The Other Nocturn in Malcolm 's Harlem Sojourn(Harlem in the 1940's)

The accounts on Malcolm X, during his 1942-1945 stay in Harlem, focus mainly upon the Hustler character. This image, created by Malcolm and his biographer Alex Haley, lacks substantive historical evidence. What is known is that he held regular jobs, at Smalls Paradise, Jimmy's Chicken Shack, which was also a Blues club, as well as various other more shady occupations. It was blue collar employment, not criminal enterprise that occupied most of his time as a Harlemite, although most of the footage in Spike Lee's movie X, is mainly on Malcolm the hustler .Previous work on Malcolm, offer rare mentions of jazz musicians. However, by his admission, Malcolm is always in the milieu of the Jazz Musician. When Malcolm was not busy working, or later hustling, he hovered about the many after-hour joints, such as Braddock's or perhaps Minton's or other establishments which catered to the jazz crowd. The musicians Malcolm interacted with represented a vast but tightly knit community. These were heady days for jazz musicians, and by extension popular American culture as Bebop, a new form of jazz, was in the offing.

The Jazz Clubs
Braddock 's advertised regularly in the Saturday entertainment section of The Amsterdam News as “the place were you meet celebrities.” Smalls Paradise held a house orchestra on Saturdays and sometime during 1941-42 the restaurant expanded to encompass cabaret performances, allowing Sunday variety matinees for what was advertised as the Sonority club with full scale cabaret shows, musical theatrical productions, and revue's.
There were two house orchestras, one played during the week. Earl Bostic and his orchestra played at Smalls and doubled as the band for the Sunday cabaret show from 1940-43. Earl Bostic is typical of the interconnectedness of the jazz musician. Although he worked at Small's, he also played and ran the house band at Minton's as well as assisted with arrangements for Lionel Hamptons's orchestra. Earl's orchestra was a virtual university for young musicians. Earl knew and played with, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Shihab Sahib and later mentored John Coltrane and Stanley Turrentine as well as numerous other jazz luminaries. The nature of the business and the close-knit Harlem community created a milieu of intense personal relationships.
No one personified the milieu more than Teddy Hill, a former a band leader, his big band stopped playing the Savoy following differences with the Savoy’s Management. In 1940 Teddy Hill was employed by the owner of Minton’s playhouse, Henry Minton to help build up the restaurant’s dwindling clientele base. Minton’s served free food provided by the owner of the Apollo Theater to musicians every Monday following their evening show. The fraternal atmosphere of the restaurant bred late night jam sessions, allowing musicians to experiment with new music styles. Bebop in part emerged out of the



1. The autobiography of Malcolm X , Alex Haley and Malcolm X, L. De caro ,Breitnan et al , Spike lee’s Movie on the life of Malcolm X is by far the most influential account, based on our society’s preference and the convenience of the celluloid form. The autobiography by Haley preceded all the others and thus set the tone for the hustler figure. I would venture that Haley, probably cultivated an elitist view towards jazz musicians and jazz culture in general given the many connections between jazz musicians and New York’s underworld . Haley, thus set the tone for all the others not to explicate further the many interactions between Malcolm and the jazz world beyond the frequent mentions by Malcolm however substantial..
2The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm and Haley, is replete with numerous depictions of himself in and around the world of Jazz, also the Spike lee movie X, covers his life in the jazz world , but only as an adjunct peripheral to the Hustler character he lionizes, similar to the plethora of all of those who have depicted the life of Malcolm textually.




Minton’s jam sessions attended by the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk. In addition to breaking musical barriers, jazz in Harlem also eroded racial and social barriers. Braddock’s grill next door to the Apollo theater was famous for uninhibited racial interactions. Since it’s inception jazz accompanied the transgression of social superstructures.
Musicians were heavily involved in the major intellectual discussions of the day, including the war, the state of Jim Crow, and the morality and efficacy of racial mixing evident in the local jazz clubs. Add to the mix a returning solder like Reginald, Malcolm's younger brother, and a collective of Africans converged in this cosmopolitan African Mecca, the focal point of which was Harlem.
The gatherings of these provocateurs in the form of African American jazz musicians and those who were attracted to their milieu, were using Small's Paradise, Minton's, Jimmy's Chicken Shack and Braddock's as a cultural lab. Encompassed in this amalgam were African Americans, born in the various cities of the North without the first hand knowledge of the historic consequences or tension, engendered by the southern institution of slavery, dubbed the New Negro by Alian locke.

A Hive of Thought
The amalgam produced definite ideas as to what Jim Crow America stood for, but more importantly this amalgam brought a poly-focal, rather than provincial grounding to the conversations. The after-hours brought all, including the immigrant from the Caribbean, the southern born African American, and the recent immigrants from the rest of the northern cities of America, to add to the well traveled intellectual propensities of the jazz musician. The diversity of backgrounds was counter-balanced by a shared genealogical reservoir of African American and Afro-Caribbean intellectual thought. The names invoked included W. Blyden, Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, as well as Locke, Cullen, Neal and Hughes. These writers are what contextually framed, informed, and steered most of the conversations which formed Malcolm’s Harlem sojourn.
The Second World War was one such topic that was raging during Malcolm's, sojourn in Harlem. The war was analyzed through the lens of the condition of marginality for that affected the various Africans who gathered at Small's, Braddock's, Minton's etc. Those who gathered were seeking an alternative to the status quo and this alternative manifested itself in the milieu of the jazz musician.

Race , specters of, and familiarities
Of course there were also the many who were present at these after hour spots purely for the entertainment value. Malcolm, like the rest who were seeking, brought his own sensibilities from Boston having prodigiously drank from the cup of Jazz while working as a shoeshine boy at the ballroom, rubbing shoulders and engaging in personal tet a tet’s with Jazz icons.
Malcolm's contact with Jazz brought him Sophia, in the autobiography he seemed not to be phased at all by this blurring of the structured color lines that had brutally taken his father, his Mother and destroyed what he new of his family life. Here as a novice in the milieu of jazz , omnipotent social structures crumble in the setting of the ballroom




3. The works of Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubious, M. Garvey’s Newspaper, the plethora of African American and Afro Caribbean writers and thinkers that form the collective corpus which comprise the discourse of Ideas and organizations that were in the public domain during, and prior to- this includes writers of Harlem renaissance mentioned above- Malcolm’s residence in Harlem. Their works are well known and form an extensive corpus of work too innumerable to cite here in their entirety





where Sophia and Malcolm are recreated as equal humans both attracted to the music. In the autobiography Malcolm takes this liaison in stride until he is locked up for this very same transgression. The profound engagement between Malcolm and Sophia is possibly the beginning of Malcolm’s revaluation of the meaning of the racial constructs he inherited from his families Garvey-ite world view. Sophia transcended Malcolm's, constructs of white individuals being unanimously one, when it came to the evil things they collectively perpetrated.
Malcolm's after hours haunts, Braddock's, Minton's and Small's harbored a collective of Africans from all over the world, including African Latinos, such as Chano Poza from Cuba, who introduced the Afro-Latin poly rhythms featured in Dizzy's band ,and the music of Mario Bauza. Dizzy, Bird and Max Roach performed without accompaniment with Asata Dafoora, an African dancer, at a benefit on behalf of the African Research Society in Manhattan.
The African Research Society was headed by Kingsley Mbadiwe a Columbia student whom Dizzy described as a Harlem fixture. Mbadiwe stood upon a soapbox, behind an American flag and harangued passersby on the tyranny of the white mans oppression. Later Kingsley acquired the nickname Mr. Bombast during his return to Nigeria where he held the post of a minister in the government.

At the Center of It All
Malcolm's decision to move to Harlem is akin to the well grounded tradition of the student going to where civilization is at its peak, and Harlem was where racism was being challenged on the intellectual level. Malcolm was a keen participant and was captivated by this new space he has never imagined could exist. Sophia, after hearing Malcolm describing Harlem, recognizes the implications and comments, "no other place will be able to contain you." Malcolm and Haley’s autobiographical constructs and the emphasis of himself as a gangster are misleading when you consider alternate motives for his sojourn.
What Malcolm sees in Harlem is a furtherance of this deconstruction of the American Myth of white supremacy. Malcolm was drawn to this world of the jazz musician because it provided answers similar to the ones Malcolm had known all along, but could not explain rationally. Malcolm knew that his family was destroyed by false ideas of race, but Jazz chipped away at Malcolm's structural conditioning. His definitions of black and white America shifted and he began to re-categorize his beliefs of race and the responses. The Harlem world of the jazz musicians dictated a general reordering of all the stasis of segregation and overhauled entrenched societal norms. The reality of the milieu of jazz did not and would not contain any particular race.
What Malcolm found in the after hour spots was musicians and Africans, with their various accents. The latter must have reeled Malcolm back to His father's Garveyite impressions of a big and diverse world of Africans. Malcolm listened and questioned each of these curious Africans, eager to learn of their conditions at home and why they came to Harlem.



4. Excerpts for the Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie’s To be, or not..Bop with Al Frazer( New York: Doubleday,19 79)pp278 -302 Asumba Kingley Mbadiwe was the head of the African student in New York and Head of the African research institute, Mbadiwe organized benefits on behalf of this institute where his friends Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Dizzy Performed along with an African Dancer Named Asata Daafor a at the Diplomat Hotel. They performed with no accompaniment, Asumba was a well known figure in Harlem for his soap box antics with an American flag behind him, this is how he made Dizzy’s acquaintance while he was a student at Columbia University. He later Was nicknamed Mr Bombast in Nigeria, Later becoming a minister in the government of Nigeria. The Nickname is in relation to the English Language and the ornate vocabulary usage, a well known penchant of this African Country.


Malcolm was also privy to late night familiarities between the races, including debates between black and white musicians on the war in Europe. African American’s begged the question why they should fight for abstract freedom again, when African Americans have fought in all the wars, including the last one, and were still denied freedom at home. One can just hear the musicians, loose with liquor fuming, “what I should be doing is fighting the white man here in America for all the freedoms and dignity. Freedoms that are gratis for even the most recent white immigrants, just off the boat from Europe.” Here, amidst smoke, sweat and jazz, Malcolm listened and learned.
What Malcolm heard was Billie Holliday singing about the strange fruit of the south, referring to lynched black men, some of them still in military uniform. Perhaps it was the images in the songs of Holliday, who Malcolm knew personally, that informed his decision to scam the Draft board by faking insanity. In the autobiography this is described as a hustle rather than a systemic antagonism embodying a political ideal. The idea of non-compliance was present in conversations in the after-hours joints teeming with subversive intellectual exchange. It was out of this jazz milieu that Malcolm determined to remain on the sidelines as Uncle Sam marched to Europe. The jazz clubs served as intellectual hubs where African American Ideologues and literary figures such as the Harlemite Langston Hughes, the famous Harlem renaissance poet would frenquent.
Malcolm and Haley's aggrandizing portrait of the Hustler steers us away from Malcolm's early intellectual habits in Harlem, habits he had formed while a bright student in Michigan. In the autobiography there is a mention about Malcolm taking in the sites and encountering communist party workers encouraging Harlemites to read and inquire more about the communist's. Malcolm alludes to a further discussion with his older co-workers, echoing the papers of the day by recalling that the communists were on the side of freedom fighting against Hitler’s fascism. The account is again very quick and as we know has been virtually supplanted by the later narrative of Malcolm’s struggles to obtain literacy in prison. This is extremely misleading and ignores Malcolm the Harlem newshound and political animal. Malcolm lets it slip in the autobiography that he read newspapers regularly and demonstrates this by offering an astute commentary on the United States foreign policy in regards to the Russia.

The Reality of Crime
In addition to scholars and musicians, the jazz milieu did contain unsavory characters that anyone familiar with the gangster lore of the early 20th century would recall. Malcolm relays to Haley in the autobiography the names of criminal figures including Dutch Shultz, and the gangsters he met at Smalls, gangsters who cut an impressive figure with a conservative look which Malcolm noted ran counter to the extremely loud zoot-suits worn by most urbane African Americans. The overbearing diffidence granted the hustler and the often flamboyant character of the gangster had a status of importance within the hierarchy of Harlem, coupling fear with a lavish and generous personality. Malcolm for reasons that are obvious wanted a piece of the status commensurate with an overblown reputation.
Since he could not become a jazz celebrity overnight, the other avenue for recognition was as a hustler. Malcolm is also looking for ways to continue the life within the milieu of the jazz musician and the financial freedom of the hustler allowed him to remain within the dynamic of this new paradigm in American culture. Perhaps another reason for the narrative of the hustler was because a narrative of the jazz musician would contradict the rhetoric of separatism. While writing the autobiography, Malcolm may have been attempting to reconcile with the Nation of Islam. Enshrining jazz culture would have made this impossible. Jazz music sanctioned interracial liaisons which were an affront to the moral codes of the Nation. Musicians could not be the archetype of Malcolm's development even in reflection if he was going to repair his relationship with the movement or lead his former constituents elsewhere.


5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
6. Ibid

7. Ibid

Ibid





International Hub
Malcolm's Harlem was one of exchange between musicians from all corners of the United States as well as Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. For Harlemites, Europe stood as a prominent point of comparison for the treatment of blacks in the United States. Malcolm was aware of the negro expatriate settlements in Paris through expatriate jazz musicians. Malcolm worldview was further expanded by the Amsterdam News's pro- American war stance for the negro that featured many editorials by Dr Dubois chastising Mussolini prior invasion and the subsequent occupation of Ethiopia , and North
Africa by the Italians for one, the temporary exile and return of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Salasie, and other such conquests by European power was also the topic of heated debates amongst the jazz musicians who were well versed with the already present pan African aspirations, and viewed this as another assault at the dignity of the Africans, in particular in the case Ethiopia a long time Afro –Caribbean and African American symbol of self determination and pristine home to the Daispora . The former exiled emperor was featured in full spreads of the Amsterdam News. Ethiopia especially and Africa was a sticking point for African Americans and Malcolm must have been privy to passionate debates at Braddock's decrying Italy’s prior occupation of Ethiopia and continued aggression in northern Africa, which was a viewed by African Americans contextually as a microcosm of Europe's colonization of Africa in it's entirety.
Malcolm possessed a more extensive grasp of geopolitics then we are led to believe by those who have ascribed the foundations of Malcolm's worldview to exposure at the Garveyite household of his parents. Malcolm’s older brother Wilbur disputes this ascription suggesting that Malcolm was too young to absorb anything that went on in the household. From Malcolm and Haley we hear that Malcolm developed a global perspective only after his split with the Nation of Islam. The truth is that Malcolm was constantly in this transient milieu of the jazz musician, touring continental America. Again through railroad work, Malcolm crisscrossed the nation, offering a much more intensive look at the condition of the African American in what he called "the sticks".
Malcolm the ethnographer must have been reflecting on the importance of widening horizons through travel, linking the lack of travel to the stagnancy of “the sticks”. It is here that Malcolm observes the malaise and poverty of the vast numbers of African Americans in the continental America . Traveling with jazz musicians in what was then called the Chittlin circuit allowed him a much more extensive idea of a collective desperation of African Americans in the United States. Unlike abstractions culled from books, travel gave Malcolm personal exposure to the collective malaise. Malcolm's youthful survey of continental America lampooned Malcolm into selfless commitment to the African American community and to the African Diaspora extant. More personally, travel made Malcolm comfortable with a semi-nomadic existence, without which it is doubtful that he would have been able to endure the lifestyle before him.
Through the efforts of the likes of, Wilmot Blyden and Dubois, Harlemites, including Malcolm, were well aware of the global challenges facing the African race. However, Malcolm was exposed to more visceral illustrations of such challenges through his personal contacts with the African Diaspora now present in Harlem and through the pan-African Congress, which had met several times before Malcolm arrival on the scene. These factors, coupled with the constant conversations and print media concerning the agitation for de-colonization of Africans , African Americans etc within these western centers gave the discerningly intuitive Malcolm, a much more sophisticated awareness of global events then we are lead to believe by his many biographers text or otherwise.

9.For an intriguing view of the social relations and other facets of the settlement of African American communities, social relation in Europe see, William Shack’s fascinating account in ,Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. Berkeley: University of California
10.The biblical link, (“Ethiopia shall rise and stretch forth her Hand”) to the Gaveyites lead Afro – Caribbeans and African Americans to settle and form communities in Shashamani a community still present today (although with a increasingly decipating roaster of original member which were around 12)with increments from newer settlers from the Caribbean and America. The original settlers were issued land grants originally constituted by Menelik of 5 gashas ( approx a over a hundred acres) and honored by Salasei, in appreciation of the strong support always accorded Ethiopia by the African Daispora.
11.The Amesterdam News 1941.
12. Louis De caro On the Side of My People
13. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, By Alex Haley and Malcolm X.





Islam in Harlem
Although I have generally painted a picture of jazz musicians as a morally lax group and rather monolithic, the opposite is also true. Jazz musicians were spiritually eclectic as they traversed the boundaries of societal norms, blurring barriers of color. Jazz musicians were attracted to the universality of Islam. Islam fundamentally rejected racial hierarchy. Many well known and not so well know musicians converted to Islam Sahib Shihab, Idris Suleiman and Talib Dawud who later married Candi Stanton, the later was also the subject of a Malcolm response to the Amsterdam news, her husband Dawud tried to legally separate Islam from the Nation. Sahib Shihab and others went as far as raising money to sponsor Islamic Ma’alims ( teachers) to come to New York.
Dizzy Gillespie offers a vivid description of Muslim musicians during the same period of Malcolm’s sojourn. Dizzy says despite untoward practices by jazz agents, converts were still able to fare amicably in the business. Dizzy, distinguished serious converts from those who merely changed there names to obtain better treatment from Jim crow America by appearing to be Muslims. Gillespie observed Idriss Suleiman was regularly
served in white establishments because he was Muslim. White society tended to treat even the blackest Muslim as something other than Negro. Jazz musicians were all issued cabaret cards, Known to musicians as police cards. Dizzy reported Kenny Clark (Klook ) joked at the irony, that he was no longer a negro because he had changed his name to the Muslim name Liaqiat Salaam. As a result, his race on the police card was effectively changed to white. According to Dizzy, almost half of the musicians at one point or the other changed their names to appear Muslim.
Malcolm is around these musicians and is intimate with many of the recent converts. Malcolm achieved at least a rudimentary idea of Islam, however, it was Islam with a universal doctrine , unlike the separation he later proselytized in the Nation. In prison Malcolm is visited by an Ahmadiya Shiekh and given a copy of the Koran. Malcolm says he learned to recite these prayers phonetically by heart. Later, when Malcolm is released and the draft board calls on him to comply with regulations, he states on his application that he a Muslim and from Mecca. What is significant is that he makes no mention of the lost tribe of Shabazz or other details that would distinguish him as a follower of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm may have been drawing upon his experience in Harlem and not on his recent interactions with the followers of Elijah Muhammad.

Jazz and Language
Malcolm's improvisational wit and powerful oratory often silenced even the most accomplished academics. Malcolm used words in the same improvisational manner as jazz musicians used music. His talent for speech was not contrived in prison, but rather was part of the social reality of the milieu of jazz, a place teeming with cultural poets, constantly innovating with language.
Upon arriving in Harlem, Malcolm shed both his zoot suit and his old vernacular, replacing it with that of the jazz crowd. Malcolm was at the cultural precipice of the civil rights struggle and was comfortable speaking to a crowd from a podium. In the manner of a jazz musician, he captivated his audiences with articulation, rhythm, and imagery drawn from an extensive reservoir of words. The autobiographies present a misleading and fantastic preposition that Malcolm developed his verbal skill while debating in prison. Indeed Malcolm himself forwards this idea, but it seems incredulous that the prison could offer up the diversity of interracial intellect available to him at the after hours venues which were a microcosm of the diversity he was to encounter later as through his public persona.
The eloquence of the jazz musicians is fortunately captured in celluloid documentary. The likes of the Duke's sophisticated approach to the English language would cower many into silence. The Duke is one of the many learned connoisseurs of




14.To Be or not no Bop, Dizzy Gillespie, Al Fraser pp-278 302
15. The Harlem of Malcolm included many Adherents if Islam ( universal in relation to singularity of common precepts, not catechism’s like the Catholics for e.g.) who were African American or other wise , this included a Large presence of Muslims from the Middle East and Europe , and small numbers of Sunni merchant mariners who were longtime residents of Harlem, by the time of Malcolm sojourn. However, one of the more popular and older Islamic presence from overseas was the Ahmadiyya Sect ,who had sent a missionary from its London Post in The very early 20th century. The Ahmadiyya were considered innovators by other Muslims in India where the Sect originated. They do not believe that Mohamed was the seal of the Prophets.
16. The Autobiography of Malcolm X By Alex Haley And Malcolm X.



the English language and depicts the importance of oratory skill in the milieu of jazz. The oratory eloquence of Malcolm formed during the Harlem sojourn from his exposure and immersion in the milieu of jazz.
The other nocturne in the Narrative of Malcolm's sojourn has been overlooked by biographies, including the autobiography itself. However, they have also been stumped by the celluloid version by Spike Lee. The script used by Spike is reputed to be an artistic hijacking of the play by the African American writer James Baldwin. Spike's version has now replaced all other accounts of Malcolm when judged purely on the sheer numbers who have watched it. Spike's concentration on the hustler construct has served to entrench this depiction of Malcolm at the cost of erasing Malcolm's more refined life.

A New Paradigm
To understand Harlem between nineteen forty to forty five, one must include the vast migration that are synonymous with the industrial revolution, creating a new demographic and shifting African American populations from the rural south to concentration in the northern cities . This shift birthed the Harlem of Malcolm's sojourn. This African American community was informed only by narrative of the historic ramifications of the southern institution of slavery, however the legacy of slavery continued to shape their position in society. This new dynamic is what informs the sense of antagonism to static malaise and resignation in the face of Jim Crow. Malcolm observed a sense of urgency that negroes are spoiling for a fight. It is these African American who create the paradigm of Jazz out of Spirituals and Blues, both of which were deeply rooted in slavery.
Harlem, during the period of Malcolm’s sojourn, was a burgeoning convergence of African Americans from all over the continental United States, along with a large contingent of Africans from the Caribbean and African merchant mariners. This is the Black Mecca described in Langston Hughes poem. All the raw materials of what made Malcolm the public personage was a result of his time in Harlem through the milieu of the jazz musician. Malcolm's involvement in the milieu of the jazz musicians, shaped his ideas of a collective African universe in the form of Pan Africanism, his ideas of race and Jim Crow, his understanding of the condition of African America, his cosmopolitan outlook, the ease he developed with travel and his intellectual dexterity. Malcolm's experiences as the hustler are by far outweighed by this experience with jazz culture.

By the village Griot 2007

Pan Afrik-revisted:Towards a future praxis.

Nkrumah’s Ideas of an Africa, as one unitary state, was largely a product of generations of African American and Afro Caribbean visions of Ethiopianism, or a Black Zion. A vision formulated as the only viable response to the intransigence of the legacy of slavery, on the one hand and the paradigm of race as a collective construct on the other. A construction based largely on the affinity of affliction in the new world, enjoining the scattered and hijacked Diaspora to imagine a pristine home in Africa, based on tenuous relations across the black Atlantic divide, spanning centuries of removal.

The focus of Nkruma's ideas were well within this new world historiographical ideal of self determination. To make it plain like Brother Malcolm X would insist, a unitary power in Africa, that could effectively counter the condition of subjugation under slavery at the hands of Europe, and its later day apparition America.

His ideas were formulated around the Praxis of African communalism, offering if you will, a philosophers' well thought out theoretical rendering of the cultural dispositional raw materials of what is , the traditional modus of African societal being. In other words formulating theory to match what was inherent in the African setting. This gave way to other theories that were less theory an more pragmatic as in the case of Mwalimu Nyerere’s Ujama in Tanzania. Other ideas of this collective African context were articulated by Jomo Kenyatta, Nassir , Kaunda, and Jaramogi Odinga Odinga to name only a few. Nassir joined Egypt with Syria. Kenya , Tanzania and Uganda formed what was called the east African community. Somalia became one nation, joining the Italian South with the British North.However;casting a fervent and forlorn hope to join their other ethnic Somali brethren, partitioned by the French( later Djibouti), Ethiopia (Ogaden), and Britain(now North Eastern Kenya). The euphoria of Pan Africanism swept through out the entire continent of Africa, momentarily galvanizing the ethnic chauvinism divide.It is almost a different Africa from the Africa of today , an Africa fragmented into the abyss of ethnic chauvinism exacerbated by today’s political actors who have the vision of a Rhino.
It is not that Africa can not produce visionaries like Nkurumah, but rather can Africa, produce a visionary that visions through the interest of the west?

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia of a relatively small,Western style, Western trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in culture commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them through the west they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa. 1

Nkruma’s vision is something Langston Hughes would have termed "a dream deferred" in that his vision although marvelous seemed esoteric to Franz Fanon. In my view Fanon, gave a more astute observation of this euphoria of nationalism.His views were formulated on the more practical conditionality of the continent and its people in real time. Fanon, observed as follows,

National consciousness is nothing but a crude , empty, fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for a young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe-a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of a nation and national unity.2

Nkrumah, was later described as a dictator by some, and there were instances in Ghana where some celebrated the coup that disposed him. The others like Kenyatta, Nyerere and most of the earlier cadres of Nkurumah’s Pan African vision were the same leaders who clinged to power( most died in office) that eventually lead to ( in case of the majority) ethnic dictatorships which deepened ethnic divisions, and gave power to a favored few. A more nuanced explanation of this system bequeathed to Africa by these earlier paragons of African unity is by Claude Ake,

The state in Africa has been a maze of autonomies of form and content; the person who holds office may not exercise its powers, the person who exercises the powers of a given office may not be its holder, informal relations often override formal relations, the formal hierarchies of bureaucratic structure and political power are not always the clue to decision-making power. Positions that seem to be held by persons are in fact held by kingship groups; at one point the public is privatized and at another the private is ‘publicized’ and two or more political systems and cultures in conflict may coexist in the same social formation.3

Nkrumah, based his vision on African traditional methods of coexistence and mutual governance and minority inclusion , instead of these ideas of multi-party democracies based on European notions of transparency, invariably passed off as universal, but in reality far fetched to the majority of Africans, as noted by Claude Ake, as follows,

The African who is slated for democracy is a rural dweller who lives in a society which is still predominantly communal. She is a subsistence farmer toiling for a precarious existence. She has virtually no access to safe drinking Water, health services and sanitary facilities and she is illiterate or nearly so. What does democratization mean in this setting and for this person? There is no chance in her ignorance, her debilitating poverty and precarious existence. She is offered only the spurious choice which is framed by forces beyond her control often beyond her understanding and of Little relevance to her needs.4

The legacy of a larger polity thus remains elusive to date. All the ideas brought forth thus far, are really just a chorus of imitations with not much thought given to what it is, that makes Africa.There are the exceptions who are concerned with a more African based Epistemology. Unfortunately they are usually drowned out by the din from this loud chorus of imitational, pseudo intellectual, and hungry ventriloquism. The griot is aware that the comments on democracy in particular may be used by this recent strongman types, to assume this visionary posture, all the while coveting power for the sake of power.
by the village griot











(1)Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, London: Metchuen, 1992. p.144
(2) Franz Fanon, The Wretched Of The Earth: Richard Philcox New Translation , Grove press
(3) Claude Ake , Democracy and Development in Africa 1996 Ibadan , Specctrum Books, p. 14.
(4) Claude Ake, Democratization of Disempowerment in Afirca , CASS occasional monograph, No.1, Lagos:
Malthouse Press 1994 , p. 20.