Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [239]
As his stay in Kenya unfolded, famous faces mingled with familiar ones. On Sunday morning, October 18, Malcolm ran into two SNCC leaders, chairman John Lewis and Don Harris, who were on their way to Zambia. During the day, a formal invitation was delivered at Malcolm’s hotel on behalf of Mboya, requesting his presence that evening at the gala premiere of Uhuru Films (uhuru means “freedom” in Kiswahili). Malcolm attended the event, and at the intermission enjoyed chatting with both Mboya and his wife. Malcolm described Mboya, who would also later be assassinated, as the personification of “perpetual motion.” After returning late to his hotel, Malcolm spoke with SNCCʹs Don Harris about “future cooperation.”
On October 20, Mboya and his wife picked Malcolm up at his hotel, and they drove to meet President Kenyatta. Taken to a parade’s reviewing stand, he relished joining the VIPs who sat with the president for tea and coffee. Malcolm was seated next to Kenyatta’s daughter Jane, and continued the conversation with her back at his hotel, the Equator Inn. That afternoon Malcolm had lunch with Mrs. Mboya, the president’s family, and a white head of police. “I had wine with my dinner,” Malcolm admitted to his diary. After lunch, Malcolm listened to Kenyatta’s public address, in which he boldly assumed “complete responsibility for organizing the Mau Mau,” the indigenous revolt against British rule in Kenya in the 1950s. At every step, Malcolm was treated like a visiting dignitary, and his prominence over the course of several days at social and public events must have stunned the CIA and FBI. The Bureau had spent years trying to split Malcolm from Elijah Muhammad, with the expectation that the NOI schism would weaken the organization and discredit its leaders. After Malcolm’s supposed failure at the Cairo conference, he should have been greatly weakened. Yet with each stop in his itinerary, the FBI received fresh reports about Malcolm’s expansive social calendar and his growing credibility among African heads of state. His media profile also continued to grow. The FBIʹs New York office reported to the director that while in Nairobi Malcolm “appeared prominently at social functions.” On October 21, Malcolm was interviewed on local TV, where he explained that at every opportunity—in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, and other cities—he had urged leaders “to condemn the United States in the United Nations for racism.”
His popularity forced the U.S. government to step up its efforts. Several black Americans living in Nairobi were contacted by the U.S. embassy, Malcolm learned, warning them to stay away from him. A party that had been planned had to be canceled, as pressure was applied in an attempt to discredit him. U.S. authorities by now of course knew all about Malcolm’s spiritual epiphany in Mecca, his break with the Nation, and even his overtures to the civil rights movement. But neither the State Department nor the intelligence agencies had any intention of telling the “truth” about Malcolm.
Despite the covert opposition of the U.S. embassy, Malcolm achieved one of his greatest triumphs on October 15, when he spoke before Kenya’s parliament. After his talk, the parliament proposed, and then passed, what Malcolm called “a resolution of support for our human rights struggle.ʺ His plan, hatched in the wake of defeat in Cairo, had finally yielded results. For a sovereign African state to endorse his human rights formulation was a tremendous political breakthrough.
The resolution brought an immediate response from American authorities. Within hours, Malcolm met with the U.S. ambassador and several aides, who grilled him on his relationships with Kenyan officials and demanded