Malcolm X (68 page)

Malcolm’s newfound hostility toward Israel can be explained not only by his obligations to Nasser but also by the shifting currents of one particular African state. In the 1950s, under the anticommunist influence of Pan-Africanist George Padmore, newly independent Ghana had been hostile to the Soviet Union and friendly toward Israel. Padmore died in 1959, and by 1962 Ghana was seriously considering becoming a Soviet client state on the model of Cuba. Trade between Egypt, a Soviet ally, and Ghana nearly doubled between 1961 and 1962, and Nkrumah displayed solidarity with Nasser by announcing his own plan for the establishment of a “separate state for Arab refugees from Palestine.” Malcolm’s anti-Israeli thesis reflected the political interests of both these allies.

This calculated view reflected the broader balancing act he performed throughout his time in the Middle East. Egypt’s secular government stood forcefully at odds with religious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been implicated in a 1954 plot to kill Nasser and subsequently banned from the country. Malcolm, indebted to both sides, could not afford to take positions that might offend either. During his stay in Cairo, his Islamic studies were directed by Sheikh Muhammad Surur al-Sabban, the secretary-general of the Muslim World League. This group was financed by the Saudi government and it reflected conservative political views, so Malcolm had to exercise considerable tact and political discretion. Simultaneously, he was also corresponding with Dr. Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Expelled from Egypt, Ramadan had also founded the World Islamic League, and in 1961 established the Islamic Center in Switzerland. Throughout their correspondence, Malcolm pressed Ramadan about race and Islam. At one point Ramadan appealed to him: “How could a man of your spirit, intellect, and worldwide outlook fail to see in Islam . . . a message that confirms . . . the ethnological oneness and equality of all races, thus striking at the very root of racial discrimination?” Malcolm responded that regardless of Islam’s universality, he was obligated to struggle on behalf of African Americans. “As a black American,” he explained, “I do feel that my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” The cordial dialogue displays Malcolm’s deepening interest in the Muslim Brotherhood’s faith-based politics—an interest that he knew he had to keep from Nasser's government.

On September 16, Malcolm returned to Al-Azhar University, where he was given a certificate establishing his credentials as an orthodox Muslim. He posed for photographs. Later that day he celebrated with Shawarbi and other friends. Leaving for Jeddah two days later, he was overwhelmed by the “touching farewells” and generosity of his Arab friends, but he also pondered the crux of one friend’s words of advice: “the importance of not being sidetracked by needless fights with Elijah Muhammad.” On September 21, Prince Faisal designated Malcolm an official state visitor of Saudi Arabia, a status that covered all his local expenses and provided a chauffeured car.

At a meeting with Seyyid Omar el-Saghaf, the vice minister of Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs department, Malcolm presented his proposal and request for funds to establish a mosque, or Islamic center, in Harlem, to promote orthodox Islam. On September 22, writing to M. S. Handler, Malcolm praised the “quiet, sane, and strongly spiritual atmosphere” of Saudi Arabia, a place where “objective thinking” was possible. Under the Nation of Islam, “I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the ‘straightjacketed world' . . . I represented and defended [Elijah Muhammad] beyond the level of intellect and reason.” He vowed that he would “never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many innocent Negroes” and affirmed that he was now “a Muslim in the most orthodox sense; my religion is Islam as it is believed in and practiced by the Muslims here in the Holy City of Mecca.”

His new political goals, he went on, were firmly within the civil rights mainstream. “I am not anti-American, un-American, seditious nor subversive. I don’t buy the anti-capitalist propaganda of the communist, nor do I buy the anti-communist propaganda of capitalists.” He was trying hard to establish for himself a relatively objective Third World position of nonalignment. Unlike his earlier endorsements of socialism over capitalism, in these comments to Handler he appears to retreat toward a more pragmatic economic philosophy. “I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity (human beings) as a whole whether they are capitalist, communists or socialists, all have assets as well as liabilities. . . .” Then, in a remarkable passage, he seems to repudiate not just Yacub’s History but the fascist-like concept that all blacks, as blacks, had to exhibit certain cultural traits or adhere to sets of rigid beliefs, in order to justify their racial identity:

In a second letter to Handler, dated the following day, he criticized his former belief in Elijah Muhammad “as a divine leader who had no human faults.” What had prompted the letter, however, was the news that Surur al-Sabban had named Malcolm as the World Islamic League’s representative in the United States, with the authority to start an official center in New York City. The league offered fifteen scholarships to American Muslims to attend the Islamic University of Madinah (Medina). This gift, combined with the twenty scholarships offered in Cairo, gave Malcolm thirty-five fully funded fellowships.

In the final week of September he was back on the move. After a brief stop in Kuwait, where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain financial support for the MMI from the foreign secretary, Malcolm traveled to Beirut on September 29. He was welcomed at the Lebanese airport by a student leader named Azizah and about ten white American students, who informed him that the American University dean had extended permission for him to speak in one of the lecture halls. Malcolm, Azizah, and several other students had lunch at the apartment home of an African-American expatriate named Mrs. Brown. One of the white students there, Marian Faye Novak, reconstructed their brief encounter, and what is obvious is that even those friendly to Malcolm’s cause still viewed him by the policies of the Nation of Islam rather than by his new beliefs. Another white student, Sara, said, “I think you were absolutely right, Malcolm, . . . when you accused the white man of having the devil in him.” Upset by the remark, Novak replied defensively, “I didn’t choose this skin, but it’s the only one I have.” Sara quickly apologized, Novak remembered, “not just for herself and her particular ancestors, but for me and mine, too, while Malcolm X nodded and smiled.” Novak stereotypes Malcolm’s response even though he did not utter a word during the exchange.

Though the group had only a few hours to advertise Malcolm’s address that afternoon, American University students had not forgotten his stellar speaking performance from earlier in the year, and an overflow crowd turned out. Later that day Malcolm flew from Beirut to Khartoum, then traveled overnight directly to Addis Ababa, arriving on September 30. The major event in Addis Ababa was a lecture to an audience of more than five hundred students and faculty at the University College student union on October 2, which was remarkable for the amount of detail in the FBI's account of the event. The Bureau (and the CIA) had not curtailed its efforts to track Malcolm after his departure from Cairo, and it appears to have followed him closely for most of his time abroad. The intelligence report from Addis Ababa suggested that “another goal of Malcolm’s visit was to permit direct contact between the black people of the U.S. and Africa.”

On October 5, Malcolm flew to Nairobi, and after some time off to visit a national park, contacted vice president Oginga Odinga and set up a meeting for three days hence. When they met, Odinga seemed “attentive, alert, and sympathetic,” and Malcolm subsequently received an invitation to address the Kenyan parliament on October 15. In the interim, he decided to visit Zanzibar and Tanzania, with the hope of solidifying the Pan-African political relationships with Tanzanian leaders he had met at the Cairo conference. Most prominent among those he’d hoped to meet with was Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu, a Zanzibaran revolutionary Marxist who had helped engineer his island nation’s 1964 social revolution and subsequent merger with then Tanganyika.

Over several days, Malcolm met a number of African-American expatriates living in Tanzania’s capital city of Dar es Salaam, and he conducted several media interviews. He met with Minister Babu on October 12, although the high point of his Tanzanian excursion was a brief encounter with President Julius K. Nyerere the next day. Like Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere had risen to power in the wave of colonial uprisings that swept through Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and unlike many leaders who fell as quickly as they rose during those tumultuous years, he would remain popular and in power until 1985. Accompanied by Babu, Malcolm assessed the man called by his citizens as
mwalimu
, or “teacher.” He is a “very shrew[d], intelligent, disarming man who laughs and jokes much (but deadly serious).”

As Malcolm’s travels brought him into more prominent power circles in African politics, he seemed to meet important figures wherever he turned. And as his presence in Dar es Salaam became more widely known, his schedule became more packed. On October 14 he visited the Cuban embassy to converse with the ambassador, who was an Afro-Cuban. That evening Malcolm was the guest of honor at a dinner that included a number of prominent Tanzanians. He delayed his return to Nairobi for several days, and when he flew back to Nairobi a few days later, he found himself on the same plane as both the Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta and the Ugandan prime minister Milton Obote. During the flight, which stopped first in Mombasa, one of Kenyatta’s ministers informed the president who Malcolm was, and soon Malcolm was requested to move forward to a seat between the two leaders. Arriving late in Mombasa, Kenyatta decided to spend the night, but Malcolm continued to talk with Obote during the flight to Nairobi. After going through Kenyan customs, Tom Mboya, Kenya’s second most powerful politician after Kenyatta, picked up Malcolm “and put me back with the VIPs.”

As his stay in Kenya unfolded, famous faces mingled with familiar ones. On Sunday morning, October 18, Malcolm ran into two SNCC leaders, chairman John Lewis and Don Harris, who were on their way to Zambia. During the day, a formal invitation was delivered at Malcolm’s hotel on behalf of Mboya, requesting his presence that evening at the gala premiere of Uhuru Films (
uhuru
means “freedom” in Kiswahili). Malcolm attended the event, and at the intermission enjoyed chatting with both Mboya and his wife. Malcolm described Mboya, who would also later be assassinated, as the personification of “perpetual motion.” After returning late to his hotel, Malcolm spoke with SNCC's Don Harris about “future cooperation.”

On October 20, Mboya and his wife picked Malcolm up at his hotel, and they drove to meet President Kenyatta. Taken to a parade’s reviewing stand, he relished joining the VIPs who sat with the president for tea and coffee. Malcolm was seated next to Kenyatta’s daughter Jane, and continued the conversation with her back at his hotel, the Equator Inn. That afternoon Malcolm had lunch with Mrs. Mboya, the president’s family, and a white head of police. “I had wine with my dinner,” Malcolm admitted to his diary. After lunch, Malcolm listened to Kenyatta’s public address, in which he boldly assumed “complete responsibility for organizing the Mau Mau,” the indigenous revolt against British rule in Kenya in the 1950s. At every step, Malcolm was treated like a visiting dignitary, and his prominence over the course of several days at social and public events must have stunned the CIA and FBI. The Bureau had spent years trying to split Malcolm from Elijah Muhammad, with the expectation that the NOI schism would weaken the organization and discredit its leaders. After Malcolm’s supposed failure at the Cairo conference, he should have been greatly weakened. Yet with each stop in his itinerary, the FBI received fresh reports about Malcolm’s expansive social calendar and his growing credibility among African heads of state. His media profile also continued to grow. The FBI's New York office reported to the director that while in Nairobi Malcolm “appeared prominently at social functions.” On October 21, Malcolm was interviewed on local TV, where he explained that at every opportunity—in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, and other cities—he had urged leaders “to condemn the United States in the United Nations for racism.”

His popularity forced the U.S. government to step up its efforts. Several black Americans living in Nairobi were contacted by the U.S. embassy, Malcolm learned, warning them to stay away from him. A party that had been planned had to be canceled, as pressure was applied in an attempt to discredit him. U.S. authorities by now of course knew all about Malcolm’s spiritual epiphany in Mecca, his break with the Nation, and even his overtures to the civil rights movement. But neither the State Department nor the intelligence agencies had any intention of telling the “truth” about Malcolm.

Despite the covert opposition of the U.S. embassy, Malcolm achieved one of his greatest triumphs on October 15, when he spoke before Kenya’s parliament. After his talk, the parliament proposed, and then passed, what Malcolm called “a
resolution of support for our human rights struggle
.ʺ His plan, hatched in the wake of defeat in Cairo, had finally yielded results. For a sovereign African state to endorse his human rights formulation was a tremendous political breakthrough.

The resolution brought an immediate response from American authorities. Within hours, Malcolm met with the U.S. ambassador and several aides, who grilled him on his relationships with Kenyan officials and demanded details of all his recent interactions. To Malcolm’s face, the ambassador stated that he regarded him as a racist, but Malcolm kept his cool. He vigorously presented his positions and objectives, challenging the authorities to show he had done anything illegal.