Malcolm after Mecca: East Africa, 1964 - Malcolm X

I met Malcolm X in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during his second extended visit to Africa, not long before his brief life ended. In the books I have seen there is only passing mention of his 1964 meetings with African heads of state and ambassadors, and little at all about other meetings. I can tell you about one of them. It was a Quaker friend, an African-American, who told me that Malcolm X would visit Dar es Salaam and urged me to meet him. To what end, I asked? I then told Bill about my first encounter with Malcolm X, at a United Nations reception in New York a year or so earlier. There, Malcolm was unyielding; there was no way that he would use his considerable leadership skills to involve whites as well as blacks in the struggle against injustice. In his world scenario there were no positive roles for whites. Given that experience, was there anything further for me to discuss with Mr. X?

My friend was not put off. Malcolm had been transformed at Mecca, he said; I would profit personally from exchanging views with him, and Malcolm himself would gain from meeting not just Africans and black Americans but people like me, white Americans working in Africa with Africans. Under Bill's persuasion, I softened my stand: If I happened to meet Mr. X, and he wanted to talk, I would talk.

Later that day I headed for a phone booth on the veranda of the old New Africa Hotel. Occupied. By whom? Malcolm X hung up the phone, smiled, introduced himself. Some four hours later, we finished talking.

Malcolm X told me how his hadj--his pilgrimage to Mecca--had transformed him, and how his conversations with African presidents like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya had enriched him. The two neighboring countries had widely disparate British colonial histories, and, consequently, starkly different independence struggles: Tanzania's was a triumph of reason, Kenya's a revolution. Malcolm X appreciated Nyerere's perspective that his country's argument with the former colonial master was with the British government, not with the British people. And he was in awe of Kenyatta's capacity to come to an understanding with Kenya's white settler-farmers, and to gain their great respect. Malcolm marveled most that both presidents were free of racial animosity.

Now, despite our earlier encounter, I could see no trace of racism remaining in Malcolm X. The impact of Mecca and of his meetings with African leaders, enhanced by his unique ability to assimilate ideas and viewpoints, was profound.

Something else happened. He began to see his struggle for justice as reaching past the issue of American civil rights to that of global human rights. He became an internationalist. More strikingly, he was in awe of and wonder at humanness--at the very existence and potential of the human person. To him now, there was one single human nature possessed by blacks, whites, and others.

I have never, before or since, met a person with so incisive a mind or so great a capacity to ask probing questions and to learn what moved people. Responding to his questions, I explained that this was my third year in Africa (the years would later add up to thirteen); and that I was there out of concerns for justice and fairness that were planted in me by my parents, my educators, and my Christian faith.

I was not to see Malcolm X again; just weeks later, he was assassinated. Still, from that one meeting, I knew that at the end of his life, Malcolm wanted all of us to join in making the world a better place, more human and more humane, and that he was in a hurry. "Anything I do today," he said, "I regard as urgent. No man is given but so much time to accomplish whatever is his life's work" (Autobiography, p. 378). Amen to that.

Margaret Snyder, founding director o the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), is a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

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