WORLD WIDE AFRICA THE VOICE OF THE PAN AFRICAN MOVEMENT

Tonight we will continue our book on Malcolm X THE MAN AND HIS TIMES, edited by Dr. John Henrik Clarke. Essay number two is wiritten by a fellow clergyman.  "Certainly Brother Malcolm wanted to relate our struggle, the struggle of black people in America, to the struggle of black people everywhere.  I say to the struggle of black people everywhere, because that is a struggle that he understood, that I understand, and that you understand.,   I am not talking about relating it to the struggle of oppressed people everywhere, but relating it to the struggle of BLACK people everywhere.  But he expected little help from the Africans and the African nations.  Malcolm wasn’t running around Africa thinking that the African nations were going to free us.  Malcolm wasn’t that kind of an idiotic idealist.  He went to our black brothers because they were our bothers.  He talked to them about our problems, and we are as concerned about their problems as we want them to be about our problems.  But he didn’t go to Africa expecting them to free us. Sometimes we forget that, and we sit around waiting for somebody in Africa to send somebody over here to free us— “like Malcolm said they were going to.”  He never said it and they were never going to do it.  If you are going to be free, you are going to free yourself, and that is what Malcolm told us.  The African nations can’t free us, they can’t save us.  They couldn’t even sabe Lumumba in Africa, they couldn’t save the black people of Rhodesia; they couldn’t free black people of South Africa. The why should we sit here in our own brutality, waiting for some mysterious transformation when back armies from Africa are coming over here and free us?  They could use some black armies from over here to free them." Myths about Malcolm X by Reverand Albert Cleage Feb. 24, 1967