Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [254]
Circumstantial evidence provided by James 67X suggests that Malcolm and Guevara briefly met that week in December. Although there is no direct evidence, Guevara’s subsequent actions in 1965 can be accurately described as carrying out Malcolm’s revolutionary agenda for the continent. The two men were kindred spirits politically, a bond revealed not only by the similarity of their worldviews but by Guevara’s subsequent travels. Days after his UN speech, Guevara flew to Africa and literally traced Malcolm’s steps from Algiers; on January 8 he was in Guinea; and from January 14 to 24 he visited Accra. He met with Julius Nyerere, and it was through Tanzania that Cuban guerrillas gained safe passage into the eastern provinces of Congo. And only days following Malcolm’s assassination, Guevara met Nasser in Cairo, where he obtained the Egyptian government’s support for the guerrilla war. That both men eventually met such a violent fate in the name of their struggles and found in death iconic stature as revolutionaries seems only to further bind their legacies.
During his final two months in Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm had said relatively little publicly about his feud with the Nation of Islam. After his return, he tried to remain silent about his dispute, but the gears set in motion within the Nation could no longer be stopped. There would be no more negotiation. The charismatic minister who had whipped members into a frenzy now became the object of that violent energy, and Malcolm’s outspokenness about the Nation through 1964 had given its leaders more than enough fuel to keep the fires burning. NOI membership had stagnated without Malcolm’s recruitment appeal, and as the paternity suit against Elijah Muhammad wended its way through the court system, it continued to produce damning public revelations, which could only be refuted as lies spread by their former national minister.
And though Malcolm had mostly kept quiet about the Nation during his time abroad, his political actions had been all too provocative. Muhammad and the Chicago headquarters bristled at Malcolm’s successful negotiations with Islamic organizations in Cairo and Mecca, which had the effect of furthering perceptions of the Nation in the United States and the Middle East as beyond the boundaries of true Islam. This especially infuriated Muhammad, who had worked hard to Islamify the Nation in recent years, though always around the central, heretical idea of his own divinity. Hiring teachers of Arabic, cultivating relations with Islamic states abroad—all this had been done to strengthen the Nation’s religious bona fides, yet by embracing orthodox Islam under his own program, Malcolm had marginalized the Nation in one fell swoop, circumscribing its membership growth at the most critical moment. This move, and its continuing ramifications as Malcolm broadened his reach, had made his murder all the more necessary from an institutional standpoint.
Throughout Malcolm’s long absence in the summer and fall, the Nation had waged what might be called a one-sided jihad against him. On July 15, John Ali informed a meeting of Mosque No. 7 that the X had been stripped from Malcolm’s name. He reminded the faithful that Malcolm had after all been a “thief, dope addict, and a pimp.” Such vitriolic speeches found their complement in the slanderous campaign unfolding in the pages of Muhammad Speaks. On September 25, Captain Joseph and Atlanta leader Jeremiah X published an article entitled “Biography of a Hypocrite,” aimed at characterizing Malcolm’s entire career within the Nation as a record of opportunism. Since Malcolm had personally opened or had a hand in developing nearly every NOI mosque between 1953 and 1962,