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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
July was always a month rich in revolution. Two recent books shed new light on key actors in the making of modern EgyptThe missing bust
Awraq Youssef Seddiq (The Papers of Youssef Seddiq), ed. Abdel-Azim Ramadan, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1999. pp308The limits of allegiance
Shahadati lil-Ajyal (My Testimony to the Coming Generations), Helmi El-Said, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, 1999. pp271
Playing the British at their own game
Fayed -- The Unauthorised Biography, Tom Bower. Macmillan, 1998. pp496Discrepancies of doctrine
Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, Otto F A Meinardus, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp344 + 24 b/w photographsFrom Ottomans to Officers
The Cambridge History of Egypt (2 vols.), volume 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M W Daly, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp464Functionalising religion
Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Gregory Starrett, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998. pp308Recovered memories
Zaman al-nisaa wal zhakira al-badila (Women's Time and Alternative Memory), eds. Hoda El-Sadda, Somaya Ramadan and Omayma Abu Bakr, Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub, 1998. pp382The illusion of the journey
Travellers in Egypt, eds. Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1998. pp318
Soon to appear, Stokely Carmichael's memoirs are themselves a part of history. Al-Ahram Weekly previews the manuscript and talks to the co-author
Rendezvous with history
Michael Thelwell helped Stokely Carmichael write his death-bed memoirs. Visiting Cairo recently, Gamal Nkrumah sounded him out on the political legacy of the Black Power movement
At a glance:Al-Hilal, a monthly magazine, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, July 1999
* Ibdaa' (Creativity), a monthly magazine, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, June 1999
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Rendezvous with history
Michael Thelwell helped Stokely Carmichael write his death-bed memoirs. Visiting Cairo recently, Gamal Nkrumah sounded him out on the political legacy of the Black Power movement
A little violence isn't necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a student movement, especially in America. In a country where Hollywood's stars lobby hard for the right to own and use a gun, how else should the young and idealistic react? Yet there was a time, not so long ago, when Stokely Carmichael, a black student of Caribbean origin chose a peaceful path to overturning the values of the society and the structures of the state. He and others formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Overnight, they found they had been branded public enemy number one.
Michael Thelwell and Radwa Ashour at Ain Shams UniversityThis firm line of non-violent, yet revolutionary, change was motivated by two considerations -- one practical and the other ideological. In the 1960s, few blacks could get their hands on sufficient -- and sufficiently sophisticated -- weapons. Moreover, faced with the heavy-handed, militaristic line followed by the American political establishment during the McCarthy years, those who opposed the system still refused to fight it with its own evil means.
Yet, despite these best intentions, the daggers were already drawn. Before long, Stokely Carmichael would take up the gun, becoming the self-styled prime minister of the Black Panther Party, an organisation dedicated to armed struggle against racial injustice and the defence of black people's rights in America. And soon afterwards, he would leave America altogether. He went to live and die in a beautiful, almost idyllic country, far across the ocean. But even this paradise was soon metamorphosed into a battlefield. The old enemy reared its ugly head again.
An old comrade, Professor Michael Thelwell, now a distinguished writer and university professor, took up his dying friend's plea to jot down his memoirs for posterity. Egypt's Supreme Council for Culture has agreed to publish an Arabic translation of the forthcoming volume. In the presence of Thelwell, I found myself transported back in time to a period for which I feel an intense, almost overwhelming nostalgia. With his eye-catching African garb and his colourful tribal headgear, it was though an age long since passed away was staring me squarely in the face. Thelwell, of the W E B DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, believes that those times were indeed a golden age. But then, as now, he has been landed with a difficult job. Today, he is left to argue the unpopular line that men like Stokely Carmichael did not fight in vain.
Hand-wringing only goes so far. Talk of the past can be excruciatingly painful. The memoir genre is invariably bittersweet. For the committed black activists of the 1960s, the universities of America, most of which were racially segregated, were their arena of struggle. "For many of my generation, [the struggle] was the itinerary. And what an improbable, unprecedented and surprising journey it has been: frightening and exhilarating in turn, it has always been instructive. I am profoundly grateful to have made the trek ..." Thelwell spoke emphatically, without any hint of bitterness or regret.
He was visiting Cairo to sit on the doctoral dissertation committee of two Egyptian scholars -- Mohsen Kamal Abbas and Shaaban Mekkawi, taking time off from a busy schedule. Yet as it turned out, his Cairo detour brought him fresh insights into his work on the memoirs of Stokely Carmichael, or rather Kwame Ture-- the name Carmichael adopted in 1972 and remained dearer to his heart everafter. In Cairo, Thelwell renewed contact with his first Egyptian student, Professor Radwa Ashour, who as a young doctoral student had been sent to him in 1972 on the recommendation of Shirley DuBois, widow of the celebrated African-American scholar and activist W E B DuBois. The late Mrs DuBois, like several other militant African and African-American activists, had by then taken up residence in Gamal Abdel-Nasser's Egypt.
The struggle against the stormy climate of American apartheid in the 1960s moulded Thelwell as a political thinker. Campus activism also introduced him to Kwame Ture, known at that time as Stokely Carmichael. The two met at Howard University in September 1960, and thereafter would collaborate closely through three decades, as comrades in the struggle against racism in America.
Top: Stokely Carmichael addressing an anti Vietnam war rally in Paris in 1967 above: With wife Miriam Makeba, at their weeding reception in 1968, greeting Oliver Tambo"We need make no apology for what we dared. And, if we did not win, neither did we lose. To the extent that there is defeat or failure here, the dishonour, the loss, is not ours, it is the nation's" Any serious reappraisal of the 1960s implies a consideration of the present state of the African-American community. African-Americans are an essential part of the nation's fabric -- but, today more than ever, their integration takes a suffocatingly limited form. Until very recently, they were America's largest ethnic minority. Today, they comprise only 13 per cent of the population of the United States -- slightly less than the Hispanics, or Latinos.
Lately, there has been a revival in the community of the tradition of paying tribute where credit is due. Many are taking stock, counting their dead martyrs, analysing the significance of their lives. This acclaim has come too late, however, for many black revolutionaries of the 1960s. Kwame Ture survived long enough to participate in this revival -- but only just. By then, he was a dying man.
It is not particularly easy to find a publisher in contemporary America for the biography of a black activist, one whom many would like to see consigned to the dustbin of history, not celebrated in a book. Still Scribner have agreed to publish Thelwell's work. The author -- or rather co-author -- is currently working around the clock to meet his September delivery date.
Kwame Ture dictated his memoirs literally from his death bed. Although he was seriously ill, he collaborated with Thelwell right up to his very last breath. He wanted to die on African soil. He left America for the last time in August 1998. Thelwell continued to work, calling him often in Guinea, West Africa, and running up an enormous telephone bill in the process. Rarely can an expense account have represented money so well spent.
Perhaps the most memorable pages in the book are those that deal with Stokely Carmichael, the young African-Caribbean in America, vulnerable and adrift. He had been a brilliant student in his native Trinidad, but after arriving in the States did not do that well at school. Pure coincidence? He himself felt that the decline in his academic performance was a result of the shock of suddenly being transplanted from an overwhelmingly Black island-nation into a huge and predominantly white world. At everything from spelling to sports, he changed dramatically, and for the worse.
Race barriers seem far more permeable today than they were three decades ago, yet many black people in America remain sceptical of their supposed "progress". Is the sorry state in which so many African-Americans live not proof of the failure of Kwame Ture and Thelwell's generation? "They are wrong." Thelwell catches his breath. "These are not monuments to defeat. They are testaments to a struggle that was bold, honourable and principled. The struggle continues."
"We need make no apology for what we dared. And, if we did not win, neither did we lose. To the extent that there is defeat or failure here, the dishonour, the loss is not ours, it is the nation's. You have only to look around you," Thelwell banged his fist on the table. Then he punched the air. "There are those who will say, have said, that [our struggles] are merely testaments to futility and defeat. Where, they ask, are the victories? So many of the engineers are dead. So many organisations defunct. So many hopeful initiatives dissipated without apparent trace or effect. So much suffering unredeemed."
In June 1966, three weeks before his 25th birthday, Carmichael coined the battle cry, "Black Power", at a freedom march in Mississippi. Challenging white authority in the American Deep South in the sixties was not a venture to be undertaken lightly. Yet the mood was hopeful, even if many of the choices were hard.
"We want control of the institutions of the communities where we live and we want to stop the exploitation of non-white people around the world." By the time of his graduation in 1964, Carmichael had registered 4,000 black voters in Alabama's notorious Lowndes County, once a bastion of white supremacist terror. He saw Black Power as "a call for black people to define their goals, to lead their own organisations ... to resist the racist institutions and values of American society."
The White establishment in America's Deep South was hostile to any challenge to the status quo. It was this intransigence which pushed so many African-Americans towards the Black Power movement. Kwame Ture and Thelwell describe their journey allegorically, as a dangerous train ride through uncharted territory, It was one with which they became well acquainted. "As Dr King might have put it, the train left the station marked Segregation in the valley of racism for the urban landscape of civil disobedience and popular mass demonstrations. Then south through the cotton fields and pine woods of Dixie and the grim struggle there for the vote, and the right of independent political organisation. This track led directly to the thorn bushes of congressional and national party convention politics. From there the track turned sharply up the steep slopes -- yet unscaled -- of self-determination and Black Power. This pointed us toward the deceptively pleasant but mined fields of academe and Black Studies -- the search for intellectual autonomy and cultural self-definition. A long layover there with an exploratory excursion into presidential politics, and the track still stretches before us."
It was this strange creature, Black Studies -- half-academic, half-activist -- that Thelwell himself chose to do battle with. He immersed himself in the whirlpool of office politics, as well as in the wider debates that engulfed the new discipline. The distinguished West Indian economist Sir Arthur Lewis put the critics' position in a nutshell: "Black studies will not prepare a black student to be president of General Motors."
Black Studies was Thelwell's baptism of fire. Meanwhile, Carmichael was the rising star of the SNCC, as it spearheaded the struggle against racial segregation, racial discrimination and racism in America in the 1960s. But he was dissatisfied with the limitations of non-violent struggle. The civil rights movement had little to offer the African-American masses.
While many black activists succumbed to Washington's blandishments, Carmichael refused to loiter about on the margins of an essentially white game, thus lending tacit support to the political establishment. He encapsulated this tough decision in the cryptic phrase, "Hell, No."
Compare and contrast Carmichael with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Once a close associate and disciple of Martin Luther King, Jackson recently turned up at the Belgrade headquarters of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, where he successfully negotiated the release of three American prisoners of war. Having made use of the system that Kwame Ture rejected, it was time for him to be used in his turn. Perhaps that is why he has iconic value as a "black success story" for the American establishment.
But here's the caveat -- and it's a big one, too. Kwame Ture died in his prime -- like my father Kwame Nkrumah before him, like Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Patrice Lumumba and Ahmed Sekou Toure. True revolutionaries, their careers were nipped in the bud, while the collaborators and those who sold out continue to live long, full lives. It's true on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Former Black Panther turned Chicago Democratic Party Congressman Bobby Rush once said of Kwame Ture, "He's probably the last prominent Pan-Africanist who is philosophically pure. He has not compromised with the forces of capitalism." Yet, in the eyes of many, Kwame Ture's brand of scientific socialism, coupled with the dream of African unity, was nothing but an anachronistic absurdity.
Even before he had discovered Africa, it was obvious to Kwame Ture that there was no future for him in America, neither academic nor political. In 1967, the promising student and Black Panther narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Soon after, he picked up his bags and set off on his travels.
The force of wanderlust was very strong in Stokely Carmichael. It was Shirley Graham DuBois who invited him to attend the 8th Congress of the then ruling Democratic Party of Guinea (RDA). There, he met the RDA's Ahmed Sekou Toure and President Kwame Nkrumah, and a whole new political perspective began to take shape in his mind.
Carmichael now saw that the world was far bigger than America. In America, he had collaborated with fellow student activists. In Guinea, his work with Nkrumah was on an entirely different scale. Nkrumah impressed on the young Carmichael the importance of internationalising the African-American struggle for justice. "The young African-American 'sit-downers' committed no violence, nor did the many white students who, following their example, poured out of the great northern universities to demonstrate against racialism, segregation and discrimination. But their petitions and pleas for justice were met with violence, with savage beatings, with jail sentences," Nkrumah warned. Carmichael saw how the old Africa was crumbling. He was soon won over by his new mentor.
Sometimes instructive, at other times rather rhetorical, Kwame Ture's experiences as relayed by Thelwell have been rescued from the drainpipe of distortion. A biography of Kwame Ture would be a book truly worth the writing. His experiences both in America and in Africa were unique. Unfit for any career in America, it was only natural that he turned to political activism overseas. Many accuse him of having remained a student activist all his life. But for Thelwell, the value of his friend's life is clear.
"Most of African-American political experience never became history, because it was rarely recorded from an African perspective," he told me. As a result, much of America's black experience has been lost, irrevocably. Worse, what has survived has been distorted, glossed over and retold from the enemy's viewpoint.
"Those powerful mainstream political organisations like to take credit for civil rights legislation, and they are the ones who have grave differences with black organisations that have supported the political struggle and that have renounced certain policies of the state of Israel," Thelwell told me in a tone that brooked no contradiction. "One particular such organisation is the Anti-Defamation League, which has led the demonisation of Louis Farrakhan." Kwame Ture and Farrakhan were close associates in the 1980s and 1990s.
It is not quite a year since Kwame Ture's death in his adopted homeland, Guinea. But already the transforming filters of memory are busily at work. Many even refuse to call the man by the name he chose to call himself, and still insist on referring to him as Stokely Carmichael. By contrast, thanks to Thelwell, we will soon have a monument to set against all distortions, past and to come.
Kwame Ture's memoirs give a vivid idea of what it was like to be a black revolutionary in the heady days of the 1960s. They explain why he chose to change his name, why he chose to move to Africa, where he later died, and why he never felt tempted to let himself be sucked into the system he so despised, but was instead flushed out of the belly of the American beast.
His search for identity is heartbreakingly sincere and reflects a common dilemma for many black leftists in America. Essentially it boils down to choosing between race and class. "Marxism offered me an approach, a coherent point of view from which to understand and engage the society, in terms of the forces of history," he says in the manuscript. And in another beautiful passage, he confesses, "One thing that I've always been extremely grateful to them [the Marxists] for is giving me a thorough understanding of the necessity for a thorough theoretical background from which to talk about social change, be it in reform or Revolution."
However, Kwame Ture also makes it clear that the issues facing him as a black man in America were more complex than the simple need for theoretical rigour. "I joined neither the Young Communist Party, nor the youth wing of the Socialist Party, neither the Socialist Party of America, nor the Socialist Worker's Party." He goes on to elaborate, "I never overtly or consciously thought about the curious fact that all these revolutionary thinkers were European or that all their theoretical models were fashioned out of European historical experience. I accepted them as being universal." But that line of thinking did not last for long. Soon, Kwame Ture came to realise that race matters a great deal.
Thelwell writes with beautiful clarity, and with the enthusiasm of a man on the trail of a fellow political traveller, whose activism he finds of immediate relevance. Each chapter retells the story. The observations can be terse and tactless, but are always genuine and frank. Kwame Ture's voice comes through loud and clear, echoing the very nature of the man -- boisterous and bubbling over with enthusiasm, always ready to provoke controversy and fire the imagination of the youth.
What makes the manuscript even more intriguing -- and perhaps unique -- is that Kwame Ture does not have an inflated sense of his own importance. Thanks to this essential modesty, he talks freely, and at times is even garrulous. He was always a man of commitment. In Thelwell, he found an interlocutor whose loyalty is a match for his own.
