Les Blancs (6 page)

The lie of racism blinds Charlie to the real causes of revolution as well as to his own culpability. From one encounter with Tshembe to the next, he feints and dodges, stumbling through the morass of his ignorance, all the more ironic because of his presumption of superiority. He means well, but in this play, it is too late for good will. The wheels of violent revolution have already been set in motion by the very first contact between colonizer and native. One mistake has been compounded by another, leading irresistibly to a violent end. Like the inevitability of change predicted by Asagai in
A Raisin in the Sun
, the moment comes when Tshembe must embrace his destiny and fight the historical intruders. The decision is fraught with pain because he must begin by murdering his own brother, who has turned traitor, and thereby sets off the attack which kills the gentle white woman, his surrogate mother, who has nurtured him from birth. As the play ends, a hyena-like sobbing laughter breaks forth from Tshembe.

Throughout the play, Tshembe’s understanding of the complexities, his ability to see both sides and to love genuinely across color lines, is at war with his native history. His psyche, which is tied to the spirit of Africa, is personified by a woman dancer who constantly calls him to action, back to the struggle of his people.

The play was first performed at the Longacre Theater in New York City in 1970, and evoked very strong reactions from its reviewers.
Just as the audience divided into two camps, cheering for different sides, so the critics seemed unable to avoid such partisanship and criticized the play according to their feelings about its central question.
¹³
Les Blancs
is a courageous, well-crafted work, but a challenge to perform for an audience unaccustomed to encountering complex and disturbing questions in the theater. Its existence marks Hansberry as a visionary who accurately read the signs of her times and foreshadowed the impending African struggle for liberation. The play also forces a reassessment of the term “terrorist,” a meaningless label which masks the desperation and sometimes the inevitability of violence.

Hansberry defined realism as “not only what
is
but what is
possible.
”
¹⁴
Les Blancs
in particular fits this definition, for Hansberry did not advocate violent revolution, but used the theater as a medium for a passionate encounter with the consequences of our heroic as well as our foolish actions. Her work has yet to receive the critical attention due her immense talent.

Behind the vibrant theater of the 1960s and 1970s stand the pioneering figures and themes crafted by Hansberry, who forced the American stage to a new level of excellence and human relevance. In play after play, she sensed the mood of her times and anticipated the future—the importance that African politics and styles would assume, the regeneration of commitment among American intellectuals, the seductiveness of mercenary values for black Americans, the equality of men and women, and the proliferation of liberation struggles throughout the world. The theater was a working laboratory for this brilliant woman, whose sighted eyes and feeling heart caused her to reach out to a world at once cruel and beautiful.

Most students in my undergraduate seminars on Lorraine Hansberry—young women and men of varied racial/ethnic backgrounds, averaging around nineteen or twenty years of age—have at least heard of Lorraine Hansberry, although only vaguely, and some even remember the film
A Raisin in the Sun
. Excerpts from the journals they keep as a record of their thoughts during the course measure the intellectual distance that they travel and the profound nature of their encounter with this remarkable playwright. A white student registered his surprise:

A woman who was struggling with the politics of her world and her own sexuality wrote: “Hansberry’s life and thoughts take on a new meaning since my involvement in progressive struggles, and especially my personal/political growth within the context of the feminist movement.”

A graduating senior majoring in history exploded: “I feel angry that I wasn’t exposed to Hansberry’s work earlier … and to have never seen a single one of her plays performed on stage!” Later, in a mellower tone, he added: “I think one of the things I love about Lorraine is her ability to have taken her pain and anger and channeled it into energies that provided dreams and promise to change what was wrong and build upon that to make a brighter future.”

One young black student wrote simply, “I wish I could talk to her.”

In their youthful candor, these young people indicted and challenged a social and educational system that withholds from the public, intentionally or through neglect, the work of such insightful, evocative artists as Hansberry. The reissuing of this volume of her last collected plays revives the spirit of her life and work for a new generation.

—M
ARGARET
B. W
ILKERSON
1994

The following essays by Margaret B. Wilkerson were used as the basis for this Introduction: “The Sighted Eyes and Feeling Heart of Lorraine Hansberry,” in
Essays on Contemporary American Drama
, Munich, West Germany: Mex Hueber Verlag, 1981, pp. 91–104; “Lorraine Hansberry: The Complete Feminist,”
Freedomways
, Volume 19, Number 4, 1979, pp. 235–245.

I do not know when, specifically, Lorraine Hansberry’s abiding interest in Africa began, but it is certain that by the time I met her she was, at twenty-one, one of a handful of Americans who could be said to be truly knowledgeable in the subject. Africa had been a conscious part of her almost as far back as consciousness itself. And this was no accident.

She remembered vividly seeing newsreels of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia when she was five, and crying over them and, when the Pope blessed Mussolini’s soldiers, being told by her mother “never to forget what Catholicism stood for.” She recalled hours as a girl spent “postulating and fantasizing … over maps of the African continent.” In an unfinished partly autobiographical novel she wrote:

She recalled studying news photos out of modern Africa and turning to the mirror—“searching, searching for a generality.” But Lorraine said of the heroine: “She did not find it and therefore did the next best thing: she embraced
all
Africa as the homeland.”

It is possible that her earliest serious influence in this regard was that of her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, one of the world’s foremost scholars of African antiquity, whose preeminence is only now beginning to emerge out of imposed academic darkness as the once Dark Continent itself moves toward the center of world events. Through Professor Hansberry’s classes and living room in the 1940s passed such students as Nnamdi Azikewe, first president of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and others soon to become the founders and leaders of new African nations. In 1963, Nigeria dedicated the new Hansberry College of African Studies at Nsakka in honor of Professor Hansberry.

In 1951 Lorraine Hansberry was a young woman on fire with black liberation not only here but in Africa, an insurgent with a vision that embraced two continents—and notebooks filled with jottings like the following:

She was a voracious reader of everything in African studies she could lay her hands on: such works as Jomo Kenyatta’s great sociological study of the Kikuyu,
Facing Mt. Kenya;
Melville J. Herskovits’
The Myth of the Negro Past;
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Black Folk Then and Now;
Lorenzo D. Turner’s
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect
, which traced the survivals of West African languages in the Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands; and Basil Davidson’s
Lost Cities of Africa
, which described the great civilizations that were to surface in Beneatha
Younger’s brash (but factual) announcement in
A Raisin in the Sun
that her “people … were the first to smelt iron on the face of the earth … performing surgical operations when the English were still tattooing themselves with blue dragons!”

At the time, she was completing a seminar on African history under Dr. Du Bois, who, among his innumerable accomplishments, was the father of Pan-Africanism, the man who, as a disillusioned delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference, initiated the first world Pan-African Congresses. Under Du Bois’ tutelage, she wrote a research paper on “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History and Its Peoples.” References in
Les Blancs
to “chopping off the right hands of our young men by the hundreds, by the tribe” were, in fact, based upon the actual “preventive” methods King Leopold employed to eliminate resistance. And when in the play she mentions Stanley and Livingstone, the point of reference was not characters seen in a movie, but in Stanley’s case a man whose work she had actually studied.
^*

As first a reporter, then associate editor, of Paul Robeson’s monthly,
Freedom
, Lorraine shared offices in the early fifties in the building at 53 W. 125th Street, with, among other instrumentalities of the black freedom struggle in that day, the Council on African Affairs, and thus found herself a frequent close working associate of such men as Du Bois, W. Alpheus Hunton, Director of the Council, and Robeson himself. Through the offices of
Freedom
and into our home in those years (and after) came incredible young men and women, exiles from South Africa and the Rhodesias, exchange students from Kenya, the Gold Coast (as colonial Ghana was known then), Sierra Leone and Nigeria, not a few of whom were to become leaders in the fight for independence, and some no doubt to die in colonial prisons. And often we would find ourselves by their sides on picket lines before the United Nations or one or another European consulate in protest of South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre, the French war in Algeria, or—uppermost in all our minds in those
days—the British campaign in Kenya, where mass concentration camps, terror bombing and the strafing and burning of villages were employed a dozen years before Vietnam. Lorraine was a close observer of the five-month trial of Jomo Kenyatta, spokesman of the demand for land restitution and self-government in Kenya. At street-corner meetings in Harlem, as in the pages of
Freedom
and frequent letters to the press, she questioned whether the trial, and in fact the entire British campaign, was in fact directed at the sporadic and, until Kenyatta’s arrest, quite isolated incidents of so-called “Mau-Mau” terror (as Lorraine would point out, the words “Mau-Mau” do not exist in any East African language), or at Kenyatta’s powerful and fast growing Kenya Africa union, whose mass public meetings were attracting hundreds of thousands in the months preceding his incarceration. She circulated petitions for Kenyatta’s release from banishment to a remote desert village, and later shared with the visiting Tom Mboya her sense of triumph when Kenyatta at last stepped from exile to the prime ministership of his nation.

I remember how odd it seemed to some in those early years to hear Lorraine talk with absolute certainty of the “coming” upsurge for independence. For in those days not much had changed in a continent that seemed as Dark and remote from twentieth-century revolution as ever. There was occasional talk of plebiscites, promised in unheard-of places and, of course, the wars in Kenya and Algeria—about which Albert Camus was predicting, in the unthinkable event of independence, “a land of ruins and dead which no force, no power in the world, will be capable of reviving in this century.” But apart from that, not much. The African in shirt and tie, much less with gun or Constitution or governmental robes, remained an “exotic” stranger on Western horizons, while few indeed were those Americans, black or white, who linked their destiny to Africa.