunted by guilt, and too steeped in the romance of racial exoticism to shed much light on the real confrontation that was coming:
The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it is this which threatens existence. And it is this which Genet evades with an abstraction: an elaborate legend utilized to affirm, indeed, entrench, the quite different nature of pain, lust, cruelty, ambition presumed to exist in the blacks.…
In The Blacks the oppressed remain unique. The Blacks remain the exotic “The Blacks.” And we are spared thereby the ultimate anguish—of man’s oppression of man.
Whereas:
To have had to deal with human beings … would have been to confront Guilt with a greater imperative: the necessity for action—that is, to do something about it. The too easy purgation of the Whites—self-condemning and self-absolving—the untouched remoteness of the Blacks—would be nullified by a drama wherein we were all forced to confrontation and awareness.
In Les Blancs, Lorraine undertook to write that drama.
As much as anything in life, and increasingly in these years, she felt the urgent need for dialogue and concerted action if the coming struggle for power in the world, the struggle for liberation, were not to degenerate into, in effect, a racial war.
It is part of the point of Les Blancs that, in spite of the three hundred years, men must talk; they must establish a dialogue whose purpose is neither procrastination nor ego fulfillment but clarity, and whose culminating point is action: to find the means, in an age of revolution, to reduce the cost in human sacrifice and make the transition as swift and painless as possible.
At the turn of the century, Du Bois had written the words which ironically undergird and echo through every agonizing moment of contemporary history: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Les Blancs was an effort to examine in dramatic terms—in terms of individual human responsibility—precisely what that meant. It was an effort to come to grips on the highest possible level with the problem of color and colonialism not just here in America, not even in Africa, but on a world scale: to determine to what degree color was—and was not—the root cause of the conflict. And thus to confront head-on the impending crisis between the capitalist West and the Third World.
Lorraine considered Les Blancs to be potentially her most important play and hoped originally that it might precede The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window to the stage. Yet though a number of drafts were written, the strict demands of craftsmanship sufficient to the theme were, in her eyes, not satisfied.
In 1963, what was to remain essentially Act One, Scene Three, was staged for the Actors Studio Writers’ Workshop by Arthur Penn, with Roscoe Lee Browne as Tshembe, Arthur Hill as Charlie, Rosemary Murphy as Marta and Pearl Primus as the Woman Dancer. The stunned response of the audience of actors and writers—I am told it was one of the most extraordinary sessions ever held at the Studio—confirmed her sense of the power of what was already on paper, but also confirmed some of her doubts. A good deal remained to be done.
At the same time, Africa itself was changing from what had been yesterday’s dreams into today’s reality. Clearly this did not affect the perspective, but it did change the shadings, bringing to the fore, for example, conflicts of method between the capitals of Europe and the white settlers of Africa, and putting into bolder relief internal antagonisms among the blacks as the struggle for formal independence, once achieved, became transformed into a more fundamental struggle for control of one’s own economy, resources, destiny. The character Abioseh loomed larger in the scales as the death of Lumumba in the Congo, and the rise of men like Moise Tshombe, Kasavubu and Mobuto, made inescapable what had always been implicit: the tenacity of Western capital interests and the fact that blacks could be as opportunistic and dangerous in serving them as whites.
All through her last year and a half, then, as Sidney Brustein proceeded toward production, Lorraine kept at Les Blancs—at the typewriter when she could, in notes and discussion when she couldn’t. She carried the manuscript with her into and out of hospitals—polishing, pondering, rethinking a scene here, refining a relationship there, but above all, seeking a multileveled structure, taut yet flexible enough to contain and focus the complexity of personalities, social forces and ideas in this world she had created. In her last working months she cracked the problem to her own satisfaction and outlined in our discussions (during these sessions, I acted as soundingboard-advocate-critic) the major structural and character developments she envisioned. After her death, as literary executor, I continued the work: synthesizing the scenes already completed throughout the play with those in progress, drawing upon relevant fragments from earlier drafts and creating, as needed, dialogue of my own to bridge gaps, deepen relationships or tighten the drama along the lines we had explored together.
In 1966, a preliminary draft was completed. Then, as the play moved toward production, I was fortunate in having the assistance of a number of friends and associates whose critical and creative contributions proved invaluable: Ossie Davis, actor, playwright, activist, who worked with me in preparation for a first—and as it turned out, abortive—production; Charlotte Zaltzberg, who came as a secretary but, in short order, became an incisive collaborator in the preparation of all of Lorraine’s work for production and publication; Konrad Matthaei, the producer who, with his wife Gay, brought the play to the stage out of a deep and unstinting belief in what it had to sa
y; Joseph Stein, author of Fiddler on the Roof, whose vast skill helped to solve crucial problems in the final weeks of production; Sidney Walters, the director who cast the play, gave it its overall look and interpretation and was responsible for some of its most memorable moments; and John Berry, the director who brought tremendous vitality and artistry to the process of compression and heightening out of which the play emerged in its final form on stage.
Somewhere in these pages each of these individuals has left his mark. Yet, except in the sense that all theater is—to one degree or another—collaborative, neither their contributions nor my own should obscure the paramount fact that Les Blancs in its conception, characters, events and ideas, its most penetrating speeches, the great bulk of its dialogue—and in the vision that informs it throughout—is the work of Lorraine Hansberry.
—ROBERT NEMIROFF, 1972
A Note about the 1983 Edition
An off-Broadway showcase production in 1980 provided the opportunity to take a fresh look at Les Blancs on stage—in particular, to reconsider some material which had been cut from the original production for reasons relating less to text than to the dynamics of that particular mounting—and to sharpen the focus of some passages with small cuts and clarifications. The present edition incorporates these changes.
—R.N., 1983
A Note about the 1994 Edition
Les Blancs has been presented in major productions since 1980: at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 1988 and at Huntington Theatre in Boston in 1989. The play continues to evolve onstage. The present literary text, however, is the final product of Robert Nemiroff’s editing in 1983.
—JGN, 1994
* The bibliography included Sir H. M. Stanley’s The Founding of the Congo Free State, as well as such works as Sir Harry Johnston’s George Grenfell and the Congo, Guy Burrows’ The Curse of Central Africa, the Belgian Tourist Bureau’s A Traveler’s Guide to the Belgian Congo and Ruanda Urundi, and Belgian Colonial Policy by Albert de Vleeschauer, Colonial Minister of Belgium.
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