PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IN WEST AFRICA

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28158, 22 December 1956, Page 3

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IN WEST AFRICA

[Reviewed by

7 R.C.L.]

Black Power. By Richard Wright. ’ Dennis Dobson. 358 pp. When Richard Wright visited the! Geld Coast in June. 1953, to gather material for this book, it was at a time when recent constitutional developments in that colony had led I to a large measure of self government. Not long before this the United King-* dom Government had instituted there' the office of Prime Minister, the first I man elected to this high office being • Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. In July 1953 ' Dr. Nkrumah was to table in the - Legislative Assembly a White Paper outlining his government’s proposals for a further measure of self-govern-4 ment. Richard Wright thus timed his I visit to the colony so as to coincide i with vital constitutional developments afoot there, and the first person he interviewed upon arrival was Dr ! Nkrumah himself. Taken on a drive with the Prime MHister through the streets of Accra, he was amazed at' the tumultuous welcome which every- | where hailed the approach of the i ministerial car. He devotes a chapter to the rise to power of Dr. Nkrumah’s I party known as the Conventionj People s Party. But it was more than political events that engaged his attention as he moved about the colony. The James Town slums provided him ' as good a picture as he would get I anywhere of the primitive, cramped I fetish-ridden life of the Gold Coast | African. It was while poking about! the James Town alley ways that he came upon “a swirling knot of men and women dancing in a wide circle, ! barefooted, and shuffling to the demoniacal beat of drums which were being played by a group of men.” And the reason for their dancing—he learnt upon enquiry—was that a girl had just died. Weird funeral rites he describes more than once in this book. He possesses in an unusual degree the gift of being able to depict in pithy, succinct sentences the scenes of animated confusion encountered in his wanderings from place to place. As he looks down upon the central market of Kumasi (capital of Ashanti) this is how he describes the scene that meets the eye: “It was a vast masterpiece of disorder sprawling over several acres: it lay in a valley in the centre of the city with giant sheds covering most of it: and it was filled with men and women and children and vultures and mud and stagnant water and flies and filth and foul odours Le Marche aux Puces and Les Halles would be lost here. Everything is on sale: chickens, sheep, cows and goatscheap European goods—razor blades, beds, black iron pots three feet in diameter—nestle side by side with kola nuts, ginger roots, yams, and silk kente cloths for chiefs and kings. In these teeming warrens shops are social clubs, offices are meeting halls, kitchens are debating leagues, and bedrooms are oolitical headquarters This is the Wall Street of the Gold Coast.”

One would have though that his being an American negro would have made the author feel a strong kinshin with these Gold Coast people and that he would have felt at home amongst them. On the contrary', he felt himself to be a stranger in a strange land. More than once in this book he gives vent to the feeling of isolation that overcame him while on * J ™ African descent and I'm in the midst of Africans, yet I cannot tell what they are thinking and feeling.” Thus does he express himself in the matter. This, however, did not deter him from using every endeavour to see as much of the people as he was able to in the course of his visit to their Whether it was a taxi driver, a boy from a mission school, or a native chief, he made it his business to get alongside these people and find out as much as he could about them. And then, of course, he talked with African professional men—lawyers, doctors and politicians—ever plying them with questions and noting carefully in the case of one and all their responses. For it was the very dialogues that passed between himself as interlocutor and these several people that were to form the substance of much of his book. Indeed, the author show’s himself to be most adept in this use of dialogue as a reporting technique. “As reporting it is a first class job” Joyce Cary is quoted by the publishers as having demarked of this book. But there is another side to the author that presents him in a poorer light. When his feelings are aroused—as they often are in the course of his writing—he becomes voluble to a degree that renders him tedious in thj extreme. And there is about much of his thinking an ill-digested quality that manifests itself in his writing in such a way as to make him quite incomprehensible—as. for example, when he writes as follows: “The dis♦unce to day between tribal man and the West is greater than the distance between God and Western man of the sixteenth century. Western man could talk to his God in those days.” An author is welcome to entertain as *p an y strange notions as he chooses to: but he will try the patience of most readers if he subjects them to too much of this kind of writing. There is something of the ranter about Richard Wright and when his ranting.

1 7 Cted a ? ain st ‘western man” one 1 j the sourness of an embittered personality. He never 1 sneers so well as when his sneers are I ti, 06 a l the expense of the British, thus, when he tells in this book of an ; evening he spent at a Gold Coast dancing arena, he dwells at unnecesi sary length upon the sight he encountered there of two young men dancing together—a sight | which led him to ask: “Had the British Brought homosexuality to Africa? nad the vices of the English public . school system somehow seeped through • here. The action of the two men i . concerned had quite another explanaI tion. as Mr Wright's host pointed out Ito him at the time. “These young I ooys his host explained, “are still pmainly tribal. In tribal dances men dance with men, women dance with | women. Why. then, must the author persist in foisting upon the reader these j suspicions of his once they had been | proved groundless? Unless it can be that he must at all costs have his dig at the British. Another time he ■ recounts how he went into a bank during his tour of the Gold Coast to j cash some of his travellers' cheques and how he was asked by the banker: i rJYeJVsir. what do you think of all 1 this Don’t you think that the people are happy?”—a perfectly simple and direct question. And yet here is the | author’s surly reaction to it expressed .in his own words: “He knew damn well what I thought, but I was determined not to give the satisfaction of j letting him hear me say it.” The I banker carried the conversation further. “You American chaps”—he i said—“are three hundred years ahead of these Africans. It’ll take a long time for them to catch up with you. I think that they are trying to go too fast, don’t you?” Whereupon the author comments: “In his attempt to influence my attitude, he was using the old tried and trusted British technique of divide and rule.” Could any more absurd construction than this have been placed upon such innocent remarks? This is but one of those places in the book where the author stands revealed as a man with a veritable chip on his shoulder. He ends his book with a valedictory letter to Dr. Nkrumah in which he argues that if Gold Coast Africa is to be shaken loose from her tribal moorings and raised from primitiveness and degradation to a state of sovereign independence, then her people must be harshly regimented. Once again, his argument is never easy to follow. Indeed, this letter might serve as a final example of the befuddled thinking that the author gives expression to once he leaves the realm of factual reporting where his particular bent lies and gives way to reflection upon the events reported. It is then, when it stands most in need of lucidity and orderly coherence, that his writing is berefit of these attributes. And lacking them, it leaves the reader at a loss to know just what is the drift of his argument. The book contains a map and some good photographs.