Book Review: Afro-6

Book Review: 'Afro-6' by Hank Lopez

5 / 5 stars

Let's wrap up our 'Some Tough City' celebration with 'Afro-6,' a 1969 novel from Dell. 

This novel is a member of a small, but significant, genre of 'what if' novels and short stories dealing with black takeovers / revolutions, one prominent example being Edwin Corley's 1970 novel 'Siege.' Also worth searching out are Robert Silverberg's 1970 story 'Black is Beautiful,' and Joe Hensley's 1973 story 'In Dark Places.'

Author Enrique Hank Lopez (1920 - 1985) was a Mexican-born author and, according to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, the first Chicano to graduate from Harvard Law School.

Lopez published a number of books, on varied topics, in the 1970s and 1980s. These topics including the Andes plane crash survivors ('They Lived on Human Flesh !', 1973), the racial and educational politics of social advancement ('The Harvard Mystique', 1979), Indian mysticism ('The Hidden Magic of Uxmal', 1980) and a biography of writer Katherine Anne Porter ('Conversations With Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek,' 1981).

'Afro-6' is not an easy novel to acquire. At amazon, the bookjackers have it listed at prices ranging from $175 to $295. At eBay, a vendor is advertising a 'like new' copy for $375 ('or best offer'). I remember getting my copy some four years ago, for a lot less money than that.

What, exactly, is 'Afro-6' ? Well, according to first-person narrator John Rios,

Dig. Dig this - I belong to a secret task force that's taking over New York City within the next ten days. Not all of the city, mind you, just the island of Manhattan. First of all, we'll isolate this miserable ofay town by destroying all the bridges and bottling up the tunnels connecting it to the surrounding metropolitan area. Then we're going to squeeze whitey into a very tight corner, man.

It's the early 70s, and a group of black revolutionaries are plotting to paralyze the U.S. with a series of riots and demonstrations, these part of an ambitious effort to take control of Manhattan, and use its possession to extort / leverage a black homeland from the federal government. Meticulous planning has gone into every aspect of Afro-6, and at 6 p.m. on October 1, it all goes down.

For Rios, who is a black Puerto Rican, the revolution is an opportunity to end the oppression of black and brown people, and stick it to whitey. Not that Rios necessarily hates white people as individuals; he has had white, Jewish, liberals as lovers, colleagues, and friends. But he hates the white power structure, it's long past time for the honkys to be shown the error of their ways.

The narrative regularly switches from the first-person perspective of Rios to the third-person perspective of Alan Geller, a friend of Rios's from their college days at Harvard. Geller provides the novel with a 'white' perspective that is sympathetic towards the black power movement.

I'm not going to spoil anything, but I will say that roughly halfway through the novel's 237 pages, Afro-6 does indeed 'go off.' And the entire nation is going to witness the depth of black rage.............

I give 'Afro-6' a Five Star Rating, because it's a well-plotted thriller. Author Lopez infuses ideology into the narrative, but avoids giving the novel a hectoring tone. There are some well-written action / combat sequences, and a healthy amount of caustic humor; one of the best examples of such, describes white liberals attending a rally held by a black militant named 'Abdul X.' As Abdul excoriates the white attendees, these revel in their abasement. 

If you can find an 'affordable' copy of Afro-6 it's well worth getting. It would be nice if, at some point in the future, a reprint of the novel can be introduced to the reading public, perhaps through something like W. W. Norton's Old School Books imprint from the 1990s. 

To paraphrase the diction in 'Afro-6,' I'm sure even honkys will dig the vibes of this novel !