The Nation of Islam leader spoke during his vist to South Africa this week of creating a homeland for more than a million black American convicts, report Vuyo Mvoko and David Beresford
Louis Farrakhan, the Black American firebrand who is trying to fill the shoes of Martin Luther King, has dreamed an extraordinary dream — of creating a black American `homeland’ in Africa. But, like South Africa’s volkstaters, it appears that he does not know were to put it. The controversial and charismatic leader of the Nation of Islam disclosed during his South African tour that he is hunting for land in Africa to build a new Utopia, with the help of more than a million black American convicts. But attempts to pin him down on the whereabouts of his dream country proved almost as frustrating as getting Constand Viljoen and his followers to define the borders of their volkstaat. When the Mail & Guardian finally penetrated Farrakhan’s heavy security to put the question to him this week, he took refuge in Genesis: `As we read from the Bible. In the beginning was the word, and the word became flesh,’ he said. `We still have to turn those words into flesh.’ Confusion about Farrakhan’s go-it-alone plans for Afro-Americans started before he even reached South Africa. In Libya, he apparently told Colonel Muammar Gaddafi that his dream was of a black `volkstaat’ in the United States itself. After the two men had met, the official Libyan news agency, Jana, quoted Gaddafi — who has pledged one billion dollars to fund a minorities’ lobby in the US headed by the Nation of Islam — as saying blacks would now be able to establish `a black state in America’. He said that, with the help of `half a million blacks in the US army’, they would be able `to set up the biggest black army on the planet’. But by the time he reached Johannesburg, Farrakhan’s dream of an Afro-American state had switched its focus to the dark continent. `We have asked for territory to be set aside in Africa,’ he told a press conference shortly after his arrival. `We were taken from Africa and brought to America and were really never asked if we wanted to be citizens. So if there was no vote taken, we have a right to Africa. This was our motherland.’ Declaring that the US, as well as Australia, had been built by convicts, he said: `Over a million blacks are in prison [in America] right now with no future. We are saying give us a chance to teach them, qualify them, reform them and let them work out their time building a new reality …’ Asked whether he was advocating segregation, he said: `Segregation is a forced separation, imposed by a superior on an inferior … when two people are in disagreement in a marriage, they should try first to reconcile. When their differences are irreconcilable, the judge then will grant the petitioner a decree of divorce.’