BOOKS-GERMANY: Louis Farrakhan’s Story

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Jan 14 1997 (IPS) - German journalist Hans Hielscher was correspondent in the United States for the German news magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ when the ‘One Million Man March’ occurred in Washington DC on Oct 16, 1995. The mammoth event pulled hundreds of thousands of black men. Their leader was the black nationalist Louis Farrakhan.

What inspired the march? Who really was Farrakhan? How did he achieve such influence? Hielscher attempts to answer some of these questions in his book ‘Gott ist zornig, Amerika’ (‘God is angry, America’.

Published by Dietz, a small German publishing firm, the book narrates and analyses Louis Farrakhan’s rise from relatively humble origins into an internationally known figure.

Born in the Caribbean in 1933 as Louis Eugene Walcott, his life could have taken a different course early on. Forty years ago, Farrakhan was a gifted violin player and sang on a church choir. He received A’s in the Boston public school. Julliard School in New York beckoned: Farrakhan should have gone there to study music.

But he was a star on the track team and decided instead to run track at the all-black Winston-Salem Teachers’ College in North Carolina. He dropped out of college to marry and became a calypso performer. In the 1950s Farrakhan came in contact with the Nation of Islam and rose to become its uncontested leader.

The Million Man March took place 32 years after Washington witnessed another famous event led by civil rights leader Martin Luther King who began his historic speech with “I have a dream”.

Back then, some 250,000 people — blacks and whites, Christians, Jews and Muslims — joined the 1963 march to protest against racial segregation in the United States. They sang the civil rights anthem “We shall overcome” and listened to King extol the virtues of racial equality.

At the Farrakhan-led Million Man March only blacks were present. They sang the chanson “A White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell”. And unlike Martin Luther King, Farrakhan does not dream of “a society that is blind to colours”, says Hielscher. His vision is of an America of two nations “separate but equal”.

But Black America, as Farrakhan assured Hielscher in interviews, is not the America of black Machos with no place whatsoever for women in the society. On the contrary, black women had proved their mettle far better in the highly competitive U.S. society than their male counterparts.

Farrakhan, says Hielscher, has statistics very much on his side: at U.S. universities, Afro-American women, who make up some 12 percent of female population, comprise 11.1 percent of the women enrolled. Afro-Amrican men comprise only 8.5 percent of males at universities.

Afro-American men however top the ‘negative’ statistic: nearly half a million of them are estimated to find themselves behind bars. There are 30,000 black American women in jail.

Indeed the ‘Der Spiegel’ journalist, who has solid knowledge of Africa, provides an insight into the psyche of a controversial Afro- American who continues to draw public focus for his contacts with the leaders of Iran and Libya, whom Washington wants to seen internationally isolated.

Farrakhan, says Hielscher, is a man of contradictions. “He hates the white man’s world and yet he does not love anything more deeply than the works of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Mozart and Beethoven.”

When Dietz brought out Hielscher’s ‘Gott ist zornig, Amerika’ as a pocket book in the first half of last year, no biography of Louis Farrakhan was available, not even in the United States.

Later Basic Books of New York published Arthur J. Magida’s 264- page ‘Prophet of Rage’, billing it as the “first ever biography of Louis Farrakhan”. That book focussed heavily on the Nation of Islam leader’s alleged anti-semitism which let to conflicts with Jews and Jewish organisations.

On the other hand, Hielscher has been criticised for paying too little attention to Farrakhan’s anti-semitism.

Nevertheless, wrote a reviewer in the conservative daily newspaper ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ (FAZ), “Hielscher’s story of the ‘Black Muslims’ in the United States and its representatives is also a socially critical narration of the state of affairs in the American society”.

The reviewer added: “What began as a cultural melting pot has turned into a multi-cultural nightmare. This book (‘Gott ist zornig’) should be taken as a first, useful introduction to the story and the world of ideas of the Black Muslims who have made Farrakhan their symbolic figure.”

And in the weekly ‘Die Zeit’, reviewer Friemut Duve criticised Hielscher for what he said was a rather general treatment of “black anti-semitism”.

But Duve, a social democratic member of the federal parliament ‘Bundestag’ and a human rights activist, praised the author for having provided a portrait of Farrakhan “not available in the U.S. either”.

He praised the author for reflecting the full range of sometimes contradictory and conflicting ideals — “entlightement and anti- enlightenment, of political discipline and racist segregation” — not available until the publication of Hielscher’s book.

In the fortnightly magazine ‘Entwicklungspolitik’, which focusses on developmental issues, the reviewer praises Hielscher for using research and personal contacts to give “a differentiated portrait” of a man whose “ideology of the superiority of the Black is so crude that one would do well in ignoring it”.