Malcolm X (58 page)

On Thursday, May 7, he met with several reporters at his hotel, and in the late afternoon toured Lagos by car. Waiting at the hotel for him upon his return were several local contacts, including scholar E. U. Essien-Udom. The group departed for Ibadan by car, a trip Malcolm described as “frightening.” That night Malcolm delivered a powerful address at Ibadan University, sponsored by the National Union of Nigerian Students, to an enthusiastic audience of about five hundred. Malcolm would later note that a riot had barely been averted there when angry students mobbed a West Indian lecturer who had criticized Malcolm’s address. Most memorable for Malcolm, however, was the honor bestowed upon him by the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria: a membership card in their society with the name “Omowale,” which in the Yoruba language means “the son (or child) who has returned.”

With the exception of Mecca, the high point of Malcolm’s trip in April-May 1964 was his visit to Ghana, where he arrived on May 10. He came at the invitation of the small African-American expatriate community in the capital city of Accra, which was informally led by the writer/actor Julian Mayfield. Best known for the racially charged novels he wrote during the 1950s, Mayfield had fled to Ghana in 1961 following the kidnapping incident in North Carolina that had also sent Robert F. Williams into exile in Cuba. He was joined in Accra by a number of fellow African-American radicals, which included his wife Ana Livia Cordero, Maya Angelou, Alice Windom, Preston King, and W. E. B. and Shirley Du Bois.

Malcolm had first met Mayfield a few years before his arrival, at the home of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, and they had kept in touch as Malcolm’s interest in postcolonial politics grew. When Malcolm informed him of his African tour, Mayfield and the other expats grew excited at the chance to bring America’s strongest voice for black nationalism to the country that had long epitomized African hopes of a better future. Since becoming the first black African nation to gain its independence from colonialism in 1957, Ghana had come to symbolize possibility for many different groups. The rise to power of Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party provided a template for African self-rule for other colonized countries throughout the continent, while the peaceful transfer of power from the British colonial government, celebrated by blacks around the globe, gave further validation to American advocates of nonviolence, who saw in the transition clear proof of the efficacy of their methods. The nonviolent strategy also found support within the U.S. State Department, which was eager to limit Soviet influence in Africa.

Yet as in Nigeria, by the time of Malcolm’s arrival the bloom had come off the rose of Ghana’s celebratory moment. The controversial murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961 had marked for many a terrible turn in the continent’s affairs, as the policies of Western nations toward Africa complicated the already strained politics of new nations struggling with civil unrest and governmental chaos. The use of violence by the enemies of the African independence movement—and similarly by white supremacists in the United States—increasingly made nonviolence seem like an anemic response, and bolstered the influence of those in favor of a more revolutionary approach. By Malcolm’s visit, Ghana was suffering from many of the same political difficulties that he had seen in Nigeria, and his appearance had the dual effect of exciting a population hungry for the ideals he represented while making government officials uneasy about embracing him.

All this did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Accra’s African-American expat community, which had been anticipating Malcolm’s arrival for several weeks. When he arrived at Mayfield’s home early in the morning of Monday, May 11, Mayfield told Malcolm that he had already arranged two major speaking events for him. One was a lecture at the University of Ghana organized by Leslie Lacy, who had been radicalized during his student years at Berkeley and upon moving to Ghana had worked to set up the popular Marxist Study Group at the university. After Malcolm settled in, Mayfield took him to a lunch at Lacy’s home, where Alice Windom also joined them. Having first encountered Malcolm when he gave a talk at Chicago’s Mosque No. 2 in the early 1960s, she was happy to be reunited with him abroad.

Over lunch, Malcolm explained that he intended “to lend his talents to the building of unity among the various rights groups in America,” recalled Windom. “[I]n his view,” she wrote, “no useful purpose could be served by exposing all the roots of dissension.” This left open the question of Malcolm’s quite public struggle with the Nation, leading him to explain his departure from the NOI “in terms of the disagreement on political direction and involvement in the extra-religious struggle for human rights in America.” His first day in Ghana in the company of the expats left him feeling welcomed and contented, and late that same night back at his hotel, writing in his diary, Malcolm pondered the possibility of relocating to Africa: “Moving my family out of America may be good for me personally but bad for me politically.”

In a May 11 letter to the MMI updating his followers on his travels, Malcolm recounted his triumphal lecture at Ibadan University, where he had given “the true picture of our plight in America, and of the necessity of the independent African Nations helping us bring our case before the United Nations.” Politically, the highest priority was building “unity between the Africans of the West and the Africans of the fatherland [which] will well change the course of history.” This letter marks Malcolm’s final break with the NOI concept of the “Asiatic” black man and the beginning of his identification with Pan-Africanism similar to that espoused by Nkrumah.

By now the
Ghanaian Times
had been alerted of Malcolm’s presence, and a short announcement, “X is here,” appeared on the front page on May 12. The following day the paper covered his press conference, in which he emphasized “the establishment of good relationship between Afro-Americans and Africans at home [which] is bound to have far reaching results for the common good.” The next few days were a whirl of celebrity activity: escorted by Julian Mayfield to the Cuban embassy to meet their young ambassador, Armando Entralgo Gonzalez, “who immediately offered to give a party in my honor”; an intimate lunch at the home of a young Maya Angelou, then a dancer who was also employed as a teacher, whom he recalled fondly from their meeting several years before; meetings with the ambassadors of Nigeria and Mali; and a private conversation with Ghana’s minister of defense Kofi Boaka and other ministers at Boaka’s home.

On the evening of May 14, Malcolm delivered the lecture that Leslie Lacy had arranged for him, addressing a capacity crowd in the Great Hall of the University of Ghana. Alice Windom, observing the scene, commented that “many of the whites had come to be ‘amused.’ They were in for a rude surprise.” The speech forced Malcolm to be at his most politically adroit, and he warmly praised Nkrumah as one of the African continent’s “most progressive leaders.” The litmus test he proposed for African heads of state was based on how they were treated by the U.S. media, and thus the U.S. government: “[T]hese leaders over here who are receiving the praise and pats on the back from the Americans, you can just flush the toilet and let them go right down the drain,” he told the crowd, which roared with laughter and applause.

Yet in its appreciation of Nkrumah the speech masked the great divisiveness that had emerged in Ghanaian politics. Though Nkrumah had been revered as a national hero during independence, by the mid-1960s his government had degenerated into an authoritarian regime characterized by rigged elections, the loss of an independent judiciary, the decline of the Convention People’s Party as a popular democratic force, the expansion of corruption and graft, and a cult of personality surrounding Nkrumah. Although Nkrumah employed Marxist rhetoric, his regime could be best described as Bonapartist: deeply hostile to the existence of a free civil society and ruled from above by a bureaucracy estranged from the nation’s population. In 1964, C. L. R. James, Nkrumah’s former mentor, publicly broke with the African president over his suppression of democratic rights in the country. Malcolm undoubtedly heard these criticisms from some of the African-American expatriates, but he wisely used his remarks to emphasize the Pan-Africanist common ground that black Americans continued to share with the Ghanaian president. At times, he even seemed to endorse the authoritarian measures Nkrumah had established over economic and social policies, explaining that only when the “colonial mentality has been destroyed” will the masses of citizens “know what they are voting for, then you give them a chance to vote on this and vote on that.”

Malcolm also used his speech to characterize the United States as a “colonial power” like Portugal, France, and Britain. And he predicted that Harlem was “about to explode.” The
Ghanaian Times
reported that Malcolm called for Third World unity: “Only a concerted attack by the black, the yellow, the red and the brown races which outnumber the white race would end segregation in the U.S., and the world.”

The next morning, Malcolm had been scheduled to speak before Ghana’s national parliament, but because of transportation delays, he arrived shortly after the formal session ended. However, members of parliament were still there, and most gathered in the building’s Members Room, where Malcolm addressed the group and engaged legislators in a lively discussion. At noon, Malcolm was taken to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of the Ghanaian government, for a private hourlong meeting with President Nkrumah. The fact of the meeting itself was somewhat extraordinary, given that Nkrumah was reluctant to associate with Malcolm; only the appeal of W. E. B. Du Bois’s widow, Shirley, who continued to be a friend to Nkrumah after her husband’s death in 1963, convinced him to give Malcolm an audience. Later Malcolm spoke before two hundred students at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba, about forty miles from Accra. He even found time to dine with other American expatriates at the Chinese embassy, where they viewed three Chinese documentary films, including one proclaiming Maoist China’s support for African-American liberation.

It was a thoroughly triumphal visit. As Alice Windom observed, Malcolm X's “name was almost as familiar to Ghanaians as the Southern dogs, fire hoses, cattle prods, people sticks and ugly hate-contorted white faces, and his decision to enter the mainstream of the struggle was heralded as a hopeful sign.” Only two sour events blemished a near perfect week. The first was a negative encounter with Muhammad Ali, who was touring West Africa. As Malcolm was departing from his hotel on the way to the airport, the two men bumped into each other and Ali snubbed him. Later Ali eagerly expressed his unconditional loyalty to Elijah Muhammad, ridiculing Malcolm to a
New York Times
correspondent and laughing at the “funny white robe” his onetime friend wore and his newly grown beard. “Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out he’s out completely.” With words he would later regret, the boxer added, “Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.”

Then, within hours of leaving Ghana, Malcolm was attacked in the
Ghanaian Times
by Nkrumah’s ideological lieutenant, H. M. Basner. A communist, Basner accused Malcolm of failing to comprehend the “class function of all racial oppression.” Malcolm’s emphasis on black liberation instead of class struggle would only serve the interests of “American imperialists. . . . If Malcolm X believes what he says, then both Karl Marx and John Brown are excluded by their racial origin from being regarded as human liberators.” Julian Mayfield immediately responded to Basner's critique. Mayfield argued that what was so upsetting to Basner was Malcolm’s rejection of the classical communist strategy telling blacks to unite with white workers to achieve meaningful change. “The black American has been down that road before,” Mayfield observed. “No single factor has so retarded his struggle as his attempt to unite with liberal or progressive whites.” The average black American worker “has no more in common with the white worker in America than he has in South Africa.” Leslie Lacy later recalled that what truly appalled the African-American expatriate group was that Basner's criticisms of Malcolm had “appeared in a black, revolutionary, government-controlled newspaper. . . . No criticism, however objective, could have appeared attacking Nkrumah.”

Malcolm’s experiences in Ghana strengthened his commitment to Pan-Africanism. Writing to the MMI, Malcolm praised Ghana as “the fountainhead of Pan-Africanism. . . . Just as the American Jew is in harmony (politically, economically and culturally) with World Jewry, it is time for all African-Americans to become an integral part of the world’s Pan-Africanists.” He called for a return to Africa “philosophically and culturally.” Before he departed on May 17, the American expatriates in Ghana organized a “V.I.P. send off,” Malcolm wrote in his diary, adding that an enthusiastic “Maya [Angelou] took the bus right up to the plane.” When the airplane stopped briefly in Dakar, the French airport manager escorted Malcolm around the facility. “I signed many autographs,” Malcolm wrote, and he prayed with many others.