The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (80 page)

But the struggle between the CAP faction that I represented and Jitu and Haki had been going on sub rosa for most of the period I had been chairman. As long as Hayward Henry and the black nationalists, black humanists, were in the organization, the Kawaida-Pan-Afrikanist faction could unite to criticize Henry and company who we felt were just three strides past being “straight-out Negroes.” But once there was a higher level of national organization unity, namely, Kawaida-Pan-Afrikanism, then the contradictions within that grouping became clearer and clearer.

Haki, for instance, would take the no-meat vegetarian line all the way out. In the Chicago cadre organization such concerns took on the importance of our principal work. As if we had all joined forces to root out and oppose meat eating. Perhaps the closeness to Chicago's Black Muslims had some influence, but it became for me more and more an example of black bohemianism, like hippies in blackface. Haki was superior to us only because we stooped to eat fish.

But the most hilarious confrontation came at one of our steering committee meetings when Haki and company produced a “Survival Kit,” a list based on the writings that Amina had done right after the Newark rebellion describing the things people must have in such an emergency. But now Haki and company took Amina's ideas further and created a Survival Kit. This survival kit included a
bath tub
.

Haki and the Chicago cache were so far into the straight-up black bohemian aspects of cultural nationalism that they spent most of their time
thinking about what they could and could not eat. Much of their Survival Kit was a list of herbs one must get and store. What was lost on them is that most of the medicines in the corner drugstore come from these herbs they mentioned and the refined form could be got and stored just the same. Plus, at one point when I was saying in a meeting that we could read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, that we should read anyone and anything that could hallmark revolution, Haki had objected, but then went on to say that in studying herbs and his Survival Kit he had consulted the works of Jethro Kloss's
Back to Utopia
and various white bohemians on weeds and herbs and exotic teas and broths. He'd even gone to some right-wing madman who counseled whites to leave the cities when the final race war breaks out and go into the countryside armed to the teeth and buy land for that purpose and store various items there as preparation for the forthcoming race war.

I asked why was it that we could read right-wing and bohemian whites, but that white and other nationality revolutionaries were taboo? The speech at the regional meeting had taken it all the way out. But at the same time too much of the move left was occurring in my own head and with only the effects being passed down to the advocates. I was grappling with ideas, desperately searching for some ideological revelation that would square socialism with nationalism. I knew, after a time, that socialism, scientific socialism, had to be the answer economically. We had grasped what we called “cooperative economics” from the beginning of Kawaida, and I had been skirting socialist theory even while I was downtown in the Village. But this was different. I had a great deal of responsibility and I was trying to deal with it, but I was still acting as if I were the only person who had to be convinced or who had to understand. Rather than holding discussions with our leadership and they in turn holding discussions with the rank and file, tried to deal, largely by myself, with my own desire for ideological clarity. I figured that all I had to do was say the word and the whole organization would not only move left but would understand why as well.

By the spring of 1974, CAP had split open just as the ALSC had. At the National Black Political Convention in April that year, held in Little Rock, I made an address to that convention which openly called for socialist revolution. It stunned quite a few people in the National Political Assembly and at that point I'm certain the more conservative factions in the organization vowed to get me out of the secretary-general's post.

That was a wild convention anyway. Saladin, my forward man into Little Rock, was “kidnapped” at gunpoint by some crazy fat nigger named Shelton
(who later I heard became a Black Muslim). Shelton saw the convention as a huge pork barrel and he wanted to make sure he and his fellow Little Rock thugs could make all the money with gambling casinos, after-hours spots, and hotels in which they had pre-rented all the rooms which they were going to charge us double for. He thought that we “northern boys” were going to chisel our way into his operations and get all the money.

To get Sala back we had to assure Shelton that he could make all the money on his various illegal and semilegal deals. But only two thousand people came to the Little Rock convention. This was not a presidential election year, and a lot of the elected officials and people turned on by electoral politics stayed home. So Shelton lost his ass anyway. The last time I saw him he was sweeping down the huge stairs of the convention hall, thousands of dollars in debt, crazy mad and trailed by two or three bodyguards with their pistols hanging out.

At one point in the convention, when we were debating the postion on Israel, about eight or nine New York delegates came into my office — headed by the professional militants Lloyd Douglas and Omar Ahmed, and several New York antipoverty militants and small-time politicians. I had told the security people to go outside. I knew all these people.

L.D. began by saying, “Percy [Sutton] told us that if we could get you national guys to cut out the anti-Israel resolution we can get some money for the New York Assembly and even get set up in some offices. We know you guys are getting Arab money for doing this, some Libyan money, we hear.”

It was funny to me. First, because if Percy had said that, I knew exactly where that was coming from, Abe Beame (mayor of New York) and company. But what also made it slightly more than hilarious was that here were these stomp-down militants wanting to bail Israel out. I told them I knew of no Libyan or other Arab money and that if there was some of it available, they could count me in. I also told him I was voting to uphold the anti-Israel resolution. They stood there in the office, militant by virtue of being a crowd, but it was so funny there was no menace to it at all.

”We know you gettin' some Libyan money,” Douglas repeated. “You need to get us some of that Libyan money!” Some of the shit you couldn't believe.

I'm certain, however, that word of the Chicago confrontation and subsequent split in CAP as well as the Little Rock speech shot around movement circles. Baraka had moved to the left. CAP had an internal struggle raised to full public pitch; split in CAP; split in ALSC. In May of that year
at Howard University, ALSC held its landmark conference, “Which Way the Black Liberation Movement?” It was a forum to debate frankly and openly the two lines within the Black Liberation movement. Owusu had suggested such a conference and it was meant to benefit the left.

Stokely Carmichael, Owusu, Muhammad Ahmed of RAM (then African People's Party), Kwadlo Akpan from PAC of Detroit (a Pan-Afrikanist cultural nationalist organization), Abdul Alkalimat from People's College, and myself, representing CAP, all made presentations. Unknown to most of us, some of the people in ALSC, whom we connected with Malcom X Liberation University and SOBU and some other formations, had formed a Communist organization, the forerunner of the later Revolutionary Worker's League. They were in motion even further to the left, but, like myself, they were also making errors.

The most striking of all the presentations was Owusu's, because he was saying openly he was no longer a nationalist and Pan-Afrikanist, that he was an anti-imperialist struggling to learn Communist theory. Before that presentation, Carmichael had made a presentation. But the MXLU, SOBU, and RWL people were waiting for him. Stokely had been out of the country, he had stayed out of ALSC and kept his people's participation in it very marginal. There seemed to be a rivalry between Owusu and Stokely, as if Carmichael was drugged that one of his ex-disciples had jumped ship. I wondered if this was anything like the relationship Karenga and I had now.

Stokely had been questioned mercilessly by some of the RWL cadre. His “back to Africa” ideology, which he called Nkrumahism, was raked over hot hot coals, one woman calling it “a credit card ideology,” referring to Stokely's many trips back and forth to Africa. But Stokely, Carmichael to the end, posed and profiled and mocked the audience. He still had partisans in the crowd, but the tide had swung toward the left. Stokely fought back but many in the audience were laughing at him.

Owusu's presentation was met with a standing ovation. Alkalimat's was the presentation that was the most clearly based on Marxist theory, and as such it was the most orderly presentation, with the most reference to consistent scientific analysis. This also was very well received, because many of us in that audience were leaning heavily in that direction.

My own presentation marched even further left, but it was still a mixed bag, still tried to square Marxism with cultural nationalism. It was so long and confused I had to skip parts of it. This convinced me, and probably several other people, that half-stepping wasn't solving anything. We had to
go further. We had to quit bullshitting. If we believed that socialism, scientific socialism (as opposed to “Utopian” socialism), was the direction our people had to seek, then we should quit obstructing their progress in that direction.

For my money, nationalism was defeated at that conference at Howard in May 1974. The people on the left who had defeated nationalism did not have all their theoretical gemachts together, but they at least did provide a point of departure, a jumping-off place, and I was ready to jump off.

June of that year the Sixth Pan-African Congress was to be held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was the first Pan-African Congress designated as such held on African soil. Colonialism had kept the rest outside of Africa. Throughout the months after the Howard conference and in the organizing sessions for the “6PAC,” the two-line struggle that had now appeared throughout the entire movement continuously surfaced. It was the US-Panther struggle all over, on a higher level, but the sides were just as sharply drawn.

Even in Dar, at the conference itself, Owusu and I found ourselves contending with the whole delegation of African Americans (the most independent delegation because completely nongovernmental) who maintained nationalist positions. But because of the influence of the liberation movements that were taking the most progressive positions and Tour, and Nyerere's attacks on “narrow nationalism,” the left held the day in that international conference. In the end Pan-Afrikanism was redefined as “the worldwide struggle of African people against imperialism.”

I had taken Obalaji, who was seven, with me to the conference. All the way over he practiced what he would say if he met Mwalimu Nyerere. Then, sure enough, we were invited to Nyerere's house, and instead of “Shikamoo, Mzee,” Obalaji just stared with his mouth hung open as Mwalimu shook his little paw. The two of us had a few deliriously happy days there in the warm beautiful land of our ancestors. We would rise some mornings at seven so that we could go out the back door of our cottage, a brick replica of an African hut, and race down the beach to the cool water. You had to go that early because by 10 A.M. it was hot; by 12 noon you better not be out there or your brains would go sunny-side up.

I gave a speech at the 6PAC entitled “Revolutionary Culture and the Future of Pan-African Culture,” calling for a “worldwide commitment by African people to build socialism everywhere and to take up the struggle against imperialism everywhere.” The fact that both Owusu and I stood
now clearly on the left, in some still largely undefined position, had been trumpeted to the four winds. But in Africa, listening to the liberation movement speakers from Frelimo, MPLA, PAC of South Africa, PAIGC, and others, I was convinced that I was moving in the correct direction. I met Walter Rodney, who was hospitalized for a minor ailment and so had missed the conference. He was teaching at the University of Dar at the time, but Owusu took me to the hospital to see him.

One shocking draggy thing was that Babu, my old friend with whom I had met and sat with Malcolm X in the Waldorf in 1965 just a month before Malcolm was murdered, had been locked up in Tanzania. To me, it was obviously the work of the CIA, the framing of Babu for the assassination of the vice president, Karume, who, like Babu, was from Zanzibar. Babu was a Marxist and the CIA had clearly not wanted him in the Tanzanian government. He had been locked up just outside Dar, where he stayed for several years without a trial.

When I asked President Nyerere about this, he told me that he thought Babu was guilty and that he was afraid to put him on trial because he feared the Zanzibaris would try to kill him. It was Babu whom those outside Africa feared most. When I had visited his home before, I remember going into his study and wondering why he had all those volumes, some forty-five of them, of Lenin lined up in his bookcases. That night he'd asked me what I thought of Cleaver and should he be allowed to come to Tanzania. (Eldridge had by then jumped his bail and fled the U.S. to Cuba, then Algeria, but had worn out his welcome in Algeria.) I told him what I thought about Cleaver, none of it complimentary.

Babu had even introduced me to Karume, at a cocktail party. Karume snubbed me and asked Babu in Swahili why he always wanted to hang around with Afro-Americans. He escorted me to countless affairs, even though he was then Minister of Economics of Tanzania, but the two of us zoomed around Dar in his car, with Babu driving. It was also Babu who was the chief moving force behind the Tanzanian Recruitment Program, which CAP pushed all over the U.S. This program called for qualified African Americans to come to Tanzania to help develop the country. It was opposed by the Tanzanian right-wing bureaucrats but the program still had gone forward. Now Babu was in jail. He was released some four years later.