Books by Richard Wright

Richard Wright: Early Works  / 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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Few Africans will have any sympathy for Richard Wright’s African criticism, especially if any follow the lead of the Ashanti Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at Princeton University. In “A Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold Coast,” Appiah rakes Wright, his Black Power  (1954), and African Americans generally, over his own critical fires because of their “African dream.” Wright’s genius and his Euro-American notoriety carries no water among the Gold Coast people and very little with Kwame Nkrumah, their political leader and future head of state.

A literary artist, Richard Wright (1908-1960) was an American expatriate (permanent) who lived in Paris from 1947 until his sudden death in November 1960, leaving behind two daughters by his Jewish wife, Ellen. Wright the existentialist writer, at their French home after the visiting wife of George Padmore encouraged him, decided to go to the Gold Coast which was on the verge of its independence under the leadership of Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, whom Wright found stand-offish. Nkrumah knew Americans well, both black and white, much greater than they knew him and his Africa.

Though he was a successful writer and lived a comfortable middle-class life, a month long journey of exploration and discovery in the Gold Coast was a great expense that his publishers would not advance for the book Black Power. So Wright made a personal sacrifice, maybe a literary gamble. In 1956, two years later and a year after his trip to the the Bandung Conference, Wright’s report The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference was published, and then in 1957, he published White Man, Listen! a group of lectures that reflects his thinking on Afro-America and on the Third World, especially Africa. Neither book sold well, though they have had a sustaining power.

“Black Power enraged many Europeans,” John A. Williams writes in The Most Native of Sons (1970). Wright was critical of their shortcomings as colonial masters. They had failed their subjects and race was the cause of it all, an irrational element that was at odds with the West’s rational and democratic traditions. But the Africans too were “sour” on Black Power, like Appiah in 1987. “They accused Richard of going to Africa expecting to be treated as royalty and of writing a “vicious” book when he was not.”

Among our “Harlem Renaissance”  writers in the 1920s, and among other American artists, and artists in Europe as well, there was a celebration of “African naturalism,” or African “savagery.” Picasso studied African sculpture, Gide explored the Congo, Maran African tribal life. In his poem “The Congo,” American poet Vachel Lindsey did a “Study of the Negro Race.” Though Eugene O’Neill moved Negro character in his play The Emperor Jones, or “The Silver Bullet,” from “comic relief to the tragic center,” as Harold Isaacs points out, all these artistic outpourings leaned heavily on, as Sterling Brown concluded, “tom-toms, superstition and atavism.” These essences were the Negro, the black African.

As some African Americans are before the King of Kumasi, Richard Wright was not willing to bend his knee before African (alien) gods. Unlike the faddishness of the 1920s, Wright was not a romantic bohemian; he was not supportive of romantic primitivism and savagery. Wright believed that for Africa to thrive in the contemporary hi-tech world that its people must soak up as quickly as possible all the best that the West had to offer and that the job at hand was to find the most expeditious way of accomplishing that feat.

Wright was speaking when there were only two independent black nations—Liberia and Ethiopia—and only Liberia a republic with a framework for democracy. Wright was speaking during the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States had missiles pointed at each other, and the main question was Capitalism or Communism. Wright had been in the New York Communist Party, USA, in 1940, and so had his wife Ellen who was a Brooklyn organizer. In 1944 Wright published a two-part essay, “I Tried to Be a Communist” in the Atlantic Monthly. As both an African American and a Euro-American, Wright knew international politics.

Despite Appiah’s attack to diminish Wright’s criticism, the issues of the role and utility of tribal gods and ancestor worship have come into a 21^st century in which a few countries dominate the world politically, economically, and militarily. That for nations to exist in Africa as they have never done before, tribal traditions and histories and loyalties have to be repressed and the people have to be reeducated to translate, to become the African that never was. Wright suggested, like an artist (off the cuff), a military education as a model. Appiah concludes that Wright was a fascist.

Though he believed himself more European – that is, a modern man, than American, Wright expressed very American values in White Man Listen!  Like Europe, America is a product of the Enlightenment, which placed restraints on a religion that had absorbed all of society and all thinking. And the Rights of Man—to be, to think unhampered by king or state, restrictions which set the stage for swift economic development. There are American traditions more suited for now, such as egalitarian values: No man is better than another. Every man is a king. A right to believe, to assemble, to speak—to determine the shape of governance without military threat is taken as the norm, except if you’re black.

As Dr. Banda of Malawi pointed out in a 1968 interview, “democracy” in Africa “did not develop from the grass roots, this idea of an organized state; democracy did not originate with us. We had our own kind of democracy. . . . You, the Western powers, brought us a new kind of life totally different. . . . Then you have also, in other places, the old tribal conflicts. As a result of all this, you get political instability.” To become stable, African nations will need a free, standard, and compulsory public education, like in America.

Wright discounted Nkrumah’s Secret Circle:  “they swore fetish, a solemn oath on the blood of their ancestors to avoid women, alcohol, and all pleasure until their "country" was free and the Union Jack no longer flew over their land. They swore fetish to stick together.” 

Both the Cold War and fetish seem to have been of little service for Africa’s entry into modern time, the nuclear and computer age. In the last two decades, ugly tribal conflicts have risen in southern Africa, Zaire, Nigeria, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda. Wright rightfully feared that “an all-pervading climate of intellectual evasion or dishonesty” would supplant democratic governance and development.

White Man Listen!  remains relevant, a good introduction to the thinking and concerns of today’s African Americans, who so much want to be African.

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updated 11 June 2008