Malcolm after Mecca
Snyder, Margaret
THE WAY OF A PILGRIM MALCOLM AFTER MECCA EAST AFRICA, 1964 ¦ met Malcolm X in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during his second extended visit to Africa, not long before his brief life ended. In the...
...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...
...Malcolm X hung up the phone, smiled, introduced himself...
...Malcolm X told me how his had}—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...
...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...
...Some four hours later, we finished talking...
...Under Bill's persuasion, I softened my stand: If I happened to meet Mr...
...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...
...X, and he wanted to talk, I would talk...
...Anything I do today," he said, "I regard as urgent...
...I was not to see Malcolm X again...
...And he was in awe of Kenyatta's capacity to come to an understanding with Kenya's white settlerfarmers, and to gain their great respect...
...By whom...
...Occupied...
...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 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...
...He became an internationalist...
...Given that experience, was there anything further for me to discuss with Mr...
...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...
...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...
...No man is given but so much time to accomplish what...
...The two neighboring countries had widely disparate British colonial histories, and, consequently, starkly different independence struggles: Tanzania's was a triCommonweal umph of reason, Kenya's a revolution...
...More strikingly, he was in awe of and wonder at humanness—at the very existence and potential of the human person...
...Malcolm had been transformed at Mecca, he said...
...Later that day I headed for a phone booth on the veranda of the old New Africa Hotel...
...In his world scenario there were no positive roles for whites...
...I can tell you about one of them...
...Malcolm marveled most that both presidents were free of racial animosity...
...There, Malcolm was unyielding...
...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 was no way that he would use his considerable leadership skills to involve whites as well as blacks in the struggle against injustice...
...Responding to his questions, I explained that this was my third year in Africa (the years would later add up to thirteen...
...X? My friend was not put off...
...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...
...Something else happened...
...To him now, there was one single human nature possessed by blacks, whites, and others...
...He began to see his struggle for justice as reaching past the issue of American civil rights to that of global human rights...
...just weeks later, he was assassinated...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 22
