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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd
Today!
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Richard
Wright's Seven Photos
of Traditional Ghana in the 1950s
from Natasha Gerson
(Holland)
26 Oct 2004
Dear sir,
I am sorting out a lot of stuff from my
grandfather AE Bayer who was an anthropologist mainly writing on
Africa and come across seven photos taken in Africa (Ghana?)
looks like the fifties and all credited on the back to Richard
Wright. So I don't know if this is the writer Richard Wright but
I think it's very probable also because I remember long ago he
told me he'd met the author of Black Boy and at the time
I thought he meant Baldwin (well I was only fifteen or so) but
now I realise he was talking about Wright.
I haven't been able to locate an email
address for his daughter but maybe you can help me there. The
handwriting on all the photos is my granddads except one which
says "R. Wright Black Power" this is a photo of two
young men drumming. The others are: old lady in tribal
dress, woman cooking, old man, houses, street
scene and all credited to Richard Wright (name in full). I
rang the institute (museum voor volkenkunde, or
now tropenmuseum) where they supposedly came from (also
on the back) but they were so vague and disinterested as Dutch
institutes always are I'm not about to return them as they would
just get lost.
If they are this Richard Wright (couldn't
find any other possibilities really) I would gladly pass them on
to Wright’s daughter or possibly they would be of interest to
someone studying his work and travel? I don't send unsolicited
attachments but if you would like me to mail scans let me know.
Yours
faithfully,
Natasha Gerson
Rudy Responds
[I responded to Natasha telling her that I would be eternally
grateful if she would share the photos with us and within a day
or so she responded. Thanks, Natasha. You are an angel.
[It is curious how right events converge. I have been
thinking about Wright for several months intensely and have
thought of him through the eyes of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Princeton
philosopher, and John A. Williams, novelist. Appiah attacks
Wright's Western view of Africa; and Williams defends Wright and
also Peter Abrahams, the South African writer, sympathizes with
Wright in his essay
Kwame Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and the Old Order.
[I
read Wright's White Man, Listen! last summer and made a
few notes. I too sympathize with Wright for his attempt at
objectivity, his honesty, and sincerity. Like Williams, I
believe Wright has been misunderstood, terribly. Few
African Americans have been as honest as truthful as Wright, in
an initial visit to an African country, whether fifty years ago
or even more recently.
[But a review of related documents may help us today to
clarify our own views and sentiments on how the American Negro
views an African identity. In Africa he found himself isolated
in a strange land, even among the Western educated, especially
Nkrumah. There were too many barriers generating
misinterpretations and uneasiness, too much honesty and too much
truth. The honesty and truth of a poet. -- Rudy]
Ghana 1950s Photos Received
Hi!
Here are the scans of the photos. I've scanned the back of
two of them as you can see it looks as if they have been used
for publication and that's why I thought maybe this
institute could have told me what and where, but alas. But possibly
they would be more helpful to someone academic and American if
need be!
My grandfather met Richard Wright in Paris
in either 1955 or 1956 and probably wrote about him then, it's
possible they met before, maybe Africa, but I couldn't find
out exactly when Wright was there. My grandfather was in Ivory Coast,
Ghana and mid Africa himself in 53/54. We have alas
not as yet found the article(s).
My grandmother died last year and since then I have been
sorting out both their many gatherings of sixty years of global
travel and fascinating acquaintances, and of course I'm
trying to do this as well as possible. But also because
I've been stuck in all sorts of research lately which
has been like reassembling a dropped egg, I now realise
with every envelope and folder I open that I might be holding
something that might fill gaps in the field or the history of
someone!
These photos were in an envelope together with many photos
from press agencies, embassies, etc. etc. all Africa
1954-1965 approx some quite interesting such as one with
prominent resistance leaders, agriculture, education. If I
come across anything else possibly relating to Wright I
will scan and mail. Let me know what you think of them!
All the best for now,
Natasha
 |
John
A. Williams,
A
Biography of Richard Wright: The Most Native of Sons
.
New York: Doubleday & Company,
Inc. 1970. The excerpt below from Chapter 11:
America's disregard of Richard as an artist
and a man, plus his own interest in examining the mechanics of
the oppression of black people, may have led him into his next
venture--a trip to Africa. For it all began in Africa; the slave
trade and slavery; lost roots, forgotten heritages. Where better
to continue the study of what was happening to Negroes than in
Africa?
The idea was first suggested by
Mrs.
George Padmore, who was a guest of the Wrights. Her husband had
remained behind in London to work with Kwame
Nkrumah, who was going to ask for self-government
for the Gold Coast (later Ghana) that summer. |
In fact, Mrs. Padmore's suggestion was
specific: go to the Gold Coast. The postwar years had seen a ferment for
freedom around the world in the colonies of Britain, France, The
Netherlands, and Belgium. "What about the Four
Freedoms?" the people in the colonies wanted to know.
Keeping pace with the cresting desire for independence, the
Fifth Pan-African Congress had been held in Manchester, England,
only the year before.
Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, the same who had been
guest of honor at a party back in New York in the 1940s when
Richard had felt slighted, was the originator of the concept of
Pan-Africanism. Du Bois had been working for it since World War
I, insisting that black people in the United States, the islands
of the Caribbean, and Africa could unite and bring independence
to black people everywhere.
Richard himself had long worked with
Africans. He'd helped to establish Présence Africain in
1947 and was to assist in organizing the Society of African
Culture in 1956. He had known C.L.R. James, a West Indian who
was active in the Pan-Africanist movement.
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Richard worked with black writers
from the French colonies: Léopold Senghor, soon to be
President of Senegal; Aimé Césaire, from Martinique;
David Diop, also from Senegal, and a host of others who
had swarmed to Paris.
Richard believed that only the West
could "nobly save Africa," and it would be
judged, finally, on the events that happened in Africa.
He felt that the West was in a race with the Soviets to
see which would carry the greatest influence in the land
where about three hundred million black people lived
under the command of a few hundred thousand whites. |
The African continent constitutes 20% of the
world's land mass. It is rich in minerals--gold, diamonds,
aluminum, uranium. In fact Uranium that went into the making of
America's atomic bombs came from the Congo. Oil deposits have
just barely been tapped in Africa; it provides most of the cocoa
for the world, along with peanuts and palm oil. Dr. Du Bois long
held the theory that World War I had not been fought over Europe
at all, but over Africa, for its tremendous wealth. Only Libya
of all the colonies had achieved independence by the time
Richard was ready to leave. In black Africa, independence was
moving at a snail's pace.
Finally, Richard knew that there were many
people who believed he'd turned his back on Negroes, that he
"thought he was white," that his commitment was not to
the underclasses. Those who believed this were supported, they
thought, by his book on the Gold Coast, Black Power,
which of course was published after his trip.
The people Richard was to meet and the things
he was to do were arranged by George Padmore. Kwame Kkrumah, the
Prime Minister of the Gold coast and chief of the Convention
people's party, was one of the people he saw. In a long,
personal letter to Nkrumah at the end of Black Power,
Richard was, as usual, prophetic:
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Make no mistake. Kwame, they are
going to come at you with words about democracy; you are
going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency;
plump-faced men will mumble academic phrases about
"sound" development; gentlemen of the cloth
will speak unctuously of values and standards. . .
." |
(A dozen years later, after being under
attack by the West for leaning toward Communism, Nkrumah was
overthrown as President of the Republic of Ghana; it had become
independent in 1957.)
Roaming around the Gold Coast in 1953 had
been somewhat difficult for Richard. His people had come from
Africa, but so long ago that he didn't know what to expect. the
Africans he knew in Paris seemed to be more French than African.
He discovered that he was more American than African, but he
fought to be objective about the book he was writing.
He felt that there was a similarity in the
way people danced in the Gold Coast and the way blacks danced in
some of the religious sects in the United States; he saw a
resemblance in the way Africans and Afro-Americans laughed. But
he was appalled at how the British had come, cut out the heart
of the tribal culture, and operated from that vacuum. It was
obvious that they had come for the wealth of the land and
nothing more, for the four million citizens of the God, Coast
remained only superficially touched by the white man's way.
They abided by his law, and they used his
money. They sometimes went to his church. In the outlying
regions where tribal systems were permitted to remain, the
chiefs owed their allegiance first to the British and then to
their people.
Richard understood that Nkrumah had taken
politics African style and employed it to fill the vacuum the
British had created with their missionaries and soldiers; he had
welded tribal emotion with nationalism. Freeedomm! was the cry
that followed Nkrumah's upraised hand; freeedomm! curled in the
air around his smile.
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The hungry boy from Mississippi,
grown to forty-five years, walked the land of his
ancestors and felt himself an alien. He had not really
expected to feel otherwise, yet he wished for more
between himself and the Africans of the Gold Coast.
The days were humid and the sun hot;
the customs were strange, and he could understand only
the Africans who spoke English, and most of these were
from what he called the "elite." Other
Africans, if they spoke English at all, spoke
"pidgin"; that is, a mixture of English and
tribal dialect. Tirelessly, Richard visited unions,
schools, societies, ceremonies, villages; he talked to
ranking officials and men in the street; he saw how the
well-to-do--black and white--lived, and the poor--all
black--existed. |
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He visited both Christiansborg and Cape Coast
castles, forts with dungeons had held people who had been
captured to be sent as slaves to the New World. From the windows
in the thick-walled buildings Richard gazed out at the sea. How
many, he wondered, went from these places? The floors of the
dungeons were worn smooth with the tread of many feet and the
scraping of chains.
"No one will ever know the number or
identity of the black men, women, and children who passed
through these walls," Richard wrote later.
As he paused to contemplate the deaths of
millions who were victims of slavery and the slave trade, he was
"numbed" to observe that "millions of men . . .
in Africa assign more reality tot heir dead fathers than tot he
crying claims of their daily lives: poverty, political
degradation, illness, ignorance."
But he condemned "white Western
Christian civilization," too, for smashing cultures and
tribal societies, for its greed, for its twisted "belief
that their God had entrusted the earth into their keeping. . .
."
How would the Africans unwind from the coil
of an awful history? In his letter to Nkrumah, Richard advised
that African life had to be organized in a manner for peace,
production, and the release of African minds from the
"mumbo jumbo" of ancestor worship.
But, with all his criticisms, at the end of
his time in the Gold Coast. Richard felt "an odd kind of
at-homeness," not because of race, "but from the
quality of deep hope and suffering" that he shared with t
he people there."
He returned to Paris exhausted. he saw the
first signs that there might be a war of independence, and
France, which was reluctant to grant it. There was no time for
Richard to rest; Black power had to be written. The trip had
incurred enormous expenses, and he hoped to recoup his
expenditures through a successful book.
But the reception the book received was
generally shrill. Richard expected shrillness from American
reviewers; he had hoped, with some reservations, that the
Europeans might be more objective. Black Power enraged many
Europeans. they could not look beyond the fact that they were
colonial masters. For the first time, Richard had difficulty
publishing a book in France. The British publishers, too, seemed
to avoid the book, although it did finally appear.
Only the Germans, who had no colonies in
Africa (although they'd held some before World war I) appeared
to be genuinely interested in the book. It was clear that
Richard would not recoup the money he'd spent on the trip, so he
embarked on a series of lectures to help earn what the book had
not.
Europeans and Americans were sour on Black
power, but so were Africans. They accused Richard of going to
Africa expecting to be treated as royalty and of writing a
"vicious" book when he was not.
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Thirteen years after Richard's book
came out, the phrase "black
power" would create equally
hostile attitudes among American whites. Yet the phrase
belonged neither to Richard nor to Stokley Carmichael of
the Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It came out of
America's Revolutionary period and is attributed to
Benjamin Banneker , a black man who helped to lay out the city
of Washington, D.C. In his time, as in Richard's and
Carmichael's, black power always meant political,
economic, and social self-determination for black
people. |
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So Black Power, like Savage Holiday, like
The Outsider,
was consigned to a gray area that was not quite oblivion, but
certainly the next thing to it.
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updated 5 October 2007 |
