The Education of a British-Protected Child (7 page)

When they arrive in the Sky and the Sky people set a great feast before them, Tortoise jumps up and asks: “Who is this feast intended for?”

“You All, of course,” reply the hosts. “You heard them,” says Tortoise to the birds. “The feast is for me. My name is You All.”

The birds do take their revenge by repossessing their feathers and leaving Tortoise high and dry in the Sky. But that does nothing to assuage their hunger as they fly all the way back to earth on growling empty stomachs.

So the message is clear: we must not let an adversary, real or potential, assume a false name even in playfulness. It makes little difference to the victim whether the trickster calls himself Nobody, as in the Greek story, or Everybody, as in the Igbo.

Few writers have understood the ways of oppression or written more memorably about them than James Baldwin. “If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where
you can go,” he tells his nephew.
¹
An Igbo elder in Nigeria, using different words, might have said exactly the same thing to the youngster: “If you can’t tell where the rain began to beat you, you will not know where the sun dried your body.”

Literal-minded, one-track-mind people have always been exasperated by the language of prophets, as when Baldwin says to his nephew:

A bitter critic of Baldwin, Stanley Crouch, writing in
The Village Voice
, accused Baldwin of

Baldwin could never advocate an uncritical identification with anything. His mind was too good for that. He always insisted that people should weigh things for themselves and come to their own judgment:

“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine,” he says to his nephew, “but trust your experience.”

Baldwin felt deeply, instinctively, most powerfully, the need for the African-American to know whence he came before he can know where he is headed.

The simplistic answer would be: he came from Africa, of course. Not for Baldwin, however, any simple answers. He had too much intelligence and integrity for that. “What is Africa to me?” asked an African poet who never left the motherland. Imagine, then, the tumult of questions in the soul of a man like Baldwin after three or four hundred traumatic years of absence. So in his anguished tribute to Richard Wright, he speaks of the Negro problem and the fearful conundrum of Africa.

Fearful conundrum, a terrifying problem admitting of no satisfactory solution. I am not an African-American. It would be impertinent of me to attempt to unravel that conundrum. But let me suggest two strands in its hideously tangled tissue of threads. One: the Africans sold us to Europeans for cheap trinkets. Two: Africans have made nothing of which we can be proud.

I am not sure whether or not Baldwin referred specifically to the allegation of African complicity in the slave trade. But he was seriously troubled as a young man by Africa’s lack of achievement. In the famous statement in “Stranger in the Village” he contrasts his African heritage most adversely with that of a very humble European: a Swiss peasant.

This lament issues from a soul in torment and cannot be ignored. But before we look at it, let me say two things. First, I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them—their story—and tell it themselves.

The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally. That must change and is indeed beginning to change, but not without resistance or even hostility. So much psychological, political, and economic interest is vested in the negative image. The reason is simple. If you are going to enslave or to colonize somebody, you are not going to write a glowing report about him either before or after. Rather you will uncover or invent terrible stories about him so that your act of brigandage will become easy for you to live with.

About
A.D
.
1600, a Dutch traveler to Benin in modern Nigeria had no difficulty comparing the city of Benin rather favorably with Amsterdam. The main street of Benin, he
wrote, was seven or eight times wider than its equivalent—the Warmoes—in Amsterdam. The houses were in as good a state as the houses in Amsterdam.

Two hundred and fifty years later, before the British sacked the same city of Benin, they first described it as the “City of Blood,” whose barbarism so revolted their civilized conscience that they simply had to dispatch a huge army to overwhelm it, banish its king, and loot its royal art gallery for the benefit of the British Museum and numerous private collections. All this was done, it was said with the straightest of faces, to end repugnant practices like human sacrifice. No mention whatsoever of a commercial motive—the penetration of a rich palm and rubber hinterland by British trading interests!

British penetration of West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century was not achieved only on the field of battle, as in Benin, but at home also, in churches, schools, newspapers, novels, et cetera by the denigration of Africa and its people. The frankness of those days was nowhere better demonstrated than in an editorial by
The Times
of London expressing its outrage at the decision of Durham University to affiliate with Fourah Bay College in West Africa.
The Times
asked Durham quite pointedly if it might consider affiliating with the zoo!

Apart from the vast quantity of offensive and trashy writing about Africa in Victorian England, there also developed later a more serious “colonial genre,” as biographer and historian Jeffrey Meyers calls it, beginning with Kipling in the 1880s, proceeding through Conrad to its apogee in E. M. Forster and
ending with Joyce Cary and Graham Greene, even as colonialism itself began to end.

John Buchan was in the middle ground between the vulgar and the serious in this body of work. He was also interesting for combining a very senior career in the British colonial service with novel writing. What he says about natives in his novels takes on, therefore, an additional political significance. Here is what an “approved” character in his novel
Prester John
says:

White racism in Africa, then, is a matter of politics as well as economics. The story of the black man told by the white man has generally been told to serve political and economic ends.

Let us now look briefly at Baldwin’s “fearful conundrum” of Africans selling their brothers and sisters and children for
bauble. Was that truly what happened? What about the sad, sad story of that king of the vast kingdom of Bukongo who reigned as a Christian king, Dom Afonso I, from 1506 to 1543; who built schools and churches and renamed his capital São Salvador; whose son was bishop of Utica in Tunisia and from 1521 bishop of Bukongo; who sent embassies to Lisbon and to Rome? This man thought he had allies and friends in the Portuguese Jesuits he had encouraged to come and live in his kingdom and convert his subjects. Unfortunately for him, Brazil was opening up at the same time and needing labor to work its vast plantations. So the Portuguese missionaries abandoned their preaching and became slave raiders. Dom Afonso in bewilderment wrote a letter in 1526 to King John III of Portugal complaining about the behavior of Portuguese nationals in the Congo. The letter went unanswered. In the end, the Portuguese gave enough guns to rebellious chiefs to wage war on Bukongo and destroy it, and then imposed the payment of tribute in slaves on the kingdom.

The letter Dom Afonso of Bukongo wrote to King John III of Portugal in 1526 is in the Portuguese archives and reads in part as follows:

Dom Afonso was a remarkable man. During his long reign, he learned to speak and read Portuguese. We are told that he studied the Portuguese codified laws in the original bulky folios, and criticized the excessive penalties which were inflicted for even trivial offenses. He jokingly asked the Portuguese envoy one day: “Castro, what is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?”
⁵

Here was a man obviously more civilized than the “civilizing mission” sent to him by Europe. Radical African writers are inclined to mock him for being so willing to put aside the religion and ways of his fathers in favor of Christianity. But nobody mocks Constantine I, the Roman emperor who did precisely the same thing. The real difference is that while Constantine was powerful and succeeded, Afonso failed because the Christianity which came to him was brutal and perverse and armed with the gun. Three hundred and fifty years after Dom Afonso, Joseph Conrad was able to describe the very site on which his kingdom had stood as the Heart of Darkness.

Such stories as Dom Afonso’s encounter with Europe are not found in the history books we read in schools. If we knew them, the prevailing image of Africa as a place without history until Europeans arrived would be more difficult to sustain. Young James Baldwin would not have felt a necessity to compare himself so adversely with peasants in a Swiss village. He
would have known that his African ancestors did not sit through the millennia idly gazing into the horizon, waiting for European slavers to come and get them.

But ultimately Baldwin proved too intelligent to be fooled. He realized there had to be a design behind the consistent tragedy of black people. That was when he said to his nephew: “It was intended that you should perish in the ghetto.”

Note the word “intended.”

When I first came to the United States in the 1960s, I did not meet James Baldwin, because he had gone away to France. We finally did meet twenty years later, in Gainesville, Florida, in 1983, at a memorable event: the annual conference of the African Studies Association. During the unforgettable four days we spent down there at the conference and later visiting old slavery sites, he spoke of me in these words: “my buddy whom I met yesterday; my brother whom I met yesterday—who I have not seen in four hundred years; it was never intended that we should meet.”
⁶

That word again—“intended.” The first order of business for Africans and their relatives, African-Americans, is to defeat the intention Baldwin speaks about. They must work together to uncover their story, whose truth has been buried so deeply in mischief and prejudice that a whole army of archaeologists will now be needed to unearth it. We must be that army on both sides of the Atlantic. The grievance against Africa sometimes encountered among African-Americans must now be critically examined. The first generation of your ancestors who saw what happened firsthand should be the ones to hold a deep grudge against Africa, if there was good reason to do so.
But many of them in fact clung to Africa. Olaudah Equiano, one of the luckiest among them, acquired an education, freed himself, and wrote a book in 1789:
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
. He preceded his European slave name by his original Igbo name and affirmed his African identity, waving it like a banner in the wind. When and how did the grievance begin to grow and fester? We must find out.

Equiano has been followed down the years by a band of remarkable men and women who realized in their different ways that the intention to separate us must be confounded if we are to succeed: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Leo Hansberry, Chancellor Williams, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and a host of others. We should learn from their example.

1988