Title: Black Power
Author: Richard Wright
Year of Publication: 1954
Thesis:
Finds that Nkrumah's strategy in the Gold Coast, to harness the power of all factions against the British was an effective revolutionary strategy and counsels Nkrumah to aim toward modernizing Ghana as quickly as possible and with a strong militant flavor (even though he uses the term "militant," he clarifies that he means something more like 'urgent and determined.').
Time: 1950s
Geography: Gold Coast/Ghana
Organization: Numbered chapters with no title, culminates in letter to Kwame Nkrumah.
Type: Sort of a participant observer travel ethnography.
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography: One of the earlier mentions of "black power" as a term.
Keywords: modernity
Themes: modernity
Critiques:
Problematic essentialization of "Africa," problematic depictions of Ghanaians as backward.
"I could well understand why the British, when they first saw it, thought it was a joke. They could not believe that a black man could take the political methods that Europe had perfected and apply them to Africa." (88)
I reached a street corner and paused; coming toward me was a woman nursing a baby that was still strapped to her back; the baby's head was thrust under the woman’s arm and the woman had given the child the long, fleshy, tubelike teat and it was suckling. (There are women with breast so long that they do not bother to give the baby the teat in front of them, but simply toss it over eh shoulder to the child on their back...) (69) See Morgan, Jennifer L. “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770.” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92.
But that pidgin English! I shuddered. I resented it and I vowed that I’d never speak it…. I started; the steward was at my elbow, holding a platter of fried fish; he’d come so silently upon me that I was nonplused. (68)
Questions:
Quotes:
From the kindle version:
Connections:
Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common “racial” heritage? (18)
How much of me was African? Many of my defensive-minded Negro friends had often told me with passion: “We have a special gift for music, dancing, rhythm and movement…. We have a genius of our own. We were civilized in Africa when white men were still living in caves in Europe….” To me talk of that sort had always seemed beside the point; I had always taken for granted the humanity of Africans as well as that of other people. And being either uninterested or unable to accept such arguments, I’d always remained silent in such conversations. (20)
Suffice it to say that the British did not originate this trading in human flesh whose enormous profits laid the foundations upon which had been reared modern industrial England. The honor for the launching of that crusade against Africa rested upon the pious shoulders of the Portuguese who had had the right, under a papal bull of 1455, to subject to servitude all infidel peoples. (22)
I’d long contended that the American Negro, because of what he had undergone in the United States, had been basically altered, that his consciousness had been filled with a new content, that “racial” qualities were but myths of prejudiced minds. Then, if that were true, how could I account for what I now saw? And what I now saw was an exact duplicate of what I’d seen for so many long years in the United States. (79)
Racialization of slavery:
Slavery was not put into practice because of racial theories; racial theories sprang up in the wake of slavery, to justify it. [compare this to Ibram X. Kendi's & others' contentions] (24)
Slavery as an economic system that affects all:
Thanks to slavery, the poor whites of the New World were retarded for more than two centuries in their efforts to gain political and social recognition, and it was not until the Civil War in America abolished slavery, thereby enthroning industrial production as the new way of life, that it could be said that the New World had had any real need of poor white people at all…. (25)
Class development:
“You see, we Freetowners have been in contact with Europe for a long time. We are called Creoles. It’s from us that the English draw their best African leaders, teachers, doctors, lawyers. If we didn’t have the help of the English, we’d be swamped by the natives in Sierra Leone. (31)
Conversation with a Nigerian Supreme Court Justice:
“That’s why we drove the English out of America,” I told him. “Mr. Justice, it all depends upon how free you want to be. I’m neither anti-nor pro-British, but if I lived under British rule and wanted to develop and exercise my natural and acquired powers and the British said no, I’d be anti-British. Tell me, do you believe that the American colonies were right in taking their independence?” (33)
Clapback:
“Haven’t you tried to find out where in Africa you came from, sar?” “Well,” I said softly, “you know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us didn’t keep any records.” (54)
Analysis of sexuality:
I stared out of the bus window, I was amazed at the utter asexuality of the mood and the bearing of the people! Sex per se was absent in what I saw; sex was so blatantly prevalent that it drove all sexuality out; that is, it eliminated all of that evidence of sublimated and projected sexual symbolization with which Western men are habitually prone to decorate their environment in depicting to themselves the reality of the hidden bodies of their women. The hair of the women was plainly done, wrapped tightly in black strings and tied in plaited rows close to the skull; no rouge or powder showed on any woman’s cheeks; no fingernails were painted; and, save for a few tiny earrings of gold, they were bare of ornamentation of every kind. (58)
Source and locus of real power is in the people:
These beautiful bungalows, I was told, had been built expressly by the British authorities for the creature comforts of the new African ministers, many of whom had only recently been released from prison where they had been serving terms for sedition. But the wily black ministers, full of an old-fashioned distrust of Europeans, had had the unheard-of temerity to refuse to live in the bungalows, had stifled their natural yen for a modern domicile, and had remained, much to British astonishment, in the neighborhoods of their constituents. (67)
On Freedom:
My mind flew back to the many conversations that I’d had in Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires about freedom, and I could picture again in my mind the white faces of friends screwed up in disgust and distaste when the word “freedom” was mentioned, and I could hear again in my memory the tersely deprecating question shot at me across a dinner table: “Freedom? What do you mean, freedom?” But here in Africa “freedom” was more than a word; an African had no doubts about the meaning of the word “freedom.” It meant the right to public assembly, the right to physical movement, the right to make known his views, the right to elect men of his choice to public office, and the right to recall them if they failed in their promises. At a time when the Western world grew (75)
How I see his definition of Black Power:
“You have fused tribalism with modern politics,” I said. “That’s exactly it,” he said. “Nobody wanted to touch these people. The missionaries would go just so far, and no farther toward them. One can only organize them by going where they are, living with them, eating with them, sharing their lives. We are making a special drive to enlist women in the party; they have been left out of our national life long enough. In the words of Lenin, I’ve asked the cooks to come out of their kitchens and learn how to rule.” (82)
Notes: