Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [247]
Malcolm was chauffeured around Conakry like a visiting head of state the morning after his arrival there. A quick visit at the Algerian embassy caused him brief embarrassment, due to the enthusiastic reception he received there. “It is difficult to believe that I could be so widely known (and respected) here on this continent,” Malcolm later reflected. “The negative image the Western press has tried to paint of me certainly hasn’t succeeded.” That evening he was finally introduced to President Touré, who enthusiastically embraced him. “He congratulated me for my firmness in the struggle for dignity.” They agreed to meet for lunch the next afternoon. That night Malcolm went to a nightclub, but perhaps because Guinea was an overwhelmingly Muslim country, he wisely stuck with coffee and orange juice.
At his lunch with President Touré and several other international guests the next day, Malcolm noted that Touré “ate fast, but politely, and several times added food to my plate.” After several guests had left, Touré returned to the topic that had animated him at their encounter the night before, the quest for “dignity.” Malcolm knew about the president’s extraordinary history—as a trade union militant and anti-French revolutionary, the sole leader in Francophone Africa to defy De Gaulle by rejecting union with metropolitan France in 1958. To Touré dignity meant African self-determination, concepts very close to his own new lexicon of Pan-Africanism. “We are aware of your reputation as a freedom fighter,” Touré told Malcolm, “so I talk frankly, a fighting language to you.”
Over the next several days Malcolm experienced a series of travel mishaps; unbeknownst to him his flight out of Conakry had been rescheduled, and he had to spend an extra night there. On his flight to Dakar on November 13 one brother recognized Malcolm, “and it was all over the airport” that the black American Muslim was present once he’d arrived. Travelers came up requesting autographs. He continued on, with a brief transfer stop in Geneva and then Paris, where he spent the night at the Hôtel Terminus St. Lazare. Malcolm flew to Algiers the next morning, but the visit was not productive. The French language barrier, Malcolm lamented, was so “tremendous” that it was almost impossible to communicate effectively. With his crisscross flight pattern continuing, Malcolm arrived in Geneva on the morning of November 16. His objective was to make contact with the city’s Islamic Center and to deepen his links to the Muslim Brotherhood. That afternoon, he had a surprise encounter with a young woman named Fifi, a United Nations secretary and Swiss national who had worked with Malcolm in Cairo. She met him at his hotel, chatting with him for hours and truly surprising him by saying that she “is madly in love with me and seems willing to do anything to prove it.” Malcolm slept late the next day, then went shopping, buying a new overcoat and suit. Dr. Said Ramadan of the Islamic Center came by, taking Malcolm first to his mosque, then to dinner with several guests. When Malcolm returned to his hotel at about nine p.m., “Fifi was knocking on my door as I came up the stairs.” She joined him in his room and left a couple hours later. Uncharacteristically, Malcolm did not record in his diary what transpired between the two of them; based on the diary, Fifi appears to be the only female he admitted to his private space during his