Richard Wright, Idiot

From Paris, Interzone:

Wright was not in disagreement with the point about roots.
But he had no intention of returning to America to reconnect
with them. He wished to trace different and, he hoped, deep-
er roots.'The African project had had a long gestation. To his
journal six years earlier, he had pledged to write ‘the only book
about Africa that will be written in my time’ (maybe he meant
the only ‘good’ book). And he gave his text a splendidly
heraldic title: Black Power.
But Wright was lost in Africa, where he had hoped to find
himself. His mind was of a different cast from that of the
Africans he met, and of a different century. Even the colour of
his skin, he discovered, could not be said. to be the same as
theirs: in Africa, shades of brown_tended to be locally specif-
ic, whereas the Afro-American experience had melded them.
He tried hard to identify with the people, but the people hard-
ly recognized the point of his identification. He was the
Outsider here.
Wright may have had pioneering insights into the political
future of African peoples, but his ideas about progress are
frozen in their era, and some sound startling now, coming
from one who considered himself a liberal thinker. In a letter
addressed directly to Nkrumah and postscripted to Black
Power, Wright referred to ‘our people’ — the people of the
Gold Coast — who ‘must be made to walk, forced draft, into
the twentieth century. The direction of their lives, the duties
they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the
sacrifices that must be made - all of this must be placed under
firm social discipline!’
It's possible that this exclamatory call grew out of his own
sensation of having lost his grip on reality in Africa. As he
admitted in his book, everything from the religion (‘juju’ and
ancestor worship) to the nudity he witnessed in the villages,
either appalled him or left him wondering how to reconcile
this ancient ‘stagnancy’ with the progressive demands of mod-
ern society to which he believed the new African nations must
aspire. Seeing men holding hands and dancing together in an
club, he immediately blamed ‘the vices of the English public-
school system. . . . Just as the African had taken inordinately
to alcohol, had he taken to this too? . . . I leaned toward” my
host and whispered: “Look here. What's going on?’”
That ‘Look here’ is pertinently phrased, and speaks vol-
umes. Wright was not an African: he was an American, with at
least as many ties to modern Europe as to his ancestral home-
land. His host assured him that he had not landed in a scene
from James Baldwin’s latest novel, but that the men’s physical
intimacy was an aspect of traditional tribal dancing, a part of
the culture. Wright’s response was to want to see the culture
changed. The ‘progressive’ thinker on Third World issues was
to find, over the coming years, that Third World thinkers
themselves considered his ideas reactionary.
i
Wright chose to write about the Gold Coast, rather than any
other African country, for several reasons: first, because of its
early struggle to gain independence; then because it was
British and thus permitted him reflections on the slave trade
(he began his journey to Africa in Liverpool); and, of course,
because of his personal connection with Nkrumah.
But there was another reason: the Gold Coast was not
French. Had the first African state to cry out for self-rule been
a part of the French empire, Wright would have left it alone.
There was a war going on at that very moment involving a
French Third World ‘property’, Vietnam. And when the
French got out of that frying pan, itwas only to land in the fire
of Algeria. Wright then had an African colonial revolution tak-
ing place on his doorstep, posing the ‘black or white’ question
in terms of the immediate vicinity. But far from answering the
question apropos of Algeria, Wright never even asked it.