The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Young Black diplomats came with dignity to the United Nations and gave that pallid group of Great White Fathers a desperately needed blood transfusion. Just two decades before our story began, the New England–born UN ambassador from the good ol’ US of A went off into a temper tantrum–seduced coma and when he came out of it was taken in a straitjacket to an exclusive funny farm raving mad and shouting that the savages had taken over. “The savages have taken over! The savages have taken over!”

  It was, moreover, a time when African-American-and-Caribbeans had become prouder of their heritage and wore their hairdos au naturel; uncooked, that is, and in the raw. Almost overnight they were proudly nappy-headed, although they were not kinky. The kinky scene was Anglo-Saxon. They did collect conga drums and art supposedly direct from Benin and Jos and Ife and the Dogon. Joined Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins and Stand-Ins and Kneel-Ins and Lie-Ins and Love-Ins. Organized boycotts and rent strikes and marched on City Hall and Washington. Innocent white “Freedom Fuckers” joined the Blacks in Dixieland. Talked everywhere about their heritage, the Blacks they did, of Gao and old Ghana and Egypt and Songhai and Mali and ancient Timbuktu and Kush. Organized Yoruba Temples and Mosques and committees by the hundreds. Good Lord! Thousands of them! “Identity” was a big word then. Roots, baby! Thanks to Brother Alex, which was to come a little later. Soothsayers by the dozens were saying some crazy sooth all up and down the Avenue; Lenox, that is; and Seventh too, a.k.a., these days, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

  Conks, processes, and bleaching creams were going out of style in Harlem. In all the Harlems of the USA. Already the great straightening comb industry was beginning to feel the pinch, as the stocking cap gave way to the fez and the handsome Touré cap. Cats were even picketing the beauty parlors.

  Sir Winston Churchill notwithstanding, it was a period when more people all over the earth were free since the very beginning of man’s existence. Albeit the Cold War Era and the time of so-called “Brinkmanship,” and later there was “Détente” even. It was the Atomic Age. The US of A had the Star-Spangled Banner flapping up there on the moon. A Black columnist skeptic, who for obvious reasons shall be nameless, said White folks were trying to go to Heaven without paying dying dues. According to one of the soapbox-orating soothsaying Black Nationalist leaders of Harlem, all this fuss about going to the moon was simply due to the fact that: “Whitey’s going back where he really came from.” Notwithstanding, it was the Space Age and the Supersonic Era. It was the Age of Independence. It was the Freedom Century. Time was catching up with history everywhere, and vice versa.

  JUST TWO DECADES AFTER THE FACT, the little Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya was quietly born. A bouncing Black baby, poor but proud and full of endless expectations. Actually Guanaya had a history going back thousands of years BWFDU (Before White Folks Discovered Us). All right, so neither did Columbus discover America. Weren’t there people there when he arrived? The kindest thing you can do for old Chris, that great con man and world traveler, is: “He stumbled upon the place and cased the joint for Mother Isabella.” It was the same the whole world over. You didn’t exist until the Western Europeans discovered you. You just waited in a kind of limbo. You just stood on some “exotic” piece of real estate in that vast continuing so-called jungle that stretched from Africa to Asia to the islands of the great Pacific and the Caribbean, staring eternally out to sea looking for the boy from Europe to loom upon the horizon and discover you, you noble savage, you. You just waited to be Christianized and civilized, and shit like that. Instead of waiting for Godot or Lefty, you waited breathlessly for Whitey.

  Africans in the old country used to say, “When the white man first came to Africa, he had all the Bibles, and we had all the land. But before we knew what was happening, he had all the real estate and we had all his Holy Bibles.” A certain Black writer, who likewise shall be nameless, called on his people to stop celebrating Thanksgiving Day. He said it was a day of infamy in the history of First World peoples. “It was the time when the white man ran the Thanksgiving game on the so-called Indians; the ‘Indians’ turned out to be the turkeys. They smoked the peace pipe with Whitey. I have no idea what was in the pipe, but by the time the smoke cleared, the white man had all the realty.” Surviving Indians were placed in concentration camps, euphemistically known as “reservations.”

  Anyhow and moreover, just two months before our story began, two decades after the gloriously turbulent sixties, Little Guanaya had weaned itself away from the bountiful ivory bosom of a benevolent Great White Mother Country. And the UK was a mother, brother. Indeed, she was probably the last of the Great White Mothers. Guanaya was undoubtedly the tiniest country in giant Africa, tinier than Chad, skinnier than Togo, not much bigger than Barbados, an almost indiscernible speck on the map, a long, thin slice near the heart of that great continent. Guanaya’s terra firma was an angry rage of colors. Surrounded on two sides by forest-clad mountains and on another by a long blue lake, and to the north lay a sandy wasteland where an ever-losing battle was waged with greedy, insatiable goats and the great blinding beige of the irresistible Sahara.

  As far as the outside world was concerned, Guanaya was the most insignificant of nations. Unmentioned by Herodotus. Unnoticed by Thucydides. Overlooked by J. A. Rogers. Omitted by the great Du Bois. Basil Davidson didn’t dig it. Marcus Garvey hadn’t known about it. Ignored reluctantly by Lomax. A place John Gunther never got inside of! According to Her Majesty’s Colonial Office, it was desperately poor in natural resources, almost un-African in that respect. Then it happened—early one morning as the sun came thundering out of China far away, with apologies from Rudyard, two months after independence, it happened. What happened? Great inexhaustible beds of cobanium—a radioactive metallic element, five hundred times more powerful and effective than uranium—were discovered in Guanaya’s Northern Province. Then—Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Publicity—Popularity—Prosperity—Population Explosion. The capital city of Bamakanougou got crowded very suddenly. Everybody loved Guanaya and with a bloody ruddy passion.

  Scientists, politicians, diplomats, businessmen, a motely coterie of hustlers, literally descended, since they came by jet propulsion, upon the baby country. They came mostly from those two great philanthropic powers of that historic epoch, beneficent leaders as they were, of the “Free World” and the Socialist Republics (the USA and the USSR). Came like wise men of old, wearing smiles and bearing gifts for their little Black baby brother. Newspapers, radio, television newsreels all over the world hailed and proclaimed the great discovery. Cobanium! Guanaya! The immeasurable gain for science and progress and mankind and so forth and so on, and whereas even. Brotherhood! One World! Democracy! Telephones were tied up all over the world discussing, animatedly, a country nobody had ever heard of before.

  A commentator in a land that shall be nameless pointed out jubilantly that there was undisputedly enough high-grade cobanium in the bowels of the earth of the Northern Province for every country large and small to have its share. The same commentator gleefully gloated that there was enough cobanium not only to destroy the entire world, were it necessary, to maintain peace on earth goodwill toward men, but to fling destruction at every planet in the universe. Mankind could rest easier. Need not fear the flying saucers. Martians would not dare invade us.

  The U.’s of N.A. either had the fastest supersonics or the most efficient telegraph. Or something. They got there firstest with the mostest and invited the young Prime Minister to be their guest and see America first, and shit, and confer with their great and gracious President, who had the nicest, whitest smile in all the world and a face that made you know everything would be all right, somehow somewhere, and a warmth that made you feel like snuggling up. Known affectionately as “Snot Rag” in his boyhood days, he still possessed the most terrific case of hay fever, especially in the fall and springtime and most particularly in winter and the good old summertime.

  Meanwhile and however, His Excellency Jaja
Okwu Olivamaki, Prime Minister of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, was a tall, strikingly handsome Guanayan, descending nationally and tribally from a long, illustrious line of paramount chiefs, warriors, emperors, obas, timis, emirs, kings, and sultans on both sides of the family, and from several overlapping nations, tribes, and countries in that part of Africa, and also in other parts. The Prime Minister wore his black beard and his Negritude with enormous dignity. His Excellency, or H.E., as some of his colleagues referred to him affectionately, was a bachelor, writer, poet, lawyer, statesman, historian, and Pan-Africanist and a host of other things that are of no particular significance to our story. He had written several books entitled African Unchained, Destiny of a Continent, etc. but the Western world never heard of these books until cobanium was discovered and the Western world discovered Guanaya. Now his books suddenly found themselves on the list and shelves of Afro-American studies departments in universities throughout the USA, as well as the libraries and archives of the FBI and CIA and other federal and clandestine establishments.

  Like so many men of color of his time, and even years before his time, he had done his apprenticeship. Like Nehru. Like Gandhi. Like Nkrumah. Like Malcom X. Like Kenyatta, like M. L. King, he had paid his uhuru dues. He was a member of that exclusive club of revolutionary jailbirds. He was a true soul brother. Twenty months of penal servitude for plotting and inciting against the Crown. But all was forgiven, if not forgotten. “By Jove, let bygones be bloody bygones. That’s the way we do things in the You-Kay.” In those days the You-Kay was the affectionate name for the United Kingdom, sometimes called the British Empire.

  Jaja Okwu Olivamaki had spent five of his growing-into-manhood years in the good old USA, spending four of them at Lincoln University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and one year on the thronging streets of Harlem, where he matriculated in the University of Hard Knocks and Disillusionment. He got his master’s degree in picket lines and demonstrations and race riots with a hurried doctorate in boycotts and soapbox oratory.

  His father had insisted that he seek his higher education in America rather than in England or in France or in Germany as did so many of the African chosen ones. He did not wish Jaja to become a Black European or a “Bentu” (been to London, been to Paris, been to Berlin, and so on). “Go to America and to a Black school. Get to know your American brothers.”

  A Moscow newspaper expressed grave doubts as to the wisdom of the young PM’s visit to the USA, that great capitalistic gargantuan, which would swallow him whole if he were not alert and agile. They lost much sleep over the PM’s footwork. But nevertheless the great proletariat of the Soviet Union wished him Godspeed (oops!) and bon voyage and hoped his country still belonged to him when he returned to the land of his fathers, and likewise, of course, his mothers.

  Meanwhile, back at Her Majesty’s Colonial Office, the chaps in charge were a trifle miffed at the untimeliness of the Great Cobanium Discovery, which was to tip the balance of power in the world. Especially pissed off were they (“pissed off”—a quaint Western metaphor indeed, of World War II vintage, I suspect), since it had occurred in a land the old You-Kay had motherly loved and lovingly mothered for close to two hundred years, patiently training the baby colony for the ultimate adulthood of independent nationhood. Yet two months after freedom was benevolently bestowed—just two blasted bloody ruddy months! Moreover, there were skeptics and even cynics in the colonial office who went so far as to suspect humbuggery, and even hanky-panky and skullduggery. The Queen herself was heard to comment: “Those simple naive conniving Blacks, those cunning buggers, those mother-muckers, you cannot trust them any further than you could throw Buckingham Palace! It almost makes you lose faith in human nature when honest natives cawn’t be trusted. I mean, by Jove, those were our mother-mucking Africans!”

  “Rule Britannia!” or “Hail Britannia!” in the words of Irving Burgie. “You Keeper of the flame. May they never never never!—” and so forth and so on.

  1

  Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki sat at the head of the conference table in his oak-paneled study in the Executive Mansion. The chandeliered ceiling gleamed brightly overhead. He looked from face to face at the Ministers who made up his Independence Cabinet. Except for Maria Efwa Olivamaki he was the youngest of them, which was one of the reasons he wore a beard. He was thirty-nine and she was twenty-nine. A few years ago when he first began to cultivate his beard they used to jest with him about it, but now it was his trademark. Short cropped it was and much much neater than Fidel’s ever was, or ever even hoped to be. All day long they had been discussing the great trip to America.

  Jefferson Lloyd, the Vice-PM, was holding forth with his falsetto and staccato voice. He went on and on and on, a compulsive talker, the fastest gabber in Guanaya, the words gushed out so swiftly from his thin lips sometimes, they stumbled over one another, but usually they bounded gaily out of his mouth, or cascaded like the rapids of Niagara. He was the original babbling brook of Bamakanougou. Though he was almost humorless and pompous and devoid of comedic bent, he was known throughout his country for the faux pass he had committed two years earlier at a Commonwealth conference banquet held in London attended by all of Her Majesty’s colonial leadership. In a wave of euphoria and under alcoholic influence, he had risen from his table and said, clearly, precisely, pompously, and prissily, “In the name of the people of Guanaya, we wish to thank our gracious Queen for her hospitality at this great Commonwealth banquet and conference from the bottom of our hearts and also from our wives’ bottoms.”

  There had been a suddenly deafening silence in the brightly chandeliered ballroom, then some uncouth one from another member country of the Commonwealth perversely giggled and the place broke up with laughter.

  The story traveled back home to Guanaya and followed him wherever he went. He became known, affectionately, as “His Wife’s Bottom.”

  “America is the home of the free and the land of the brave and we have nothing at all to worry about and nothing to fear but fear itself and they welcome us into the world of free men and independent nations—and—”

  His Wife’s Bottom (or HWB) was seated at the PM’s right hand, and the PM stared at him and nibbled at his beard with his long and slender fingers. His Wife’s Bottom went on and on like he was reciting something he had memorized or was reading from an idiot sheet. “It is the land of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and where their pilgrims died and also of their father’s pride.” He paused a hundredth of a second to catch his breath and clear his throat. “And furthermore it’s the richest country in the world and Americans are known everywhere for their generosity, which is proverbial and universal. If we are able to forge a friendship with them, we wouldn’t need another friend in all the world.” He cleared his scratchy throat again. “Financially I mean, of course.” He owned the most nervous throat in all Guanaya. “They would put money and technicians at our disposal with no strings attached out of the bountifulness of their hearts and also out of their love for freedom and fair play, which is hysterical, I mean, of course, historical . . . And the only thing we would have to assure them is that we’re not communistically inclined, and you cawn’t blame them for that, you know, what with the New Cold War and the untimely demise of détente . . .”

  Mamadou Tangi, Minister of Foreign Affairs, quickly, sharply interjected. Actually it was more of a swift thrust than an interjection. Albeit he spoke much more slowly. “Those are precisely the tactics we must not pursue. First sign that there’s no danger of us drifting toward communism, and we wouldn’t get a tuppence from them. Keep them guessing is the proper tactic. As they say in the vernacular of the American cinema, we must play difficult to acquire. Like I always say: ‘Long Live the Cold Ruddy War.’ We must juxtapose both termini contra to the medium, or is it play both ends against the middle?”

  Jaja Olivamaki looked from his Vice-PM to his FM. They were his right hand and his left hand respectiv
ely and politically. Always seated nearest to him on opposite sides of the table. Lloyd and Tangi were diametrical opposites in looks and outlooks in personalities. Lloyd was thin and nervously underweight and overanxious and liberal minded and optimistic and conservative and worried-looking and a bloody chatterbox. As for Tangi, most Europeans considered him unbearably and insufferably arrogant. He was of medium height and thickly constructed and sour faced and distrustful and sarcastic, and fanatically nationalistic, thoroughly Pan-Africanistic, some thought. Especially Europeans thought, possibly with justification. It might serve the purpose of enlightenment here to state categorically: in those days, even liberal-minded, humanitarian-type Europeans, Americans included, frowned upon indigenous nationalism. Oh yes, indeed—even socialistic radicals. I mean, Right and Left and from the middle. Many thought it not good at all for the proper “native” to be nationalistic. It simply was not healthy for him. It developed in the Blacks negative characteristics such as bitterness and dissatisfaction and arrogance and insolence and even self-importance. In a word, it made the Black man dreadfully unhappy. And moreover it did considerable damage to his natural disposition toward humbleness and profound humility, which after all were the saving-grace qualities in any “noble savage.” Look at Gunga Din! Witness Uncle Thomas! Not to mention “Moses and Mosetta,” in the inimitable words of Professor William Mackey Junior.

  Even William Faulkner himself, that shining exponent of noblesse oblige, that great unreconstructed libertarian and plantation owner, during the onset of the sixties gave to American persons of color the following revolutionary slogans: “Patience! Cleanliness! Politeness!” Or words to that effect. Which in one word means “humility,” that rare quality that was almost unknown and nonexistent amongst the playboys of the Western world. Let Western man wallow in the strength and courage of his convictions, but let the Black man have humility, that greatest of all virtues residing in the soul and bosom of every single Black man, and let him not deny it. They wanted to save the Black man from himself and keep him happy.