The Artificial Negro - An African Builds An Underworld Empire In America

Josiah M'bele was born in a remote village of Cameroon in the far hills of the English highland townships. Divided because of long-ago and long-forgotten colonial differences, the tribes of the country never noticed the boundaries. In Bamenda, where Josiah lived, people spoke either Fulfulde or Pidgin.  The official languages of French and English were foreign tongues of no interest and of no use. 

Only occasionally did Josiah hear English when he was growing up - like the time when his father was arrested by the police and tried in a court presided over by a solemn, very proper English-speaking judge.  The young boy accompanied his mother to watch his lawyer spar with the judge in this strange-sounding, harsh language, money paid, and his father dismissed into into the hot March sun. 

It was then that Josiah's life turned to the West. 'You must learn English', his mother said, 'for you will go to America'.  That had always been Sarah M'bele's dream - to enable her son to get out of the mire of Africa, the oppression of big men, the clutches of the Chinese traders, the intimidation of the tribes from the South, the daily diet of manioc and bush meat, and not a penny to spend on anything else.  One day her son would become wealthy and leave the stink and rot of Africa behind. 

Josiah was a smart boy and learned English well in school - that and mathematics for which he had a special and particular talent.  Numbers were everywhere, bunches of things, long columns of fire ants, stones on the road, leaves on the mango tree.  You could combine them, relate them, conjure them.  There were real numbers, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, complex, fascinating equations which calculated miniscule differences and suggested universal laws. 

He caught the eye of the young Belgian priest who taught mathematics in the school.  He immediately saw Josiah's potential and made sure that he went on to secondary school.  There Josiah thrived, surrounded by other boys of his ability, interest, and ambition, and at graduation was well-prepared for university - not Oxford or Cambridge, although he was quite well-qualified for admission, but a lesser but still reputable school in the North of England. 

It was there, however, that Josiah had another turning.  This cold, wintry, dark place was not only far from the sunshine and warmth of his home, but annoyingly academic.  Numbers were all well and good, but what did they add up to but more numbers?  Looking at the formulas and quizzical abstractions on the blackboard, the young man only saw nests, tangles, irrelevancies.  

As the professor droned on about Fermat, Heisenberg, and Planck, Josiah dreamt of other things, things a mature, handsome, broad-shouldered young man would naturally think of.  A beautiful blonde, silken-haired, tall woman; a mansion by the sea, and a banquet table of limitless variety. 

 

He was smart enough to stay the course, to graduate with honors and get acceptance to a prestigious graduate school in America, but his was only a desultory interest in learning.  University was simply a waystation to something much, much bigger. 

During his first week at his American graduate school, he was approached by a number of American blacks who were hungry to know about the motherland.  'What was Africa really like?', they asked.  As time went on and their fawning ignorance became a nuisance, he became interested in the real black experience, the ghetto.  

His colleagues were, it seemed, not quite up to par - men and women who balked and foundered at the simplest calculations, were indifferent to study, but whose grades were always the highest. 'Affirmative Action', Josiah learned, was behind it all - an engineered way of promoting the interests of American blacks who could not get a leg up without help.  His classmates were uninteresting, self-absorbed, politically naive, and just as co-opted by the New World colonial system as Africans had been in Africa. 

But what was the famous 'hood all about? The inner city, the ghetto, the real black America? Every city had one, and a bus ride and a transfer got you there.  It was not as he expected - a black place with not one white in sight, a place of trash and litter, boarded up windows, nodding drug addicts, pimps, whores, and con men seemingly on every street corner. 

He was intrigued.  His black history books had told the story of Frank Lucas, American gangster, lord of Harlem, richest black man in America, ruler of a vast drug kingdom with connections in Asia, Mexico, and Los Angeles.  Lucas was richer than any white man, an ingenious, savvy, brilliant entrepreneur whose wealth grew yearly; and where he, Josiah, was standing, on a potholed street in a prosperous American city deep in the ghetto, was Lucas' offspring. 

Pharoah Jones, a man just as enterprising, canny, and ruthless as Lucas; a man with a management structure, an army, a secret police, and a sales and marketing network the envy of Wall Street was the man to see. 

'Now this is a real black American', said Josiah and arranged to meet him. 

Admission to the sanctum sanctorum was not easy, but Josiah's African credentials made it easier.  Jones had never met a real African, especially one from an unpronounceable place deep in the jungle, and it was this surprisingly romantic, native dream that was the foundation of their friendship and partnership. 

Josiah was immediately taken by the man, the most impressive, intelligent, powerful man he had ever met. The big men in Bamenda were posturing fools compared to Jones, petty, brutal, savagely ignorant tools; while Jones had a natural confidence, unmatched ability, and a Nietzschean will. 

If Josiah was to be a black man in America, albeit an African, it was to this star that he would be hitched, not to the desiccated old men on the faculty of ______. 

 'You're my artificial Negro', Pharoah said to Josiah many months after he had welcomed him into the fold, 'my man'; and from that moment on Josiah knew that he had found a home. 

The friendship between the two men was sympathetic.  Josiah loved Pharoah for his genius, his will, and his uncanny understanding of market economics and the insatiable demand for his product.  Pharoah loved Josiah for his suave intelligence, the kind of cultured brilliance that he had never seen before - a certain familiarity with the concepts and ideas that Pharoah had only glimpsed but wanted to know. 

As the friendship grew, and as Josiah was given more responsibility in the organization, Pharoah's empire became the most able, feared, and wealthy on the east coast.  Josiah provided a certain social perspective - how the minds of politicians, judges, and police captains worked.  Buying them was not the issue.  Keeping them interested was, and Josiah so well understood the frailty of moral principles, the pedestrian demands of a bourgeois life, and the nature of men that the empire was secure at its very foundation. 

 

Josiah's colleagues at the university wondered what had happened to their African friend, the one to succeed, a professorship at Harvard, dean eventually, political star, Washington influencer, the man they looked up to for his talent and his origins.

Only later did word circulate on campus that he had gone underground; but the rumors were vague and imprecise.  Perhaps he had joined the latter day Black Panthers, or the seditious anti-capitalist movements of Brooklyn - some politically valid movement that was worthy of his abilities.  

No one even considered the possibility that he was a colleague, friend, and confident of the famous Pharaoh Jones, the most notorious and feared black man in America - the Pablo Escobar of the black underworld. 

Josiah did realize his African dreams - blonde, blue-eyed women, a mansion in Palm Beach and one in St. Tropez, and the wealth of Croesus.  He was so trusted by Pharoah that when Josiah said he wanted to retire, he let him go with a warm embrace and an invitation to return whenever he wished.  No blood shed, new feud, no vendettas, just a recognition of friendship and intimacy. 

The last anyone heard, Josiah was living happily on the Mediterranean, well under the radar of American and European authorities, and visited often by his mother who was as proud of him as could be.  The number counting had paid off, she said, smiling and hugging her boy, sipping her tea on the verandah overlooking the harbor.