Malcolm X's 1964 Journeys Through Africa and the Middle East

In 1964, the final year of his life, Malcolm X traveled through Africa and the Middle East twice, and the experience reshaped his politics from Nation of Islam separatism into an explicit, outward-facing Pan-Africanism.

The first trip ran from mid-April to late May, built around his pilgrimage to Mecca. Having left the Nation of Islam that March, Malcolm performed the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, an experience he described in letters home as transformative for how he thought about race, since he worshipped alongside Muslims of every color and origin. From Mecca he traveled on to Beirut, then Cairo and Alexandria, and into West Africa: Nigeria, where students at the University of Ibadan gave him the honorary Yoruba name Omowale, “the son who has come home”; Ghana, where he met President Kwame Nkrumah and members of Nkrumah’s government; and on through Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria before returning to New York in late May as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

That trip convinced him African American demands for civil rights should be recast as a human rights struggle brought before international bodies like the United Nations, rather than treated as a purely domestic American issue. Back in New York in June, he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, explicitly modeled on the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the continental body founded by African heads of state the previous year.

He returned to Africa in July for a longer, more consequential second trip that stretched into late November and took him through roughly a dozen nations, including Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, with stops in the Middle East and London along the way. Its centerpiece came in Cairo, where the OAU held its second summit of heads of state from July 17 to 21. Malcolm, attending as an observer, circulated a memorandum on OAAU letterhead urging African governments to formally raise the treatment of Black Americans as a human rights violation before the United Nations. The summit’s final communiqué included language condemning racial discrimination in the United States, a diplomatic result Malcolm considered a significant win. During this second trip he also met with numerous African heads of state and addressed audiences at universities across the continent, arguing consistently that the fates of Black Americans and newly independent African nations were bound together.

One clarification is worth making plainly: any footage from this period showing an image of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader assassinated in January 1961, would necessarily show a photograph, portrait, or monument rather than Lumumba himself, since he had already been dead for more than three years by the time of Malcolm’s travels. Lumumba nonetheless loomed large as a martyr figure in the Pan-Africanist circles Malcolm moved through in 1964, invoked constantly as a symbol of the stakes of the anti-colonial struggle.