Spectator opectator July 13, 1974

REVIEW OF BOOKS

DiElbe Onyeama on the lies of a black hero

This unauthorised biography* of Malcolm X (his widow declined to be interviewed for the book) owes its interest chiefly to the fact that it was written by a white man — which is surely a remarkable achievement in itself, since Malcolm X was vehemently anti-white. The odd title of the book is explained by the fact that the author has foreshortened Malcolm's early life as pimp, hustler, burglar and convict at twenty, focusing heavily, instead, on his last years, his assassination and the ensuing investigation and murder trial.

Peter Goldman, a senior editor of Newsweek, was neither Malcolm X's friend nor confidant, but the two met frequently between 1962 and 1964 for interviews, and exchanged letters. Mr Goldman writes: "I have attempted here as best I can to pick up where the available literature leaves off." I am afraid it has been a futile attempt; for there is not sufficient information about Malcolm X that is not already known, though the book does much to explain the man. Yet to explain him was not, it appears, what Mr Goldman fully intended to do. "I have tried to define him minimally — to resist the temptation to crowd him into some neat little box and label him nationalist, or socialist, or militant, or hatemonger, or any of the other names in which we have tried in the past to contain his protean life and intelligence." Yet, somehow, this is precisely what Mr Goldman has done, despite his own personal definition of Malcolm X as "neither saint nor sinner but a good and • gifted man struggling toward daylight." Indeed, not only is Malcolm X presented carrying every one of those labels (not that they were not true — they were), but he i also portrayed (inadvertently on Mr Goldman's part, I'm sure) as a man so devoured by his own bitterness against white people as to be totally unrealistic in some of his utterances on the colour issue. One is left amazed at the inability of a man of his intelligence to perceive the absurdity and .falsehood in those utterances. For example: Malcolm remained nominally a back-to-Africa man • • 'Millions of so-called Negroes in this country,' he said, 'have a distorted image of our homeland. They think Africans eat each other and live in mud huts. They've been brainwashed by the white man — why,

I'll show you muddier huts in Harlem than they've got over in Africa.'

It would appear strange that Malcolm should call 'homeland' a continent where racism, tribalism and, of course, nationalism were at their zenith to an extent that made their Western counterparts seem blessedly insignificant.

He visited Ghana, in West Africa, and at a major speaking session at the University of Ghana, he announced to his audience: "I'm from America, but I'm not an American. I didn't go there of my own free choice. I don't feel that I am a visitor in Ghana or in any part of Africa. I feel that I am at home. I've been away for four hundred years but not of my own volition, not *The Death and Life of Malcolm X Peter Goldman (Gollancz £4.20)

of my own will." Implying by that, of course, that the white man plundered Africa, capturing and enslaving Africans, and transporting them to America. Yet no one should he have felt more bitter against than the very Africans he regarded as brothers. After all, the slave trade was as old as Africa itself. Africans had been selling each other in slavery since before the dawn of time. When the white man first began to buy slaves from the coastal kingdoms, he had merely followed an old market custom, and had simply carved a piece of the business for himself.

These are crucial points which Mr Goldman, surprisingly, failed to pursue with Malcolm X or any of his other sources. At least if he did so, it is not apparent in the book. Still on the question of Africa, it is abundantly clear that Malcolm X expected too much from the old continent. In Ghana, while doing all he could to incite hatred and win support

and sympathy, he was totally indifferent to the fact that Ghana was in serious economic difficulty at the time and was dependent on the United States. "President Nkrumah would have been 'sympathetic," one of.Mr Goldman's sources remarks, "but his actions would have depended on other things he had to consider. He wasn't free,to act just out of his sympathies. A lot of things would have made him hesitant to take on the United States government. The United States and the Soviet Union were too important to offend." Little wonder then that after his great hospitality towards Malcolm X, Nkrumah was finally distant towards him and the former left Ghana "feeling his idol a degree or so cooler than he had expected."

Was he really justified in regarding all whites as devils? Reality, finally, forced him to concede not. He was a member of the religious movement 'Black Muslim.' In Accra, he met the Algerian Ambassador, Taher.Kaid — "an African and a revolutionary but, at least in skin colour, a white man" — and expressed to him his dreams of linking the destinies of AfroAmerica and Africa around the single fact of colour:

'Brother Malcolm.' Kaid said, smiling gently, 'that sort of leaves me out, doesn't it?'

'What do you mean?' Malcolm asked.

'Well,' said Kaid, 'I'm a Muslim brother and a revolutionary, but I'm not black — I'm Caucasian.'

Mr Goldman explains: "Malcolm, for a rare moment, wasn't sure what to say. The hajj had made it possible for him to forget Kaid's colour but not his own. He began to wonder after that whether the politics of blackness might be cutting him off from important sources of support, not so much on the white American liberal-to-radical Left — Malcolm hadn't changed that much just yet — as among the White Muslims of North Africa and the Middle East and the non-black nations' of the Third World."

It is not, often that the hero of a book for whom the biographer is full of praise fails to emerge as a praiseworthy character. Malcolm X is certainly one such hero. In his foreword, Mr Goldman expresses his own emotional attitude towards Malcolm X. "I do know that he had enormous impact on me, quite beyond the fact that I liked and admired him. Malcolm was a revelation for many of us. He was for me; he could be outrageous at moments, but he spoke with enormous personal authority, and he showed us another black America that most of us didn't know existed. Malcolm changed me, and 1 suppose that is why I wanted to write about him."

But was he really worthy of praise? If so, why was it that fewer than four hundred turned up for his last meeting? Why was it three blacks (the very blacks he sought to teach self-pride), and not his white enemies, who shot him dead? Why was the leader of the Black Muslims, Elijah Muhammad, totally unsympathetic at Malcolm's death? I quote him: "It was his foolishness, ignorance and his preachings that brought him his death. If Malcolm had died a natural death, we would have given him glorious burial; we would have stood over hi body and prayed with tears of grief in our eye But it's wrong to even stand beside the grave a hypocrite. He turned his back on the man wh taught him all he knew. It was me. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm got what he was preaching." Which was violence. Mr Goldman describes vividly and dramatically the moments leading up to the shooting of Malcolm X. The book is efficiently written, though the text is marred by some careless writing. It is useful, however, to have a white man write the book, so that those who embrace the notion that a white man is incapable of dealing honestly or compassionately with a black hero can tune out immediately.

Dillibe Onyeama was born in East Central Afriea and educated at Eton. He has written Nigger at Eton and John Bull's Nigger, which is published this week by Leslie Frewin at £2.50