By Gamal Nkrumah The end, to be sure, was a long time coming for Kwame Ture. He had long been a thorn in the flesh of anti-democratic forces in the United States. An outspoken critic of the American political establishment, foreign policy, capitalism and Zionism, Ture was the last of a dying breed. A Pan-Africanist who hoped to see a single, socialist state embracing the whole continent, Ture stood for global social justice. He championed the Palestinian cause, which earned him the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League, B'nai B'rith. In 1967, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro warned, "If imperialism touches a single hair on his [Kwame Ture's] head, we shall not let it pass without retaliation." There were many who wanted to see him consigned to history. Indeed, in 1967 he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. "We are revolutionaries," he said afterwards. "We are aware of the fact that death walks hand in hand with struggle." Former Black Panther turned Chicago Democratic Party Congressman Bobby Rush put it in a nutshell: "He's probably the last prominent Pan-Africanist who is philosophically pure. He has not compromised with the forces of capitalism." Still, to many, Ture's brand of scientific socialism, coupled with African unity, seemed an absurd anachronism. In June 1966, Ture coined the "Black Power" cry three weeks before his 25th birthday at a freedom march in Mississippi. Challenging white authority in the American Deep South in the sixties was no joke. Yet the mood was hopeful, notwithstanding many hard choices that had to be made. Ture stood for the empowerment of the black, poor and politically marginalised: "We want control of the institutions of the communities where we live and we want to stop the exploitation of non-white people around the world." By the time of his graduation in 1964, Ture had registered 4,000 black voters in Alabama's notorious Lowndes County, once a bastion of white supremacist terror. "When people saw this, they had to recognise this was a new kind of force," remarked political scientist and Columbia University professor Charles Hamilton. Ture co-authored Black Power, published in 1967, with Hamilton. In the book, the authors describe Black Power as "a call for black people to begin to define their goals, to lead their own organisations ... to resist the racist institutions and values of this society". "In the 1960s, we said, 'Hell no, we won't go' to Vietnam, to fight against a people who never called us a nigger, and we didn't go. We said that they would defeat US imperialism, and the heroic Vietnamese People, under the sterling example and leadership of Ho Chi Minh, did. Today, we say 'Hell yes, we are going to Libya.' We are traveling nonstop, all the way, from Conakry to Tripoli, and we warn the US government not to interfere." It is tragic that Ture never, in fact, made it to Tripoli. "All Africans in the US know anytime imperialism is hunting an African Revolutionary, if they make it to Cuba, as in baseball, they are home safe. From Robert Williams to Assata Shakur, Cuba has paid a heavy price as a haven for revolutionaries [from] throughout the world. We also know, first hand, Libya's contributions to and protection of African and other revolutionaries worldwide." Flouting the American-led sanctions against Libya, Gaddafi sent a hospital plane to take Ture to Tripoli for treatment. But the plane arrived in the Guinean capital Conakry a couple of hours too late. Ture was dead, but not before he had declared his gratitude to the Jamahiriya and to "Brother Muammar" Gaddafi, who had footed much of the penniless invalid's hospital bills. To the very end, Ture refused to blink in his showdown with what he believed to be American imperialism. He stood for what he described as the "African and World Revolution, and the masses of African and other oppressed peoples worldwide". By the eighties, many thought Ture a spent force. As the nineties wound on, he was forced to fight from his sickbed. Physically, he was a mere ghost of his former self. Yet in the nineties, he could still use the language of the sixties and make it sound as true as ever. Towards the end, no doubt sensing that his days were numbered, his antiquated turn of phrase was heartbreaking in its dogged determination to be heard and understood. Kwame Ture, who took his name from the African leaders Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, was convinced that his sickness was an "FBI-induced cancer, the latest in the white man's arsenal of chemical and biological warfare". He said so in his final statement, entitled Hell Yes, We are Going to Libya: A Declaration to Africa and the World, dated 5 November 1998. No matter how you spin it, his blatant flouting of the American-imposed travel ban on Cuba and Libya was a setback for the Clinton administration's plan to tweak Africa Washington's way. And Ture was no stranger to Libya. His first glimpse of Africa, after all, was Tripoli in 1967. Born Stokely Carmichael in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Kwame Ture was raised in America and died in his adopted home of Guinea, where he had chosen to live out his last days in the beautiful mountain resort of Dalaba. It was in Guinea, at the funeral of my father in 1972, that I first met him. I was a rather impressionable 12-year-old, and Carmichael and his then wife, the beautiful Miriam Makeba -- the Umm Kulthum of the South African townships -- made a most colourful couple. "No, he is not dead, he only sleeps," Ture told us. He knew perfectly well that Nkrumah was dead, but he didn't want to believe it. It seemed almost as much of a shock to him as it was to us, his immediate family. "In 1967, Presidents Ahmed Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, through the intercession of Shirley Graham DuBois, invited me to attend the 8th Congress of the Democratic Party of Guinea (RDA). They invited me to live, work, study and struggle here in Guinea, an invitation which I readily accepted, despite tremendous criticism from almost every quarter. Thirty years later, I still live in Guinea, working, studying and struggling for the African Revolution. And I will continue to do so until the last second, of the last minute, of the last hour, of the last day. And it is my wish to sleep here in Guinea, eternally." Distant rumbles of thunder, flashes of lightening, and through it all the eternal beauty of the land. The slate-grey overcast was steadily darkening. Small wonder Ture chose the mountains of the Futa Djallon as his final resting place. For such a romantic revolutionary there could hardly have been a more breathtakingly beautiful setting in which to die. Mountain peaks, rolling hills and deep valleys, lush meadows, home to the handsome Fulani people and their cattle. Ture was something of a folk hero. People of the sixties still tell their children about how Ture could execute a smooth U-turn at 90 miles per hour on a Mississippi road to evade a car-full of racist pursuers with rifles. "Let me remind you, it is Mr Stokely Carmichael," Ture once angrily corrected three Delta policemen who stopped his car, addressing him as "nigger" and "boy". He was promptly carted off to jail. Arrested over 30 times by his own admission, chased, beaten, and often under close surveillance, the former "prime minister" of the Black Panthers loved to reminisce about those days. I last saw Ture in Cairo last year, at the home of a mutual friend. He was on his way to South Africa. "Those were great times to be a revolutionary. These aren't," he chuckled. He talked non-stop for two hours. Then, suddenly his face twisted into a rictus of pain. His voice trailed off and we bid him farewell as he began to doze off. He let his chin drop on his emaciated chest, and the weariness of his slow movement bespoke a great pain. I never saw him again. Ture was loud. In a rush of rage at the Seventh Pan-African Congress of April 1994 in Kampala, he severely criticised fellow delegates for being slack about African unity. In his wild agitation, he personally insulted some of those present, making himself many enemies. "He's mad," I told a friend, in a hoarse whisper, but not without admiration. One of his most endearing traits was that he was always ready to concede a mistake. "I have made many errors," he would often say towards the end of his life. Another endearing characteristic was his loyalty to his friends. "In 1966, when I had just been elected Chairperson of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, my first official act was to visit the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. It is then that he ordered all members of the Fruit of Islam to protect me wherever I traveled, anywhere in the world. I am still under that umbrella of protection today, here in Africa, in Guinea. I could never be ungrateful to the Nation of Islam, to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, nor to his incarnation -- Minister Louis Farrakhan." He also remained an optimist to the very end. "It is impossible for anyone seriously following or participating in the struggle not to understand that victory is inevitable," he told me a year ago. "As children, we joined the Freedom Rides to break the back of segregation and apartheid in interstate transportation in the US. Today, we ride on the front of the bus, we charter buses to take one million men, women and children to marches in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta. And we will never turn back." He died a member of the Central Committee of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and the Democratic Party of Guinea. Twice married and divorced, Ture is survived by a teenage son Bokar, whose mother Guinean physician Marlyatou Barry, ironically now resides in America.
