Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

  ABIOSEH At St. Cyprian’s he will be educated.

  TSHEMBE He might also become a priest.

  (He bites the apple)

  ABIOSEH And that is a horrible possibility?

  TSHEMBE Horrible.

  ABIOSEH TO give one’s life to God …

  TSHEMBE To my knowledge it has never been proved that it is He who enjoys the gift! (Picks up the other’s Bible)

  ABIOSEH (Whirling) You would be better off, my brother, if your Christian teachings had been more forceful!

  TSHEMBE I never thought much of Christian forcefulness.

  ABIOSEH That is what you think, but God is raging in you, fighting for you!

  TSHEMBE (Slamming the book shut) Why does He always tell you and not me what He is doing! (He gets up and crosses away)

  ABIOSEH In any case, Eric will return with me.

  ERIC No. I am staying here—where I belong! (To TSHEMBE, pleading) They call me by the name my mother gave me—

  TSHEMBE (Derisively) —Ngedi!

  ERIC Yes. Ngedi. They have asked me to take the oath.

  ABIOSEH “They?”

  ERIC Peter …

  (Knowing suddenly he should not have said it. ERIC and TSHEMBE exchange glances)

  ABIOSEH Peter? (ERIC rushes off) Ah yes … Peter. (Remembering) “… We do not recruit Europeans …” Tshembe, you knew this? But why? He works for them. They trust him …

  TSHEMBE Abioseh, you really don’t understand any of it, do you?

  ABIOSEH I understand he must be stopped!

  TSHEMBE Why?

  ABIOSEH It is creatures like that who make it impossible for us.

  TSHEMBE “Us”?

  ABIOSEH For responsible men. (TSHEMBE shoots him a look and turns away. ABIOSEH stops him)—Practical men who know how to bide their time—who understand there is only one way to power here. Tshembe, when the blood of this hour is past, when order and reason are restored to these hills, the West will compromise because they must. The government at Zatembe will call upon us, because they cannot go on in the old way. And then, my brother, it will be our time! Black men will sit beside the settlers. Black magistrates, black ministers, black officers! Responsible leaders—

  TSHEMBE (Turning to him slowly as if for all time and all comprehension) You are altogether committed to them, aren’t you?

  ABIOSEH I am committed to God, to civilization—and to Africa! Yes, Africa, my brother—

  TSHEMBE (Quietly, the controlled precision of a scalpel) The American blacks have a name for those like you, Abioseh, but it lacks … magnitude! (He starts away, turns back) Perhaps among the twelve disciples of your Jesus—a better one might be found!

  ABIOSEH Yes, Tshembe—but it is not I who am Judas! It is you who have sold yourself to Europe! It is I who chose Africa! Tshembe, Tshembe … I have watched you and listened to you and desperately wished that you would share my goals for our people. I have waited and prayed. But you believe in nothing! You act on nothing! You have put man on God’s throne—but you serve neither God nor man!

  (ABIOSEH turns on his heel and starts out)

  TSHEMBE Where are you going?

  ABIOSEH I must go.

  TSHEMBE Go!? Go where?

  ABIOSEH To see Major Rice.

  TSHEMBE Peter …!

  ABIOSEH (Turning to him) They are murderers, Tshembe. Murderers!

  TSHEMBE Abioseh, stay out of this. It is not your affair!

  ABIOSEH (Taking hold of him) It is both our affair. Tshembe, come with me!

  TSHEMBE (Breaking free) He is an elder. He helped to raise us. They will kill him, Abioseh …

  ABIOSEH I must go.

  (ABIOSEH starts out. TSHEMBE grabs him)

  TSHEMBE NO!

  (They grapple and at last TSHEMBE flings him to the ground and grabs up the spear to hold him there)

  ABIOSEH Then you must use the spear!

  TSHEMBE Abioseh, there is butchering on both sides. Stay out of this!

  ABIOSEH Christ leaves me no option.

  (ABIOSEH rises and stands tall in his righteousness, inviting the blow)

  TSHEMBE Abioseh! We sat together as children and watched the fire and spoke of what we’d become as men. Look at us now!

  ABIOSEH (Advancing on the spear until it rests against his breast) Then use the spear. Because that is the side you have chosen. The side of terror, the side of blood. I make you your brother’s keeper!

  (The two brothers stand, facing each other. ABIOSEH sweeps past him and exits)

  Blackout

  ACT TWO

  SCENE 5

  Not quite an hour later. The Mission.

  CHARLIE’s portable is open before him on the veranda. He types rapidly, then rips out and crumples the page. DEKOVEN looks up from the drink he is nursing.

  CHARLIE No cable. No mail. No phones. I wish to God there was something I could do.

  DEKOVEN Mr. Morris, you really must learn to give up. You are sitting there, still harboring the fugitive hope that sooner or later Torvald Neilsen will walk out of that jungle and announce, “I have been to Zatembe to intercede for Kumalo!” Isn’t that so?

  CHARLIE (Smiles) It was only a thought—

  (TSHEMBE enters)

  TSHEMBE Mr. Morris! Dr. DeKoven. Is Peter here?

  DEKOVEN He went cross river early this morning.

  TSHEMBE Then I must wait. Do you mind?

  DEKOVEN Of course not.

  CHARLIE (As TSHEMBE turns away) Tshembe—

  TSHEMBE (With polite finality) Mr. Morris.

  (He sits on a stump at some distance. CHARLIE at last turns back to DEKOVEN)

  CHARLIE You know, I care about this place. Very much.

  DEKOVEN I do not doubt that.

  CHARLIE You said something the other day. About how coming here had “saved your life.” Did you mean that?

  DEKOVEN For whatever little that’s worth

  CHARLIE Well. Obviously a great deal to a good many people.

  DEKOVEN Some other age will have to know that, Mr. Morris. I don’t.

  CHARLIE Why not, Doctor?

  DEKOVEN Mr. Morris, there is a hospital for Europeans only seventy-five miles from here. Entirely modern. Here things are lashed together with vines from the jungle. Surely you must have wondered why.

  CHARLIE Well, I assumed I knew why—that it was obvious …

  DEKOVEN Is it? Electric lines between here and Zatembe could be laid within weeks, a road in six months. The money exists. All over the world people donate to Missions like this. It is not obvious, not obvious at all

  CHARLIE But I thought the African wouldn’t come if it were different. Marta—

  DEKOVEN (With a gentle smile) Marta is two things, Mr. Morris: a very competent surgeon and a saint; but she questions nothing very deeply. One of the first things that the new African nations have done is to set up modern hospitals when they can. The Africans go to them so freely that they are severely overcrowded, so something is wrong with Marta’s quaint explanation, don’t you think?

  CHARLIE Apparently.

  DEKOVEN (With great acuteness and irony) Mr. Morris, the struggle here has not been to push the African into the Twentieth Century—but at all costs to keep him away from it! We do not look down on the black because we really think he is lazy, we look down on him because he is wise enough to resent working for us. The problem, therefore, has been how not to educate him at all and—at the same time—teach him just enough to turn a dial and know which mining lever to raise. It has been as precise as that—and that much a failure. Because, of course, it is impossible! When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists—nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven. That is part of what is happening here. (Drinking and looking off) But only part.

  TSHEMBE (Swinging around and smiling slightly) You seem disturbed, Mr. Morris—

  CHARLIE Well, it’s simply that—well, it takes a hell of a lot of education to turn a backward people into—How many people in this village can eve
n read?

  TSHEMBE Read what? Drums? Everyone. Books? Six, eight, a dozen at most.

  CHARLIE (Sitting back, confirmed) Well, then.

  DEKOVEN (Smiling) Morris, this Mission has been here forty years. It takes perhaps twenty-five to educate a generation. If you look around you will find not one African doctor. (Shrugs) Until they govern themselves it will be no different.

  CHARLIE (Nods) And the … “other part”? You said there was another part, DeKoven—?

  DEKOVEN (Rising and moving about like a man possessed, reliving the past) The other part has to do with the death of a fantasy. I came here twelve years ago believing that I could—it seems so incredible now—help alleviate suffering by participating actively in the very institutions that help sustain it.

  CHARLIE You’re not suggesting that lives have not been saved here, Doctor? Why, you alone …

  DEKOVEN Oh, I have saved hundreds of lives; all of us here have. I have arrested gangrene, removed tumors, pulled forth babies—and, in so doing, if you will please try to understand, I have helped provide the rationale for genocide.

  CHARLIE Genocide!? Come on now, DeKoven, you can’t really—

  DEKOVEN Mr. Morris, colonial subjects die mainly from a way of life. The incidentals—gangrene, tumors, stillborn babies—are only that: incidentals. Our work—(He interlocks his fingers)—reinforces the way of life. But when you come with a faith, an ideal of service, it is impossible to believe that. It was, at first, for me. But I saw my first delegations my first year here.

  CHARLIE Delegations?

  DEKOVEN Yes, at that time they were always sending delegations with a petition of some sort; about the land, grazing rights, taxes. And some of them were always making the trek into Zatembe, you know, to see the governor, the ambassador—anyone who could do something. But they always came here first.

  TSHEMBE To get the Reverend’s opinion.

  DEKOVEN And he would talk and joke with them and, usually, nothing was done, or, if it was, they were invariably herded onto less land, the taxes were raised higher—or something. And then one day, seven years ago, they came, led by old Abioseh as usual, with a petition to the Governor General for a new constitution that would permit Africans to sit in the legislature in proportion to their numbers. They were petitioning, of all things, to govern the colony; quite like that. I shall never forget his face—

  CHARLIE The Reverend?

  DEKOVEN (He is standing on the very spot, acutely recalling the moment) Yes. He had the most extraordinary expression when he finished reading the petition and he put it down—like this, you know—and he stood up and wiped his glasses and then put them back on, and he smiled at them and they smiled back as they always did, and then he walked among them, his arms outstretched, saying, “Children, children … my dear children … go home to your huts! Go home to your huts before you make me angry. Independence indeed!” (A beat. He shakes his head) No, I shall never forget the old man that day. And the thing is that until that moment, standing here, I hadn’t understood in the least, not the slightest, any different than he. The fact that it was all over was in the face of the second old man there, Abioseh.

  TSHEMBE (Interjecting) My father.

  DEKOVEN He did not move, he did not smile, he did not speak. He just stood there with the paper in his hand which they had gone to such pains to draw up, that pitiful piece of paper with its awkward syntax and utterly lucid demands which presumed to do what was and remains impossible: ask for freedom!

  TSHEMBE (After a beat) He never came back.

  (TSHEMBE rises and drifts upstage)

  DEKOVEN (Gesturing around him) They will murder us here one day—isn’t that so, Tshembe? (TSHEMBE turns and regards him but says nothing. Drums are heard in the distance) All of us. And the press of the world will send a shudder through men everywhere. It will seem the crowning triumph of bestial absurdity. We pillars of man’s love for man rewarded for our pains: our very throats slit ear to ear by rampaging savages. And whole generations will be born and die without knowing any better. (He drinks; then) No, my friend, do not let the drums, the skins and the mumbo jumbo fool you. The sun really is starting to rise in the world, so we might just as well stop pretending it is the middle of the night. They are quite prepared to die to be allowed to bring it to Africa. It is we who are not prepared. To allow it or to die.

  (TSHEMBE exits)

  CHARLIE (Looking after him) He must have been quite a guy, his father.

  DEKOVEN (Remembering) “Quite a guy …”

  CHARLIE … To bring up the boy—and still maintain a relationship with the Reverend …

  DEKOVEN (Bewildered) The boy …?

  CHARLIE Yes. Eric. Well … he is his father, isn’t he? Reverend Neilsen—with Abioseh’s wife?

  DEKOVEN (Smiles and pours himself a drink and sits. Then) Yes … It was Abioseh’s wife. She died in childbirth: the Kwi say from shame. But, Morris, it wasn’t the Reverend … It was George Rice.

  CHARLIE Major Rice—?

  DEKOVEN (Nods) You see, the man really is part of this country. (PETER enters) Peter, Tshembe was looking for you. He went up the path.

  PETER Thank you, Doctor.

  (He starts after him but halts at the screech of brakes and hysterical sirens offstage. At the same moment TSHEMBE reenters)

  TSHEMBE Peter—

  (He starts towards him, but halts as RICE and SOLDIERS, guns at the ready, appear with ABIOSEH)

  RICE There was a raid at M’nabe. Two hundred blacks. Reverend Neilsen was among the slaughtered.

  CHARLIE Oh my God!

  (DEKOVEN merely closes his eyes)

  RICE (As PETER starts to leave) Peter—(PETER freezes. TSHEMBE’s eyes meet ABIOSEH’s) I think we can all use a drink. (PETER goes to the bar and starts getting drinks) We’ve brought the body back. Out of delicacy I won’t describe the nature of the mutilation but I would suggest that the ladies be protected from viewing it. (PETER gives RICE a drink) Thank you, Peter … (PETER offers drinks to CHARLIE and DEKOVEN, who refuse them) Yes, two hundred blacks and it looks like just the beginning. They don’t stand a chance, of course. At dawn we begin a new coordinated offensive … fresh troops, helicopters, jets, the whole bloody works … (PETER starts to leave) Don’t go, Peter. (PETER halts and RICE motions that he’d like another drink) Within three weeks the mopping up will be over, I can promise you that. (Looking up as jets rocket overhead and into the distance) Just listen, Mr. Morris: the sound we’ve been waiting for! (As PETER approaches) No spear on earth will bring one of those down—isn’t that so, Peter?

  PETER Yes, Bwana.

  RICE (Takes the drink) Thank you—Ntali …! (PETER drops the tray and runs and, in split-second succession, the SOLDIERS and RICE open fire. He falls, jerks—and lies dead at TSHEMBE’s feet. The SOLDIERS turn their guns on TSHEMBE. ABIOSEH starts to pray. RICE crosses to the body and puts his gun away) I am taking the liberty, Doctor, of having a new safety flare system installed. Your friend here had cut the old one—did you know that, DeKoven? Yes, well … my condolences to Madame. Are you coming, Abioseh? (To TSHEMBE, indicating the body with his foot) Get rid of it.

  (He exits, followed by ABIOSEH and the SOLDIERS. CHARLIE and DEKOVAN look on silently as TSHEMBE sinks to his knees beside PETER)

  Dimout

  ACT TWO

  SCENE 6

  In the darkness the roar and burst of jets explodes overhead. In the distance the muffled sounds of destruction. Then silence—and, gradually, the faint jungle sounds of dawn.

  It is the following day. A clearing in the jungle lit only by shimmering shafts of sunlight through the density of trees overhead.

  Out of the shadows steps NGAGO—in the uniform of the Freedom of the Land Army: green fatigues and shirt, cartridge belt, long knife at the waist, rifle in hand. Two WARRIORS (one the young WOMAN seen in the first scene) similarly attired, with rifles, move swiftly to their appointed places, keep watch, and occasionally respond to his words.

  NGAGO
makes a ritualistic sign and moves with a dancer’s grace, almost hypnotically, circling the stage. He is no ordinary leader and this is no ordinary exhortation. His voice at times rises in traditional anger; more often it is almost a whisper, a hiss, a caress. He is the poet-warrior invoking the soul of his people.)

  NGAGO (Raising rifle hand ritualistically) We must speak swiftly and move on. Brothers! Sisters! (His hand sweeps the audience) Here now are our people flying before the enemy—hunted in the land of our fathers—woman and child and grandsires of the Kwi peoples. See them and understand! See them, people! (Gesturing directly into the audience) This young one was making her way from the embers of her village when the soldiers caught her. Five of them! Must I tell you of the crime!? (Gesturing again) Rise up, old father! This old man came through the woods with his family and met the troops. (Screaming) HE IS WITHOUT FAMILY NOW! (Pointing) And look there! And there! (He and the WARRIORS crouch as a helicopter circles overhead, then fades off) And there! They drop lakes of fire on our villages! The hummingbirds of death sit motionless in our skies to fire on us like animals! They drive us like beasts into great camps they have built for this hour! What then but to fight? WHAT THEN BUT TO DRIVE THEM OUT!? (Softly, hypnotically: an incantation to the slowly mounting staccato of the drums) People, pass this word in the forest until the trees whisper it, until the river hums the message: Send us your sons! Send us warriors! KILL THE INVADER! By spear and by rifle! In the night, in the morning! On the roads—in their homes—in their beds! Let us drown them in the blood they have shed for a thousand seasons—(His voice hushes almost to a whisper, caressing the words)—and so make Death black for all their generations—(He kneels and circles his hand over the earth)—so that in all our land no seed of them—(He picks up a handful of dust)—no single scent of what they were—(Letting it sift away through his fingers)—remains to afflict our children’s children’s children! (Rifle in the air in classic pose joined by the WARRIORS) KILL THE INVADER!

  Blackout

  ACT TWO

  SCENE 7

  Sunset. The Mission.