The Quiet Before, page 12
* * *
—
THE ARTICLE THAT nearly brought Zik’s experiment to an end was published in the May 15, 1936, issue of the Morning Post. It was part of the regular volley of columns and counter-columns. In this case, the writer, identified only with the pseudonym Effective, was responding to an earlier editorial that posed the purposefully provocative question, “Do the Europeans believe in God?” Effective said yes, they did, but it was a god “whose name is spelt Deceit” and whom Africans had no business worshipping. The white man “believes in the god whose law is ‘Ye strong, you must weaken the weak.’ Ye ‘civilized’ Europeans, you must ‘civilize’ the ‘barbarous’ Africans with machine guns. Ye ‘Christian’ Europeans, you must ‘Christianize’ the ‘pagan’ Africans with bombs, poison gases, etc.” Nothing was held back. The racism of the colonizers was rancid: Europeans “put a monkey on a chair with a chain around its neck and let an African child hold fast to the chain and take their photographic picture and write an inscription underneath—‘two monkeys’—so that the African realizes that to the Europeans he (the African) is classified as a monkey. Yes, this is the god that the European knows and believes in.”
By the article’s end Effective asserted that he prayed only to “the god of Ethiopia, whom my forefathers worshipped at a period when the Europeans were living in caves,” and that he felt himself to be on equal footing with any white man who might claim superiority. “The European respects me and I respect him in turn. In the event he oversteps his bounds and becomes insulting, I often put him in his place in a jiffy. He does not controvert with me because he knows what the result would be.”
Zik had had reservations about running this piece. It wasn’t that some red line had been crossed—the anonymous opinions in his pages regularly stretched to these extremes—but the identity of the man writing as Effective made him wary. It was Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson, a self-described “international African” who was born in Sierra Leone and spent most of his life traveling in trade union and Communist circles, even studying at a Comintern-sponsored university in Moscow in the late 1920s (where Jomo Kenyatta, the future Kenyan leader, was his roommate). When Wallace-Johnson landed in the Gold Coast around the same time as Zik, the colony’s attorney general wrote that the writer had been trained in Moscow “in the art of subversive propaganda” and that he had “returned to West Africa as a professional agitator.” Copies of The Negro Worker proliferated in his wake.
Zik didn’t mind Wallace-Johnson’s radicalism—after all, they shared the same anticolonial goals—but they differed greatly on tactics, on how to get to where they wanted to go. Wallace-Johnson desired immediate revolution. He looked to Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky and valorized the idea of a vanguard leading the way. Zik disagreed and thought an “intellectual revolution” was needed first—and that his newspaper was doing the work of bringing it about. “I referred him to the history of modern Italy,” Zik wrote, describing his first encounter with Wallace-Johnson. “How it took a Mazzini to revolutionize the thinking of the Italians, and a Cavour to plan the future of Italian nationalism, before a Garibaldi came on to the scene as a man of action.” Wallace-Johnson responded that Zik’s method would take centuries; his could accomplish independence in decades.
What Zik couldn’t abide was Wallace-Johnson using his radical approach to sabotage Zik’s, planting a bomb in the middle of his public sphere. And so when Alfred Ocansey, the paper’s publisher, passed along the article and asked Zik to run it, Zik pushed back. He did not trust Wallace-Johnson, and he also knew that without a name attributed to the piece, he himself would be responsible for its possible “seditious intent.” But Ocansey insisted and Zik, frustrated, passed the piece along to one of his assistant editors to handle.
What Zik didn’t know was that Governor Hodson, despite his genial presence at Zik’s wedding, was looking for just such an opportunity. In February 1936, several months before Zik published Wallace-Johnson’s piece, Hodson had made a request to the Colonial Office that had shocked his superiors. He wanted “absolute power to suppress a paper at once, if, in my opinion, such action is warranted.” The radio propaganda campaign had failed, and the newspapers seemed beyond reform, “controlled by the Red element” and seeking, through the publication of many angry, disgruntled voices, “to stir up trouble and break up the Empire.” He had a specific disdain for Wallace-Johnson, who, though he didn’t run a newspaper, seemed to always be involved in every provocation. Increasingly irritated, Hodson wrote home that he was certain that, unlike the British rulers, “the French would not tolerate it for one second.”
* * *
—
THE KNOCK ON Zik’s door came eight days after Wallace-Johnson’s “Has the African a God?” appeared in the Morning Post. It was early on a Saturday morning at his suite at the Trocadero. Standing there, flanked by a number of armed officers, was the superintendent of police, D. G. Carruthers, who also happened to be one of Zik’s regular tennis partners at the Gold Coast Lawn Tennis Club at Adabraka. Carruthers looked as if he didn’t know the man before him. “Are you Mr. Nnamdi Azikiwe?” he asked. Zik responded that he was. “Are you the editor of The African Morning Post?” “Yes,” Zik answered again. “I have a criminal writ for you.” And with that Carruthers handed over a document charging Zik with four counts of violating the sedition ordinance, all related to Wallace-Johnson’s article. Zik scanned the page and quickly saw that each count carried a maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment or a hundred-pound fine. He broke out in a cold sweat, his thin shoulders hunching forward, and Carruthers suddenly abandoned his impersonal pose. “Zik, I hope you realize that I am doing my duty,” he told him. “Of course, D.G., I do.” Carruthers then smiled and asked if they were still on for tennis that evening.
Wallace-Johnson was soon also arrested after detectives uncovered proof that he was Effective. His trial came first, in the fall, and ended with a guilty verdict, though the radical was able to avoid prison (he was given two weeks to raise a fifty-pound fine instead of a three-month sentence). The light punishment so angered Governor Hodson that he began drafting new legislation allowing him to deport from the colony anyone charged with sedition.
Zik’s ordeal dragged out much longer; the trial was delayed nineteen times over the course of 1936. These were long months of waiting and uncertainty. He tried to run the newspaper as before, populating it with as many voices as possible. But he felt the chill of Hodson’s crackdown. When Zik did finally come before a judge, in January 1937, it didn’t take long for him to be declared guilty. Wallace-Johnson’s trial had already established that the Morning Post had published seditious content, and as the editor Zik was complicit in the crime. “It is a very serious offense for an editor of a newspaper to commit in a largely illiterate country like the Gold Coast,” the judge told Zik. He received a six-month sentence and was fined fifty pounds, but a technical mistake on the judge’s part spared Zik from prison, and he emerged on the steps of the courthouse looking rattled but resilient. He was prepared “for the inevitable,” he told the crowd, if it helped to speed Africa “on its way toward redemption and self-determination.”
He embraced his martyrdom. The day after his judgment he wrote a column describing himself as the “living spirit of an idea—the idea of a New Africa,” now faced with “the travails and tribulations of Gethsemane, and Golgotha and Calvary.” He had arrived in the Gold Coast, “this Galilee of my life,” at the age of thirty and he was now thirty-three, “on the brink of my ‘crucifixion.’ ” His readers, also the paper’s main contributors, who owned it as much as he did, now felt embattled along with him. They were his strength, he wrote. “Why then should I be daunted when I know that Renascent Africa feel with me, and sigh with me, and dream with me, and vision with me, at this thirty third age of my fleeting existence on this planet?” If the Morning Post had managed to create a new public, Zik was speaking to it and for it.
Zik appealed the ruling a few months later, in March, and it was then that the special character of the newspaper revealed itself. “Grumblers’ Row,” and much of the rest of the paper, had a trickster quality in its anonymity. Writers darted out from behind trees, threw rocks, and then retreated. And this, in the end, is what saved Zik and his entire endeavor.
He was represented by Frans Dove, the most highly respected West African lawyer (and the father of Mabel Dove, a.k.a. Dama Dumas). Dove decided to question a fundamental assumption of the Crown’s case: that Zik was in fact the editor of The African Morning Post. Before the appeals procedure could begin, Dove asked the three judges of the West African Court of Appeal (made up of the chief justices of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone, three knighted white Englishmen in wool wigs) if he could first raise a preliminary but basic objection. He wanted an explanation for why Nnamdi Azikiwe had any connection with this case.
The attorney general huffed that this was an absurd question. He said that, of course, Nnamdi Azikiwe was “Zik” and that every schoolboy in the country knew who Zik was: the editor of The African Morning Post, which published a seditious article in its pages. Dove answered that though he understood “the popular identification of Zik with Azikiwe and Azikiwe with the African Morning Post ” and that this might mean something to the average person, it “meant nothing to the law.” In the paper, the pseudonyms separated the pen from the body. The name Nnamdi Azikiwe appeared nowhere, even if “Zik” did. Unless the Crown could properly identify the man before them as the editor, he was not answerable to the charges that had been brought against him.
Dove had come up with a checkmate, using the logic of the British court system—which determined guilt through identification and confession—against itself. The attorney general jumped to his feet and said he was surprised that Dove was trying to deceive the court in this way. He would gladly provide legal proof of identity. He then called into the record Zik’s original arrest by his tennis buddy D. G. Carruthers. In the transcript read aloud, Zik was clearly asked both whether he was Nnamdi Azikiwe and whether he was the editor of The African Morning Post. “That was the record, my Lords,” said the attorney general with triumph in his voice.
Dove was prepared for this. The courtroom grew quiet, and all three judges peered down from their benches with real curiosity about the lawyer’s next move. He stood up and said in a quiet voice that it was true that on the occasion of his arrest, May 23, 1936, Nnamdi Azikiwe had admitted he was the editor of the paper. But that was irrelevant. Had the prosecution established anywhere that he was the editor on the material date of Friday, May 15, 1936—that is, when Wallace-Johnson’s article appeared in print? “Even breathing seemed to have stopped in the court,” one of Zik’s friends reported. The judges posed the question to the deflated attorney general, who had to answer that no, he could not offer any proof that Zik had been legally identified as editor on May 15. That, one of the chief justices then said, was “fatal” to the Crown’s case.
The trial was over in a matter of minutes. The president of the West African Court of Appeal threw out Zik’s conviction and ordered that the fifty-pound fine be immediately refunded. Zik hardly had a moment to take it all in when what he later described as a “hilarious uproar” broke out. He was lifted on the shoulders of his friends as the police shouted, “Order in the court!” They carried him out and then down Pagan Road to the offices of The African Morning Post, where, he later wrote, “the staff joined with the mob as we milled through the streets of Accra, singing, dancing and merrymaking at my acquittal.” The grumblers had come in person to celebrate their win.
* * *
—
THE TRIAL AND ZIK’S VICTORY over the colonial masters had made an impression on the growing community of newspaper readers in Accra. They had affirmed their right to their public space, the small freedom to debate among themselves. Kwame Nkrumah, a young teacher trained at the Achimota School who had visited Zik the previous year looking for advice, later wrote in his memoirs that his own feelings of nationalism were “revived at about that time through articles written in The African Morning Post.” Nkrumah had thought of becoming a Catholic priest but decided to study in the United States instead. Zik wrote a letter to Lincoln University, and Nkrumah set off, starting his studies there in the fall of 1935. But he followed the events back home very closely—as did Langston Hughes, who wrote a poem about his old college friend. Nkrumah, the man who would eventually become the first prime minister and president of Ghana (and one of the first leaders of any sub-Saharan African country to gain independence), wrote that Zik’s sedition case was “the first warning puff of smoke that a fire had been lit, a fire that would prove impossible to extinguish.”
What was this fire? Those first flickers of a national identity, born of opinions rubbing against each other in ways they never had before, as citizens of a shared nation argued about their present and their future. Zik was pleased, of course, but he also took the moment to stop and ask himself what he was doing in the Gold Coast. It had been an exhausting year. His wife, Flora, missed her family, missed Nigeria. And his own relationship with Ocansey had become strained. He didn’t know whether he would have the same sort of editorial control over the paper that he had enjoyed before his arrest. With these doubts already growing, he learned of a small newspaper going out of business and selling its press. He quickly found investors and took the opportunity to buy the steam-powered machine, a Wharfedale Stop Cylinder, invented in the mid-nineteenth century and already out of use in Europe and America. This one was well worn but functioning. Zik had all the parts delivered on a truck to Accra, and as soon as he set it up, he registered a new company: Zik’s Press.
Soon, just three months after his acquittal, he was on a boat in Accra harbor, looking again at the coastline. This time, though, he had his wife with him and a printing press on board, as well as a reputation for being more than just a sharp young man with an American education. He had proven himself capable of bringing together a readership, a self-aware community that didn’t mind irritating the British authorities as it groped toward its own independence. Now he was headed to Lagos, where he would start a new newspaper, the West African Pilot, hoping to continue what he’d begun. It would take another quarter century before Nigeria would declare its independence from Britain, and when it did, Nnamdi Azikiwe was sworn in as the republic’s first president.
Chapter 5
FOCUS
Moscow, 1968
IN THE YEARS following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union exhaled. It was a period known as the Thaw, and like many in her generation Natalya Gorbanevskaya was shaped by the sliver of openness it brought after the long years of pervasive fear and murder. Nikita Khrushchev, the new leader, delivered his “secret speech” in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and repressive rule. New thinking, new shapes and colors, made their way in. Picasso’s paintings were exhibited in Moscow and Leningrad, and Natasha, as she was known to all, rushed to see them with her friends from university.
But for the urban intelligentsia this dizzying moment also presented a new set of complications. Just a few months before cubism made its way to the Hermitage, Soviet tanks had brutally crushed the Hungarian revolution. It was no longer obvious anymore exactly what would set the regime on edge. Under Stalin, testing the limits of freedom meant possibly being sent to a Siberian Gulag or marched downstairs to a prison basement and shot. But how far could you go now? The landscape, though cleared of land mines, still had plenty of holes to fall into and sharp rocks to trip over. What would set off the regime? How critical could you be, and what exactly could you criticize? What art was permitted? And what kinds of difficult truths could be uttered above a whisper?
The testing ground for these questions was samizdat. The word was a contraction of “self” and “publishing,” usually by typewritten manuscript, and it was in every way a unique product of the Thaw. By the early 1960s it was the underground method for reading the novels, short stories, poems, political essays, and memoirs that would never make it through the Soviet state censors. Samizdat writing quickly became the most interesting writing, passed from hand to hand illicitly, a sort of forbidden fruit. (A famous joke from the time recounts a mother saying that when her daughter refused to read War and Peace, she gave it to her to retype as samizdat, and she grabbed it and read every word.)
For a burgeoning poet like Natasha, who had been writing verses since she was a young girl, the Thaw made her feel she could express herself more openly, but the options for having her work read were still few. When she was a linguistics student at Moscow University in the late 1950s, her first poems appeared on the university’s wall newspaper—pages of printed broadsheet pasted up around campus, to be read while standing. Other students attacked her as “decadent and a pessimist” for her dark, lovelorn sentiments. She also learned just how dangerous poetry could be in the Soviet Union. After the quashing of the Hungarian revolution, some of Natasha’s friends were arrested for their poems, and she even found herself at the notorious Lubyanka prison (the place where, in fact, inmates had been shot in the basement not long before). Under KGB pressure, she revealed everything about the creation of the pamphlet that had contained the offending poems. In her mind then, at twenty-one, she still imagined herself a good Soviet citizen, a member of the Komsomol, the young pioneers. But afterward she was filled with remorse and never forgave herself for betraying her friends.
By the early 1960s, her writing life benefited from the spread of samizdat, giving her a chance to add her verses to the stream of underground poetry. At first, she would copy out her poems by hand and share them with friends. But after she purchased an old Olympia for forty-five rubles to write her thesis, she began typing them out. She used carbon paper that could create four copies at once. Natasha would reproduce the same collection as many as eight times, to “publish” an initial samizdat run of thirty-two. Her poems of alienation and loneliness would then spread as her readers made their own copies. “I enter my being like a plane going into a spin,” she wrote in one poem, part of her first samizdat publication from 1964, the year when she began putting together annual compendiums. In another she is “not a flame, not a candle, but a light, I am a fire-fly in the damp, tangled grass.”
