P.S. by Studs Terkel

know mine. Thinking now, as a country—We think of Africa immediately, and you have, again (returning to your work, by the way, may I suggest this work to listeners—James Baldwin’s. Nobody Knows My Name , published by Dial, and even though I say it is a collection of essays, it isn’t that. It is a novel; it is an autobiography, really, in a way), you have a journalistic report, and a very accurate and astute one: “Princes and Powers,” it’s called. You were covering a meeting of Negro writers of the world in Paris, and African writers were speaking, too.
     
    Yeah. It was really an African conference; it was predominantly African. The Negroes were there as Africans, or as, well, the black people of the world, let’s put it that way.
     
    What of the African writer, then? You mentioned Wole here. Isn’t there a problem here? The uncovering of this rich heritage, so long buried, by kidnappers, by colonial people. And at the same time we know that technological advances are taking place, changes, the slums are being cleared—
     
    The twentieth century, in fact—
     
    Now isn’t there loss as well as gain here? It’s a question of things happening at the same time.
     
    It’s a very great question. It’s almost impossible to assess what was lost, which makes it impossible to assess what’s gained. How can I put this? In a way, I almost envy African writers because there’s so much to excavate, you know, and because their
relationship to the world, at least from my vantage point—and about this I may be wrong—seems much more direct than mine can ever be. But God knows, the colonial experience destroyed so much, blasted so much, and of course changed forever the African personality. So one doesn’t know what really was there on the other side of the flood. It’s going to take generations before that past can be reestablished and, in effect, used.
    And at the same time, of course, all of the African nations are under the obligation, the necessity, of moving into the twentieth century at really some fantastic rate of speed, which is the only way they can survive. And of course all Africans, whether they know it or not, have endured the European experience and have been stained and changed by the European standards.
    In a curious way, the unification of Africa, insofar as it can be said to exist, is a white invention. That is to say, the only thing that really unites, as far as I can tell, all black men everywhere, is the fact that white men are on their necks. What I’m curious about is what will happen when this is no longer true and for the first time in the memory of anybody living, black men have their destinies in their own hands. What will come out then, and what the problems and tensions and terrors will be then, is a very great and very loaded question.
    I think that if we were more honest here we could do a great deal to aid in this transition. Because we have an advantage, which we certainly consider to be a disadvantage, over all the other Western nations. That is to say, we have created—forgetting, you know, quite apart from anything else—the fact is we have created, and no other nation has, a black man who belongs, who is a part of the West. Now, and in distinction to Belgium or any other European power, we had our slaves
on the mainland. And therefore, no matter how we deny it, we couldn’t avoid human involvement with them, which we’ve almost perished denying, but which is, nevertheless, there.
    Now, if we could turn about and face this, we could have a tremendous advantage in the world today. But as long as we don’t, there isn’t much hope for the West, really. If one can accept the fact that it is no longer important to be white, it would begin to cease to be important to be black. If one could accept the fact that no nation with twenty million black people in it, for so long and with such depth of involvement—no nation under these circumstances can really be called a white