Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [238]
Though the group had only a few hours to advertise Malcolm’s address that afternoon, American University students had not forgotten his stellar speaking performance from earlier in the year, and an overflow crowd turned out. Later that day Malcolm flew from Beirut to Khartoum, then traveled overnight directly to Addis Ababa, arriving on September 30. The major event in Addis Ababa was a lecture to an audience of more than five hundred students and faculty at the University College student union on October 2, which was remarkable for the amount of detail in the FBIʹs account of the event. The Bureau (and the CIA) had not curtailed its efforts to track Malcolm after his departure from Cairo, and it appears to have followed him closely for most of his time abroad. The intelligence report from Addis Ababa suggested that “another goal of Malcolm’s visit was to permit direct contact between the black people of the U.S. and Africa.”
On October 5, Malcolm flew to Nairobi, and after some time off to visit a national park, contacted vice president Oginga Odinga and set up a meeting for three days hence. When they met, Odinga seemed “attentive, alert, and sympathetic,” and Malcolm subsequently received an invitation to address the Kenyan parliament on October 15. In the interim, he decided to visit Zanzibar and Tanzania, with the hope of solidifying the Pan-African political relationships with Tanzanian leaders he had met at the Cairo conference. Most prominent among those he’d hoped to meet with was Abdulrahman Muhammad Babu, a Zanzibaran revolutionary Marxist who had helped engineer his island nation’s 1964 social revolution and subsequent merger with then Tanganyika.
Over several days, Malcolm met a number of African-American expatriates living in Tanzania’s capital city of Dar es Salaam, and he conducted several media interviews. He met with Minister Babu on October 12, although the high point of his Tanzanian excursion was a brief encounter with President Julius K. Nyerere the next day. Like Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere had risen to power in the wave of colonial uprisings that swept through Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and unlike many leaders who fell as quickly as they rose during those tumultuous years, he would remain popular and in power until 1985. Accompanied by Babu, Malcolm assessed the man called by his citizens as mwalimu, or “teacher.” He is a “very shrew[d], intelligent, disarming man who laughs and jokes much (but deadly serious).”
As Malcolm’s travels brought him into more prominent power circles in African politics, he seemed to meet important figures wherever he turned. And as his presence in Dar es Salaam became more widely known, his schedule became more packed. On October 14 he visited the Cuban embassy to converse with the ambassador, who was an Afro-Cuban. That evening Malcolm was the guest of honor at a dinner that included a number of prominent Tanzanians. He delayed his return to Nairobi for several days, and when he flew back to Nairobi a few days later, he found himself on the same plane as both the Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta and the Ugandan prime minister Milton Obote. During the flight, which stopped first in Mombasa, one of Kenyatta’s ministers informed the president who Malcolm