Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [203]
By now the Ghanaian Times had been alerted of Malcolm’s presence, and a short announcement, “X is here,” appeared on the front page on May 12. The following day the paper covered his press conference, in which he emphasized “the establishment of good relationship between Afro-Americans and Africans at home [which] is bound to have far reaching results for the common good.” The next few days were a whirl of celebrity activity: escorted by Julian Mayfield to the Cuban embassy to meet their young ambassador, Armando Entralgo Gonzalez, “who immediately offered to give a party in my honor”; an intimate lunch at the home of a young Maya Angelou, then a dancer who was also employed as a teacher, whom he recalled fondly from their meeting several years before; meetings with the ambassadors of Nigeria and Mali; and a private conversation with Ghana’s minister of defense Kofi Boaka and other ministers at Boaka’s home.
On the evening of May 14, Malcolm delivered the lecture that Leslie Lacy had arranged for him, addressing a capacity crowd in the Great Hall of the University of Ghana. Alice Windom, observing the scene, commented that “many of the whites had come to be ‘amused.’ They were in for a rude surprise.” The speech forced Malcolm to be at his most politically adroit, and he warmly praised Nkrumah as one of the African continent’s “most progressive leaders.” The litmus test he proposed for African heads of state was based on how they were treated by the U.S. media, and thus the U.S. government: “[T]hese leaders over here who are receiving the praise and pats on the back from the Americans, you can just flush the toilet and let them go right down the drain,” he told the crowd, which roared with laughter and applause.
Yet in its appreciation of Nkrumah the speech masked the great divisiveness that had emerged in Ghanaian politics. Though Nkrumah had been revered as a national hero during independence, by the mid-1960s his government had degenerated into an authoritarian regime characterized by rigged elections, the loss of an independent judiciary, the decline of the Convention People’s Party as a popular democratic force, the expansion of corruption and graft, and a cult of personality surrounding Nkrumah. Although Nkrumah employed Marxist rhetoric, his regime could be best described as Bonapartist: deeply hostile to the existence of a free civil society and ruled from above by a bureaucracy estranged from the nation’s population. In 1964, C. L. R. James, Nkrumah’s former mentor, publicly broke with the African president over his suppression of democratic rights in the country. Malcolm undoubtedly heard these criticisms from some of the African-American expatriates, but he wisely used his remarks to emphasize the Pan-Africanist common ground that black Americans continued to share with the Ghanaian president. At times, he even seemed to endorse the authoritarian measures Nkrumah had established over economic and social policies, explaining that only when the “colonial mentality has been destroyed” will the masses of citizens “know what they are voting for, then you give them a chance to vote on this and vote on that.”
Malcolm also used his speech to characterize the United States as a “colonial power” like Portugal, France, and Britain. And he predicted that Harlem was “about to explode.” The Ghanaian Times reported that Malcolm called for Third World unity: “Only a concerted attack by the black, the yellow, the red and the brown races which outnumber the white race would end segregation in the U.S., and the world.”
The next morning, Malcolm had been scheduled to speak before Ghana’s national parliament, but because of transportation delays, he arrived shortly after the formal session ended. However, members of parliament were still there, and most gathered in the building’s Members Room, where Malcolm addressed the group and engaged legislators in a lively discussion. At noon, Malcolm was taken to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of the Ghanaian government, for a private hourlong meeting with