Malcolm X

It behooves me to begin by stating that a much longer version of this chapter appears as an essay titled “Malcolm X and United States Policies towards Africa: A Qualitative Analysis of His Black Nationalism and Peace through Power and Coercion Paradigm” in The Journal of Pan African Studies (2016). I hold the copyright to the article as it is not the journal’s policy for authors to relinquish their copyrights to it. The inclusion of this essay was deemed imperative based on the belief that no book on the conceptualizations of Africa by major Black thinkers in the Diaspora would be complete without the inclusion of Malcolm X’s revolutionary ideas. The chapter is about his conceptualization of Africa and the lessons that can be learned from it to help build a new Africa. That Malcolm X was bothered by the history of distortion, misrepresentation, subjugation, and exploitation of Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, European colonialism and neo-colonialism, and United States imperialism is hardly a matter of dispute. For example, as he lamented in his book titled On Afro-American History, for 300 years, the slaver knew that he could not enslave African people until he first made them dumb, and one of the effective ways to make enslaved Africans dumb was to take away their languages. Once their languages were gone, they could not communicate with their relatives, and they could never have access to information from their families. Slavers had laws that made it mandatory for a Black child to be taken from his/her mother as fast as that child was born. The child would be brought up somewhere else away from the mother, so that the mother could not teach the child what she knew—about self, about her past, about the child’s heritage. And if the master would ever find a child who had any knowledge of his/her mother tongue, that child was put to death. Using a qualitative explanatory case study methodology (which emphasizes words, as opposed to numerical values, to answer the questions how and why), the chapter shows that it was Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism and peace through power and coercion paradigms that underlay his conceptualization of Africa and the actions he took to push American policymakers to rethink their policies toward Africa, and African leaders to take appropriate positions toward the United States’ agenda at the United Nations and in the continent.