How to I turn off the colors in emacs?

[Dieter]

FreeBSD 7.0 with package emacs-22.1_2

Attempt to edit a C file and emacs goes into some colorized mode.
Of course it chooses colors that are unreadable.
How do I turn OFF the colors and get simple black and white?
(ASCII mode, not X11)

The man page mentions command line options for foreground and
background colors, but these aren't mapped correctly, and
don't fix the problem anyway.

The builtin "info" isn't readable because it is in color.

Haven't found anything useful with google.