On 10 May 1964, on his return trip to the United States from Mecca, Malcolm X landed in Accra for a weeklong visit to the capital of the ‘Black Star of Africa’. His visit was anxiously anticipated by many, especially members of the large African American exile community, who had settled in the wake of Ghana's independence in 1957;Footnote ² it was clearly dreaded by others, especially members of the US government consular staff in Accra; and it was treated with a somewhat ambivalent curiosity by many others. Malcolm X's high-profile visit, of course, has assumed an important and well-deserved place in biographical accounts of his life, as a key component of his religious and political transformation or conversion, as some have termed it.Footnote ³ As Kevin Gaines has written, ‘whatever impact the hajj had on Malcolm's racial consciousness, his visit to Ghana and his interaction with the so-called white as well as black revolutionaries enabled him to imagine coalitions with nonblacks and therefore to reject the NOI's [Nation of Islam's] parochial black nationalism’.Footnote ⁴ Thanks to private paper collections, which detail Malcolm X's visit (especially those of Shirley Graham DuBois, John Henrick Clark, and Julian Mayfield),Footnote ⁵ the 2014 publication of Malcolm X's 1964 diary,Footnote ⁶ and the work of scholars like James Campbell, Kevin Gaines, Gerald Horne, and Manning Marable,Footnote ⁷ we know a great deal about how Malcolm X's sojourn in Accra impacted his political trajectory and its specific significance for that small but important community of African American revolutionaries resident in Ghana at the time. We know far less about how Malcolm X's visit resonated in other quarters — among different refugee and expatriate communities or among Ghanaians themselves. What kinds of meanings might it have generated more broadly, especially across the new nation's capital?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to retrieve in any substantive way Ghanaian perspectives on Malcolm X's visit in 1964. Archival documentation, above and beyond newspaper accounts, is virtually non-existent, and many of those who encountered Malcolm X through his public appearances over a half century ago are no longer with us. Rather, my purpose here is to approach Malcolm X's visit as a key moment through which to access articulations of race, racial identity, and liberation politics that converged, cohered, but more often collided in Ghana during the first decade of independence. I am particularly concerned with the public discourse and politics surrounding race and racial formation — with what I will term ‘race talk’ — among members of the large and diverse expatriate and exile communities in Ghana, and how that talk intersected, or not, with Ghanaian understandings of Blackness and Whiteness.Footnote ⁸ Beginning in the 1950s and ending abruptly in 1966 with President Kwame Nkrumah's overthrow in a military coup, a substantial number of expatriates from across the globe settled in Ghana to assist in the work of nation-making, modernization, and African liberation. Some, as Gaines has powerfully demonstrated in his work, were African American activists drawn to Nkrumah's pan-African dream.Footnote ⁹ Many from among that group counted themselves as exiles, alongside African freedom fighters and White South African communists, who had fled the brutality of White supremacist colonial settler regimes. But they were not alone. There were countless others — Irish and Welsh nationalists, Caribbean Marxists, White American socialist dissidents, French peace activists, British Fabian socialists, to name just a few — who were drawn to this country of the future — a country, they believed, which ‘faced neither east nor west’, one that faced only forward.Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps these women and men were all driven by what Robin D. G. Kelley has so powerfully termed ‘freedom dreams’, but their visions for a better world were multiple and often conflicting, even though Ghana provided a shared dreamscape.Footnote ¹¹ Much like a flash of lightning illuminates the parameters and contents of a darkened room, Malcolm X's visit, I want to suggest, threw into instant and sharp relief the competing freedom dreams of these exiles and expatriates, as they debated the role and place of race and racial discourse in the liberation politics of what was fast becoming, by appearances anyway, a postcolonial world. It is a debate as critical for the 2020s, I'd like to suggest, as it was for the 1960s.

With the important exception of work on the former colonial settler states of southern Africa, few scholars have traced histories of racecraft or racial formation in Africa (as opposed to ethnic formation) into the postcolonial period.Footnote ¹² While historians like Jonathan Glassman, Bruce Hall, and Carina Ray have begun to center discussions of race in histories that move from the precolonial through the postcolonial periods, for the most part, the ‘postcolonial’ seems to conjure into simultaneous being the ‘postracial’ for much of the continent.Footnote ¹³ This is not to ignore the profoundly important global discussions about the racial landscape of knowledge production about Africa that have flourished in the wake of the #Fallist movements across the globe, discussions that often include important historical perspectives.Footnote ¹⁴ But it is to question where and how race appears or disappears as a central analytic in historical reconstructions of postcolonial African history, especially outside of the former settler states.

In Ghana, for example, much historical work is silent on issues of race and racial formation for the recent postcolonial past. The same cannot be said of anthropological work, where Black scholars like Bayo Holsey, Laurian Bowles, and Jemima Pierre have taken the lead in centering race as an essential analytic for probing the transnational postcolonial world of contemporary Ghana.Footnote ¹⁵ Pierre is particularly pointed in her response to what she terms ‘the continent's ironic exclusion from contemporary analyses of race and racialization processes’, with a powerful exploration of the ways in which ‘local discourses and practices that index race and raced relations resonate and are in dialogue, both with the global political economy and transnational/diasporic identity politics and formations’.Footnote ¹⁶ Though framed historically, my thoughts in the following pages are shaped by a similar concern, as well as by my particular intellectual autobiography. Like Pierre (and perhaps as a result of studying African history and African American history at Northwestern University, where the two fields long co-existed in uneasy tension), I have been confounded by the ‘astonishing irony’ that the broad field of African history has rarely (outside of the former White settler states) grappled with race and processes of racial formation in postcolonial Africa, while scholarship on race has dominated histories of the African diaspora.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, part of the Malcolm X story I seek to engage in these pages includes some reflections on my own training in African history and on an early lesson in the legibility or translatability of US racial categories in African postcolonial contexts.

So, let me begin: what was the historical context in May 1964, which renders Malcolm X's visit such a significant moment for race talk, for observing the postcolonial politics of race and the collision of ‘freedom dreams’? A number of events stand out, some of special relevance to the University of Ghana and the status of exiles and expatriates in the country. While there had been several attempts on Nkrumah's life in the previous two years, on 2 January 1964, a police officer within the walls of Flagstaff House, where Nkrumah worked and had his residence, fired five shots at him. The assassination attempt failed, but in its aftermath an almost impenetrable cloud of fear and suspicion descended over the country, with ‘rumors of spies and plots’ abounding.Footnote ¹⁸ Nkrumah himself was convinced, and not without reason, that the US Central Intelligence Agency was behind the attack. In the days that followed, there were protests outside of the US Embassy, which greatly heightened tensions between the US and Ghanaian governments. During one such protest, a demonstrator tried to pull down the American flag, but an African American embassy worker intervened, clutched the flag to his chest, and then hoisted it back up the pole. In the weeks that followed, the Ghanaian press was filled with editorials warning Ghanaians to ‘Beware, Brother’! especially of ‘These American-Negro rascals’!Footnote ¹⁹ As one particularly vitriolic column warned,

Historian David Levering Lewis, the prize-winning biographer of W. E. B. DuBois, who taught European history at the University of Ghana from 1963 to 1964, recalls of those tense months, ‘African Americans were skewered as fifth columnists, black people who served the imperialist ends of their white masters while pretending to be soul brothers and sisters to Africans’.Footnote ²¹

But this was not only and simply a war of words, waged in the local newspapers. In early February, in addition to the arrests of alleged suspects and opposition political leaders, Nkrumah's Convention People's Party government orchestrated demonstrations ‘by the masses’, including onto the University of Ghana campus.Footnote ²² That same week, deportation orders were issued against a number of expatriate faculty for plotting to overthrow the government of Ghana. At least two of those deported, Robert Seidman, a senior lecturer in law, and Wendell Pierre, a lecturer in French literature, were considered by their colleagues politically progressive, staunchly anti-imperialist, and supportive of Nkrumah and his government.Footnote ²³ The deportation of Pierre hit the African American community in and around the university especially hard, although very few spoke out in Pierre's support. (The exceptions were Julian Mayfield, Leslie Lacy, and Preston King.)Footnote ²⁴ As Lacy later wrote,

But the situation for African American exiles, as Kevin Gaines has argued, was extremely precarious during this time. They could not openly critique the government and ‘many had sacrificed everything, including U.S. passports and citizenship, to come to Ghana’.Footnote ²⁶ Thus it was, in an intensely charged moment of geopolitical intrigue, which found expression in a racialized discourse of loyalty and liberation, espionage and subterfuge, that Malcolm X stepped onto the tarmac in Accra. For the African American community, as Campbell has written, news of Malcolm's arrival ‘fell like rain on parched ground, nourishing spirits and reviving hope’.Footnote ²⁷

Because it is so well-documented in a number of scholarly works,Footnote ²⁸ I will not recount in detail all the events that transpired during Malcolm X's time in Accra.Footnote ²⁹ While his visit was anticipated for several weeks by members of the African American exile community, his arrival on Sunday, May 10 came unannounced. That Monday, May 11, Malcolm X contacted Julian Mayfield and thus began his whirlwind visit. By the close of that evening, spent at the house of Mayfield and his wife, Dr. Ana Livia Cordero, a full week of activities was finalized. According to Alice Windom, that first evening was arranged as the ‘“refugee night” so that Afro-Americans would have an opportunity to meet and talk with Malcolm. People were rounded up and that night 30 or 40 of us congregated at Julian's house’. Windom, along with Maya Angelou, Victoria Garvin, Mayfield and Cordero, Robert and Sarah Lee, and Leslie Lacy quickly formed the ‘ad hoc Malcolm X Committee’.Footnote ³⁰ Again, according to Windom's account, members of the local press corps were extremely helpful in making Malcolm X's visit such a success, especially the editor in chief of the Ghanaian Times, the managing director of the Ghana News Agency, and Cameron Duodu, editor of Drum magazine (Ghana edition). On Tuesday, Malcolm held a press conference, which was extensively covered in the papers the following day. The Daily Graphic headline, for example, read: ‘Help U.S. Negroes – Malcolm X’. According to the account, Malcolm X had declared that ‘the struggle by Negroes for civil rights in the United States should be switched for a struggle for human rights to enable Africans to raise the matter at the United Nations. . . . He described the U.S. as the “master of imperialism” without whose support France, South Africa, Britain and Portugal could not exist’.Footnote ³¹ The Ghanaian Times account added that ‘The Muslim leader condemned what he described [as] the “shrewd attitude aimed at dividing Afro-Americans and their age-long brothers in Africa” and declared “The establishment of good relationship between Afro-Americans and Africans at home is bound to have far reaching results for the common good”’.Footnote ³²

The following evening, Wednesday, 13 May, Malcolm X spoke to the largest audience he would encounter in Ghana — an audience of faculty and students in the Great Hall at the University of Ghana. The event was organized by the Marxist Study Forum, a student group founded by Lacy, Harold Duggan, and Lebrecht Hesse shortly after the deportations of expatriate faculty in February.Footnote ³³ According to Malcolm X's own account of his speech: ‘Before this audience I tried my best to demolish the false image of American race relations that I knew was spread by the U.S. Information Agency. I tried to impress upon them all the true picture of the Afro-American's plight at the hands of the white man’.Footnote ³⁴ In her widely circulated ‘An Account by Sister Alice Windom of Malcolm X's Visit to Ghana in 1964’, which she wrote shortly after Malcolm X's departure from Accra, Windom reported:

Lacy would later recount in his memoir, The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro, that ‘The students loved him. They cheered and they chanted. They shouted at the top of their voices songs of praise in different Ghanaian languages’.Footnote ³⁶

The following night, Minister of Defense Kofi Baako hosted a dinner for Malcolm X and a group of government officials at his home. Plans were finalized at that gathering for Malcolm X to address the National Assembly the following morning. Unfortunately, by the time Malcolm X arrived, the Assembly had adjourned, though representatives were still in the building, so he was able to address them in the lounge. By his own account,

Malcolm X's appearance before members of the National Assembly was only the first in a series of important meetings throughout the day. After that session, he was driven to Winneba, where he made a presentation before the staff and the entire student body of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute. From there, he returned to Accra, where Chinese Ambassador Huang Hua and his wife hosted a state dinner in his honor. Other dignitaries included the Cuban and Algerian ambassadors, as well as Shirley Graham DuBois, who would be instrumental in arranging Malcolm X's meeting with Nkrumah at Christiansborg Castle the following morning. After this meeting on Saturday, May 16, Malcom X spent his last full day in Accra attending a lunch hosted in his honor by the Nigerian High Commissioner and visiting Shirley Graham DuBois at the Cantonments house she had shared with her husband, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, before his death in 1963. The final formal event on Malcolm X's schedule was another dinner, this one hosted by the Cuban ambassador. The following morning, as he would later write,

Brief though it was, Malcolm X's week in Ghana in 1964 had a profound impact on the African American exile community in Accra — an impact recounted in detail by several historians and preserved in the memoirs of some of those who were in Accra at the time. In the wake of rising anti-American sentiment following the January attempt on Nkrumah's life, ‘Malcolm's timely visit’, as Gaines has written, ‘promised to deliver African American supporters of the Ghanaian government from the suspicion of disloyalty’.Footnote ³⁹ In his memoir of 1963, Lewis makes a similar point about the timing of the visit, especially with regard to the university: ‘A fine institution's spirit was dying, and in the midst of our disorientation, Malcolm X appeared’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Malcolm X's message of racial unity and the primacy of pan-African struggle — a message he repeated in every public and private event — worked to unify and revitalize the refugee community. ‘For people living in exile’, Campbell observes,

Indeed, for the African American exile community, Malcolm X's message of international unity in the face of a common enemy — White supremacy in both its national and imperialist forms — spoke back in powerful ways to recent newspaper editorials that had warned Ghanaians not to be fooled by skin color and to be wary of the ‘negro agents of neo-colonialism’ in their midst.Footnote ⁴²

But what did Ghanaians make of Malcolm X and his message? This is, of course, a difficult question to answer; the sources are slim and fragmentary, at best. Windom's and Lacy's accounts describe elated, enthusiastic receptions at every public gathering, particularly after Malcolm X's speeches at the Great Hall and at the Winneba Institute. While there was fairly extensive press coverage of the visit and Malcolm X's accommodations at the Ambassador Hotel were paid for by the Ghanaian press corps, the published accounts are largely descriptive and give little indication of the reporters’ impressions. One exception can be found in the ‘Life is Tedious’ editorial column by Cassius Nimbus. Here Nimbus writes,

Unfortunately, beyond published newspaper accounts and the odd editorial, it is difficult to assess directly what most Ghanaians thought of Malcolm X's message. Lewis remarks on the huge crowd that assembled at the Great Hall for Malcolm X's lecture, but suggests that most Ghanaians did not receive Malcolm X's message in the same way the editorialist Nimbus had. They ‘seemed emotionally unready for the personal intensity of his professions of faith’, Lewis writes,

Yet the fact that Malcolm X was hosted by Minister of Defense Baako and was received by the National Assembly suggests that there was certainly a positive reception by some government officials, though Lacy postulates after Malcolm X's speech at Legon that the ‘CPP-ites seemed annoyed. A bloodless war with the university was over – they had lost the last round’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Unfortunately, there is, for the most part, only contradictory speculation as to what Nkrumah himself thought of Malcolm X, since no account by Nkrumah of this meeting has survived. Malcolm X wrote of it only briefly, ‘We agreed that Pan-Africanism was the key also to the problems of those of African heritage. I could feel the warm, likeable, and very down-to earth qualities of Dr. Nkrumah. My time with him was up too soon’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Several accounts, including Maya Angelou's, mention that it was far from a foregone conclusion that Nkrumah and Malcolm X would even meet. Only after Shirley Graham DuBois engaged with Malcolm X on Friday evening at the Chinese ambassador's dinner did she agree to intervene: ‘“He must meet Kwame”, she decided, and then arranged the appointment with Nkrumah for the following morning, Malcolm X's last full day in Accra’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Alice Windom wrote that she and Lacy waited an ‘interminable time’ while Malcolm X was with Nkrumah: ‘we could not ask what transpired between them, it was apparent that Malcolm was moved and gratified by the experience’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Interestingly, Lacy himself reports a much shorter meeting: ‘Malcolm went in alone and in no time at all returned. . . very elated’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and Julian Mayfield, who actually accompanied Malcolm X to Christiansborg Castle, offers a far less positive (Gaines calls it ‘cryptic’) spin on the meeting and events leading up to it. In his unpublished memoir, ‘When Ghana was Ghana: the Nkrumah era’, he writes that ‘it was only with considerable difficulty that the President was persuaded to grant Malcolm an interview . . . [and it was] extremely brief. . . . I delivered Malcolm and collected him afterwards, and I know that there was no love lost between the two men’. In part, as Mayfield writes, this may have been due to the economic difficulties Ghana was facing. ‘During Malcolm's . . . visit’, he continues,

And what of the responses of White expatriates to Malcolm X's visit, especially to his speech at the Great Hall? The written first-person accounts I have at hand come primarily from the African American exile community and from Malcom X himself. ‘“I worked on those whites there in the audience”’, he recalls, telling them,

Windom's account very much echoes Malcolm X's, though it adds that ‘many of the whites had come to be “amused”. They were in for a rude surprise and faces turned from “white” to pink to flamingo red before the night was over’.Footnote ⁵²

As a graduate student at Northwestern University in the 1980s, I heard many a story about Nkrumah and those heady days in the wake of independence from those who had been in Ghana in the 1960s as resident or visiting faculty. One story I heard several times was about Malcolm X's speech at that very packed Great Hall. These firsthand accounts, by White former expatriate scholars, were strikingly similar. They all mentioned that the space was absolutely packed, standing room only, and that the excitement of Ghanaian students was palpable as they anticipated hearing from this leader of the African American freedom struggle. However, when Malcolm X took the stage, so the account continued, the students were shocked. They were expecting a Black man, but Malcolm looked White to them. This narrative, which I heard at least three times, never spoke directly to the storyteller's own reactions to Malcolm X; rather it focused on Ghanaians and Ghanaians’ seeming inability to comprehend Malcolm X, to make sense of his appearance or his rhetoric. Malcolm X was, in other words, racially illegible or incomprehensible to most in the audience. What I suppose is also implicit in this narrative is that the storytellers recognized and understood this ‘incomprehensibility’ in ways that Malcolm X was unable to. The moral of the tale seemed to be that African American understandings and experiences of race did not translate; they were completely out of place in or out of sync with a newly postcolonial, postracial (non-racial?) Africa.

Several years ago, when I was corresponding with the famed Ghanaian novelist and journalist, Cameron Duodu, we touched on the Great Hall lecture. In 1964, Duodu was the editor of the Ghanaian edition of the South African magazine, Drum, and covered Malcolm X's visit extensively. He was also in attendance at the Great Hall lecture. Duodu questioned the veracity of the stories I had been told, pointing out, first and foremost, that for centuries there had been ‘mixed-race’ people or ‘mulattos’ in Ghana. ‘I would dispute the idea that Ghanaians in the audience regarded him as a “white man”’, he wrote. ‘Many Ghanaians went to school with ‘mulattos’ who spoke the same indigenous languages as themselves’. Moreover, Duodu recalled, ‘Malcolm had gone to great lengths to explain the complexities that he thought dogged the relations between Africans and African-Americans’.Footnote ⁵³

Interestingly, Duodu's recollection and some of the White expatriate stories of racial incomprehensibility that I was told find some corroboration in All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, where Maya Angelou recounts a particular incident during the Great Hall speech.Footnote ⁵⁴ She writes that during the question and answer portion of the event, a Ghanaian student stood up and asked, “‘Mr. Malcolm X, what I don't understand is why you call yourself Black. You look more like a White man than a Negro’”. Angelou reports that Malcolm responded, ‘“Little brother, I've been waiting for that question since I landed in Africa, and while many people thought it, you're the first person who had the nerve to ask. I commend your courage. Well let's look at it”’. What Angelou then recounts is Malcolm X's lengthy explanation of the history of slavery and the slave trade, of the rape of enslaved African women by White masters, and of the enslavement of the children born to those women. ‘“[If] Whites who should know don't claim me and Blacks who should know do claim me, I think it's clear where I belong”’, he concluded. ‘“I am a Black Man. Notice, I don't say Black American, I don't consider myself a democrat, a republican, or an American. I am a Black Muslim man of African heritage”’.

Angelou's is the only firsthand observer account, of which I am aware, that corroborates, in part, what I heard in graduate school about Ghanaian student engagement with Malcolm X in the Great Hall. While I am somewhat intrigued by the absence of similar accounts in other written sources, what I am most struck by is how differently that engagement is characterized by Angelou. She describes a patient, thoughtfully delivered American history lesson by Malcolm X, a lesson that Duodu also recalls. Not only did the accounts I heard as a graduate student not include Malcolm X's reply, they seemed to transform one student into many or all students and to thus extend racial incomprehensibility to postcolonial Ghana generally. Admittedly, these graduate school story-tellings were brief and unfolded in informal contexts. But for years they troubled me. Read alongside and against the documentary grain, especially Angelou's account, they seem aimed at conjuring up for me a postcolonial and postracial Ghana, where Whiteness and Blackness have been divested of all meaning, all power to signify, and where it was conceivable, even believable, that Malcolm X might be mistaken for White.

Yet these very different accounts, of exiles and of expatriates, do share some similar terrain, in that they tend to deploy Ghanaians to ventriloquize non-Ghanaian understandings of racial meaning: in the one instance, Ghanaians do not comprehend race; in the other they embrace Malcolm X enthusiastically and unequivocally as a brother come home.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both accounts avoid the messiness of that space where the local meets the diasporic or global. It is in that place — where things ‘intimately familiar and jarringly different’, in Pierre's words, cohere and collide, ‘where local discourse and practices that index race and raced relations resonate and are in dialogue, both with the global political economy and transnational / diasporic identity politics and formation’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Angelou's published account of the Great Hall speech thus stands as one of very few which actually complicates the encounter between local and diasporic understandings of race by detailing a critical moment of what Shohat and Stam have termed ‘race in translation’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Angelou is not, however, entirely alone. Although he does not specifically include the story of the inquiring student in the Great Hall, in ‘African responses to Malcolm X’, Lacy offers a rather sharply critical account of what may have been lost in that race translation. Speaking of his own community of exiles, Lacy wrote,

One does not have to agree with Lacy's biting and bitter analysis of the exile community to appreciate his attempt here — an attempt not unlike Angelou's — to situate Malcolm's visit in the messy interstices between the local and the diasporic. Admittedly, the point I am making here may largely be a discursive one. It doesn't really matter whether one Ghanaian student thought Malcolm looked ‘White’, all students thought Malcolm appeared ‘White’, or none did and embraced him immediately and unequivocally. But what does matter, as we try to think historically about the ways in which race talk converges, coheres, or collides across various local and transnational or diasporic registers, is that those who made Ghana their home in the early 1960s, whether as exiles or expatriates, often and vociferously debated the racial politics of liberation. Ghanaians were seldom central in or to those debates, except when invoked via a strange kind of ventriloquism.

This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the days immediately after Malcolm X left Accra. Hiram Basner, a White South African Marxist, who had been a lawyer and politician in South Africa, but fled in 1960 after time in detention, wrote a lengthy, scathing critique of Malcolm X's Great Hall speech in his weekly column in the Ghanaian Times. (David Levering Lewis describes him as ‘the white South African expatriate who served as Nkrumah's fire-and-brimstone press lord [who] supplied editorials for the Ghanaian Times that helped push the citizenry of the capital into a state of paranoid hysteria’.Footnote ⁵⁹) Here Basner criticized Malcolm X for being a narrow nationalist, who did not appreciate the ‘economic motivations and the class function of all racial oppression’. ‘If Malcolm X believes what he says’, Basner wrote, ‘then both Karl Marx and John Brown are excluded by their racial origin from being regarded as human liberators.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Foregrounding race and ‘racial conflict’ on a global scale, Basner argued, plays right into the imperialists’ hands.Footnote ⁶¹ The following day, both Julian Mayfield and Shirley Graham DuBois responded to Basner's column in what the Times called a ‘debate on the racial issue’.Footnote ⁶² The editor of the paper included a headnote, which introduced Mayfield as an ‘Afro-American writer who shares the ideas of Malcolm X’, and explained that he hoped the debate ‘would help not only the Afro-American people, but the whole black race in their struggle against racial discrimination wherever it might exist’. In his hard-hitting reply, Mayfield defended Malcolm X's position:

Mayfield then reminded readers of the central point of Malcolm X's message: ‘that the U.S. is the stronghold of world capitalism and imperialism, and that the 22 million Afro-Americans properly united with their African brothers, are in a singular position to exploit the contradiction of the capitalist system and to hasten its downfall’. Graham DuBois’ response was not as lengthy as Mayfield's, but it offered a similar critique: ‘Mr. Basner seems to ignore the fact that Malcolm X[’s] vigorous protests and denounciations are against the White Government and the White Ruling Class of the United States’.Footnote ⁶³

Basner would, in the end, have the last word in the debate, as Nkrumah and the CPP Central Committee shut down ‘the debate’ shortly after Basner published another column on 29 May 1964 entitled, ‘The Conversion of Malcolm X’. Here Basner applauded a speech Malcolm X had made upon his return to the U.S. about his experiences on the hajj and in Africa and how those experiences had convinced him that ‘some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man . . . a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Basner concluded from what he had read that Malcolm X,

In other words, Malcolm X must have finally realized, in Basner's eyes, that non-racialism was the only way forward.

* * *

By the time Malcolm X landed in Accra in May 1964, Ghana was the undisputed epicenter of what at the time was termed the ‘African Revolution’; Africa's ‘Black Star’ drew not only the attention of, but had become a magnet, a sanctuary, for a dizzying array of transnational actors and a significant site for imagining, dreaming, and debating an entirely new, non-aligned, postcolonial, and postracial world. It was a place where activists from across the globe, with their Ghanaian hosts, cooperated, colluded, and collided over how to construct a way forward toward a fully decolonial, nuclear-free, postracial world. In no way were their freedom dreams bounded by the borders of the new Ghanaian nation state. Malcolm X's presence, even for that short week, both shaped and amplified these transnational debates and exposed the deep political divisions, especially among exiles and expatriates, over race and space, decolonization and time.

In a recent contribution to Time & Society, social and political philosopher Charles W. Mills explores what he calls the ‘chronopolitics of racial time’, with chronopolitics intended to capture the relationship between one's perspective on time and the political decisions one takes.Footnote ⁶⁵ The chronopolitics of racial time, therefore, treats political decisions and political visions as products of the very different ways race is time-mapped, for example: race has existed since early antiquity vs. race first emerged in the Middle Ages vs. race is a product of modernity.Footnote ⁶⁶ I'd like to suggest, by way of conclusion, that Mills's theoretical intervention helps us make sense of the content and context of what was being debated in Accra in 1964, of the ‘race talk’ that filled the media, and to appreciate its historical significance.

‘Chronopolitical contestation by its very nature’, Mills writes, ‘is likely to encompass past, present and future’.Footnote ⁶⁷ And, indeed, the heated debates that filled the Ghanaian media in May 1964 had everything to do with pasts, presents, and futures, framed by conflicting chronopolitics. White South African communists, like Basner, viewed processes of racialization as being directly rooted in and harnessed to the historic development of capitalism. To mobilize, to organize on the basis of racial solidarity, which is what Basner considered Malcolm X's agenda to be, was ‘racialist’ in a postcolonial and therefore postracial context; it was to reify categories produced by capitalism. Liberal White expatriates, some of whom were in the audience at the Great Hall, may not have agreed with Basner that only a socialist revolution could rid the planet of capitalism (and therefore racism), but they did share his conviction that to mobilize along racial lines, in a postcolonial and therefore postracialized context was, in and of itself, to reproduce and reinforce ‘racialism’. The chronopolitics of radical Black internationalists like Julian Mayfield were informed by a completely different time map: racial time was global; the United States and Ghana co-existed on the same time map; it was simply not possible to imagine Ghana's present or its future as detached or detachable from centuries of global White supremacy and ongoing struggles against it, whether on the African continent or in the United States. And what of Ghanaians? Again, the sources are fragmentary, but clearly for some, like Cassius Nimbus or the students who filled the Great Hall, Malcolm X's visit was revelatory. As Nimbus wrote in his 1964 column, he shared his impressions in order to create ‘an aliveness to a true situation’. Malcolm X had opened new vistas for understanding the connections between battles against White supremacy in the US and battles against White supremacy, as manifested in colonialism and neocolonialism, across the African continent. He thereby introduced Ghanaians to what Mills would term a ‘new mapping that redraws both the time and space of the modern world order, and admits how crucial transcontinental racial exploitation has been to it’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Malcolm X's short week in Accra not only surfaced ‘race talk’ and chronopolitical debates about racial time through the country's newspapers, it pushed that talk, those debates much further into the public realm — on to street corners and buses, into chopbars and dinner parties, and into the classrooms and residence halls of the university. Less than a year after Malcolm X departed Accra, on 21 February 1965, he was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. And almost a year to the day after Malcolm X died, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup.Footnote ⁶⁹ Most of the exiles fled Ghana or were deported; the expatriates repatriated. Public debates about race and racial time, about pan-Africanism, the African Revolution, and the ties that bind seemed to evaporate completely.

But the seeming disappearance of race talk from the public realm, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, is not evidence that race, racialization, or the chronopolitics of racial time are without meaning, without contemporary relevance, without history. The ‘racialized time of white modernity’, as Mills terms it,Footnote ⁷⁰ can be more or less in evidence, might surface or submerge, depending upon the chronopolitics of the moment, but it never disappears. For Ghana, the ethnographic work of anthropologists like Bowles, Holsey, and Pierre, as I noted earlier, has been decisive in this regard — exposing the content and context of contemporary racialized scripts: Holsey's excavations of Black subjectivities via tours of the castles at Elmina and Cape Coast, time spent in history classrooms, and interviews with families living in the shadows of those castles; or Bowles's careful reading of the gendered and racialized language that describes the women migrants from the Sahel who work as kayayei (head porters) in Accra — language that reveals how ‘anti-Blackness is deployed in Ghana’.Footnote ⁷¹

Pierre's Predicament of Blackness is especially poignant in demonstrating the centrality of Africa to the production and articulation of contemporary postcolonial racial formations and to the intersection of diasporic and local registers. Take, for example, her discussion of the contemporary use of the term ‘obruni’ in Ghana, which can be translated as ‘foreigner’, but is most often applied specifically to Whites. The fact that it is sometimes used to reference foreign-born people of color, including Blacks from the diaspora, has, as Pierre notes, ‘led many people from outside of Ghana to make the now very popular case that Ghanaians consider diaspora Blacks to be White’.Footnote ⁷² As Pierre demonstrates, this constitutes a very superficial reading of a complicated and nuanced form of naming, which at the bottom ‘signals a thoroughly racialized discourse in Ghana… about Whiteness and the articulations of White power and privilege’.Footnote ⁷³ Its repeated deployment up to the present moment, I would add, including in the story I was told years ago of Malcolm X's momentous Great Hall speech, demonstrates the strong investment many Whites, including White scholars, have in the idea that postcolonial Africa exists outside of global currents of racial formation. Indeed, as Pierre has persuasively argued, the academic world of African Studies in the US and Europe, seems especially unwilling to ‘address the complexity of race making, particularly key distinctions between race, racialization processes, and practices of racism’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It is precisely that investment in what we might call ‘non-racial’ or postracial race talk and its implications for the production, reproduction, and sustenance of White supremacy (including in academia) that needs to be interrogated and historicized, and not only vis-à-vis Malcolm X's visit to Accra in 1964.

The challenge this recent ethnographic scholarship poses for historians of Africa is how to think historically and across local and global registers about the chronopolitics of racial time. What translates and what does not? When? Who is talking? Who is listening? Who is silent or silenced? Whose voices are amplified and why? I have sought to take on some of these questions here, through a focus on Malcolm X's brief sojourn in Accra. Over a half century later, in the wake of George Floyd's murder in the US, the demand that ‘Black Lives Matter’ resonated across the African continent, from Accra to Nairobi, from Dakar to Johannesburg. A decolonial or decolonized history-writing would urge us to think through the connections between Malcolm X's Great Hall speech in 1964 and the youth on the streets of Accra in June 2020. How might our history work actually contribute to what Mills calls an ‘oppositional racial chronopolitics, guided not by race as racism but race as a recognition of the racial structuring of the modern world and the concomitant need for corrective racial justice’?Footnote ⁷⁵