Malcolm X - A Must Read - A Super Black Leader of our Time.
Zarook Qasim
Malcolm X and the Difficulties of Diplomacy.
In 1964, the Black nationalist organizer toured Africa and the Middle East on a journey that would both transform his outlook and reveal the limits of transnational solidarity.
Alex WhiteAlex White is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, where his research focuses on international broadcasting in late colonial East Africa
After the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, the Ghanaian Times declared that the world had suffered “a most grievous loss.” He was, it suggested, one of the few Black American leaders who utterly understood “that the black man’s struggle in America was inextricably linked with the African revolution. … He was the only prominent leader who saw the potential of an Africa united with her millions of descendants in the Western world.” In Egypt, similarly, a coalition of nine anti-colonial groups signed a declaration condemning the “brutal assassination” and commemorating Malcolm X’s attempts to “weld closer ties between the black man of America and ourselves in the struggle for freedom.” In Tanzania, meanwhile, The Nationalist presented the murder as a “grim reminder of the political climate that persists in the United States of America” and expressed solidarity with “the crusade of the American black folks who still are graded as second-class citizens.”
Today, Malcolm X is best remembered for his campaigns in the United States. As the civil rights movement splintered in the early 1960s, he came to prominence as an uncompromising critic of white supremacy and the champion of Black nationalism. In his charismatic religious preaching, he urged Black Americans to reject Christianity as a “colonizer’s religion” and return to the Islam of their African ancestors. In his work as a political organizer in Harlem, the so-called “Black Mecca” of New York, he rejected the compromises of the mainstream civil rights movement. He argued that Black communities would have to liberate themselves by “any means necessary,” from civil disobedience to violent resistance.
In the last year of his life, however, Malcolm X turned his attention away from the United States and toward anti-colonial struggles around the world. Between April and November 1964, he embarked on a 23-week journey across Africa and the Middle East — a campaign trail that took him from Algeria to Kuwait and from Senegal to Kenya. This tour would prove transformative. In Mecca, he completed the Hajj and dedicated himself to Sunni Islam. Across Africa, he rubbed shoulders with preachers, presidents, and anti-colonial activists in an ambitious campaign of personal diplomacy aimed at raising awareness of racism in the United States. However, Malcolm X’s ambitious plans for a united front linking Africans and Black Americans often failed to account for his hosts' political interests. At some times, his radical rhetoric proved controversial in his host countries. At others, his inexperience with international politics plunged him unwittingly into a complicated struggle for influence across the postcolonial world.
Malcolm X’s interest in anti-colonial politics did not begin in 1964. In the 1920s, his parents had both worked for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association — a radical political organization that urged its members to go “back to Africa” and liberate the continent from colonial rule. In 1952, Malcolm X continued this Black separatist tradition by joining the Nation of Islam — a political and religious movement that taught that white people were “devils” and encouraged its followers to create an independent Black republic within the United States. He was also deeply influenced by the Bandung Conference of April 1955, which gathered representatives from 29 African and Asian states. At the conference, radical delegates like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesian President Sukarno argued for a united front against colonialism and economic domination that Malcolm X believed could act as a model for anti-racist struggles in the United States. In Harlem, therefore, he began using his status as a minister of the Nation of Islam to educate his followers on anti-imperialist campaigns from Ghana to Congo.
“If people in Africa are getting their freedom,” he declared in April 1959, “then 20 million Blacks here in America … should study the methods used by our darker brothers.”
In practice, the authoritarian structure of the Nation of Islam prevented Malcolm X from developing these connections. On his first trip to Africa and the Middle East, in July 1959, he declined an invitation to meet Nasser and to complete the Hajj in Mecca because it would have been seen as disrespectful to do so before the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad did so. As Malcolm X became a more prominent and public figure through the early 1960s, however, his close relationship with Muhammad developed into a bitter personal rivalry. In November 1963, Malcolm X made a series of callous comments about the John F. Kennedy assassination, claiming the chaos was merely “chickens coming home to roost” for the president’s role in destabilizing the Third World. Elijah Muhammad seized on the opportunity to discipline his former student, banning him from public appearances and all but expelling him from the Nation of Islam. Isolated from his community, a frustrated Malcolm X began looking for a new political and religious direction. In doing so, he turned his attention back to the struggle against empires in Asia and Africa.
Malcolm’s priority was to complete the Hajj. Borrowing money from his sister, Ella Collins, he flew to Egypt and then Saudi Arabia in April 1964. Malcolm X had long been curious about mainstream Muslim communities, having been introduced to Sunni Islam by his sister Ella and the Egyptian academic Mohamed Shawarbi. Correspondence with Muslim friends suggests that he was already beginning to have doubts about the theology of the Nation of Islam. As Sunni jurists pointed out, the Nation’s belief in the inherent superiority of Black people and its claim that its founder Wallace Fard Muhammad was an incarnation of Allah were particularly offensive to Muslim communities across the world. It was during the Hajj, however, that Malcolm X finally abandoned his hard-line beliefs and embraced Sunni Islam.
“I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color,” he explained in one letter from Mecca. “You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen and experienced has forced me to rearrange much of my thought patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.”
With this new religious outlook in place, Malcolm X began searching for new models of radical political action. He traveled first to Lebanon, where the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood impressed him. He then returned to Egypt, where he was inspired by the government’s support for industrialization and its strong one-party system. “No African nation,” he noted in his diary, “needs a political system that will allow division and bickering while it is trying to decolonize itself.” He then flew on to Nigeria and Ghana, where he spent time with nationalist politicians and became fascinated by their historic campaigns against British imperialism. Over time, this fact-finding tour also began providing opportunities for Malcolm X to speak directly to new African audiences. He gave frequent interviews to the press from Nigeria and Ghana, and his university lectures were broadcast over national radio services. Malcolm’s priority was to undermine the publicity of the U.S. Information Agency, which he believed had used Kennedy’s popularity in Africa and the promise of the civil rights bill to present the United States as a progressive and responsible world power. With characteristic dark humor, Malcolm X claimed that his speeches and interviews had “shot holes in the JFK image” across the continent. Africans, he said, would soon learn to distrust any “information agents” who claimed that the United States was abandoning its racist past.
This campaign proved divisive. In Ghana, Malcolm X’s anti-imperialist rhetoric aligned closely with the propaganda of the ruling regime. Ghana was the first country south of the Sahara to achieve independence, and its charismatic president, Kwame Nkrumah, had long advocated for Africans to unite against European domination. In Accra, Malcolm X found that his hotel bills had also been prepaid by the newspaper editors G.T. Amin, T.D. Baffoe and Kofi Batsa — a clear sign of his value to the nationalist press. The visit was also popular among the small community of Black American leftists in Ghana, who had abandoned the United States for a chance to escape racist rule and contribute to the development of a Black African state. By 1964, this community included the author Julian Mayfield, the sociologist Sylvia Boone, and the poet Maya Angelou. Subtler political factors in Ghana, however, meant that all did not welcome Malcolm X’s firebrand politics. Nkrumah initially refused to meet with Malcolm X, having been warned that any political support for Black American radicals could endanger the United States’ promise to fund his ambitious Volta Dam project. He eventually granted an interview — but the meeting was short, and Mayfield reports that there was “no love lost” between the two men. After Malcolm X departed for Senegal, the Marxist journalist and presidential adviser Hyman Basner wrote a column in the Ghanaian Times that sharply criticized Malcolm X for his obsession with race, arguing that he ignored “economic motivations and the class function of all racial oppression.” Julian Mayfield rushed to Malcolm X’s defense, writing that these criticisms failed to recognize the unique importance of race in the United States and suggesting that Basner was “so far off the point that he could not hit a barn door with a shotgun.” Basner responded that Malcolm X himself had recently abandoned his hard-line views on race, but the controversy was quickly silenced at Nkrumah’s request.
Despite these challenges, Malcolm X returned to the United States in an optimistic mood. By the end of May 1964, he was back in New York and began to experiment with ideas for a new political structure for an organization in America that could adopt the structure and tactics of African anti-colonial organizations. In June, these ideas took shape in the form of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a new movement designed to create a “working unity” among anti-racist groups under Malcolm X’s personal direction. The influence of his time in Africa and the Middle East was clear. The movement took its name from the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the intergovernmental association of states founded in Ethiopia in 1963. The OAAU Charter was in fact a lightly edited version of the OAU Charter, replacing references to “African states” with “people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere” and adding a commitment to create a “non-sectarian, constructive program” for human rights across the United States. Eventually, the OAAU charter stated, the organization would aim to combat police brutality, build resilient Black communities, and carry out a “cultural revolution” to bring Black Americans closer to their African ancestors.
The OAAU’s first mission, however, would be to raise Black American issues in international forums — a task that meant returning to Cairo to address the African summit conference of the OAU. Arriving in Egypt in July, Malcolm X had intended to address the conference directly. The script of his speech urged African leaders to commit themselves to the struggle of their “long lost brothers and sisters,” asking for their support for a United Nations resolution condemning racism in the U.S. “Since the twenty-two million [Black Americans] were originally Africans,” he wrote, “we strongly believe that African problems are our problems, and our problems are African problems.” As in Ghana, however, Malcolm X failed to anticipate how mainstream nationalist leaders would receive his radical language. His warnings against the dangers of “American dollars” and threats of “maximum retaliation” against racism proved unpopular with leaders who were close to the U.S. or reliant on economic ties to Europe. Malcolm X was eventually only allowed to enter the conference as an observer and was instructed to circulate his speech in text rather than deliver it directly. The conference eventually passed a resolution denouncing “continuing manifestations of racial bigotry” in the United States, but it also praised the passage of the Civil Rights Act and called on the government to “intensify their efforts to ensure the total elimination of all forms of discrimination” in the future. In public, Malcolm X claimed publicly that his intervention had been a success. But in private, he voiced doubts.
“The science of diplomacy and political maneuvering at the international level is much different and more delicately difficult than getting on the soap box there in Harlem,” he wrote to his wife, Betty, at the end of the month. “I have gotten an invaluable education by coming to this Summit Conference.”
Malcolm X’s inexperience with African and Asian politics also plunged him into complicated struggles for regional influence. In August, the Egyptian government provided Malcolm X with 20 scholarships for his followers to study at the prestigious Al-Azhar University — a tactic that the Nasser government had previously used to win favor among anti-colonial groups from across Africa. Malcolm X interpreted these awards as a political coup against the Nation of Islam. As he explained to Betty, the “fact that Elijah Muhammad was only able to send one student here in thirty-four years, and we can send twenty at one time, is the best yardstick by which to measure this wonderful blessing.” However, the gift also attracted the attention of Saudi Arabia, Egypt’s longtime rival in the Arab Cold War. Prince Faisal, who had hosted Malcolm X in Mecca, grew concerned that the Nasser government was using the Black nationalist leader to draw American Muslims into its political orbit. In response, the Saudis prepared an award to secure their own influence — 15 scholarships for the Islamic University in Medina. When Egypt’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs also awarded Malcolm X with the title of “daily” (missionary), in recognition of his efforts to spread Islam in the United States, the Saudi government ensured that he was accredited by its own Muslim World League. Unaware of the political and economic stakes that fueled the rivalry and obsessed with the idea of political unity, Malcolm X developed an idealistic idea that he could bring the two sides together.
“My heart is in Cairo,” he promised his contacts on the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, but he could best serve those interests “by solidifying myself also with the more moderate or conservative forces that are headquartered in Mecca.” A mission to find progressive allies had inadvertently drawn Malcolm X into the orbit of a dangerous political rivalry.
Malcolm X spent the next three months traveling across Africa — a journey that allowed him to spend time sightseeing in Egypt; to travel to Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Guinea for the first time; and to return to Nigeria and Ghana. As in the first half of 1964, the purpose of the tour was an ambitious campaign of personal diplomacy aimed at building support and publicity for his political causes. Throughout his travels, he was interviewed by the “Arab Observer,” the “Egyptian Gazette,” “Al Gomhuria,” “The New York Times” and “Xinhua” and appeared on the radio in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Monrovia, and Addis Ababa. In Ghana, he also recruited Maya Angelou and Sylvia Boone to the OAAU as official “representatives in Africa.” At the same time, however, it became increasingly clear that Malcolm X was running for his life. Since his embrace of Sunni Islam in April, he had been receiving death threats that he suspected originated from the Nation of Islam. Friends and family urged him to stay in Africa for his safety. By November, he had been offered asylum in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, and American intelligence officials were reporting rumors that he had been offered “top propaganda jobs in Ghana and Egypt.” However, he was also growing concerned that so much time abroad would remove him from the struggle in the United States and any chance of creating meaningful political change. Moving his family out to Africa permanently would be “good for me,” he summarized in his diary, “but bad for me politically.” This was especially true as violence escalated in New York. “I realize many there in the States may think I’m shirking my duties as a leader,” he wrote to Betty from Cairo in July, “by being over here while there is such trouble there.” In November 1964, with some reluctance, Malcolm X left Africa in search of an uncertain political future.
After his assassination in February 1965, the OAAU collapsed into obscurity. “Before [Malcolm’s] death there seemed to be plenty of time,” wrote Sylvia Boone from Accra. “His death showed us how little time there was; the loss of him showed us how little we were prepared.” In the end, therefore, Malcolm X’s vision of a united front between African and Black American radicals was never realized. After his break with the Nation of Islam, he had turned to the new nations of Asia and Africa in an ambitious attempt to reconfigure international politics. Taking inspiration from successful campaigns against the empire, he envisioned a broad strategy that combined electoral and revolutionary politics with a bold campaign of international diplomacy. However, he soon found that the political scene he had entered was more complex than he had ever imagined. In practice, his radical activism had to contend with pragmatic policymaking. He also had to navigate a shifting world of power and patronage in which he was useful if he could serve the wider aims of postcolonial states. Malcolm X’s odyssey across Africa and the Middle East indicates the rich possibilities for solidarity that existed across the postcolonial world — but also its practical and political limits.
