The IRD also prepared and distributed an article about Black Power leaders targeting Trinidad. The IRD was particularly worried by the movement’s potential influence in the Caribbean. It came amid rising concern in Whitehall about the Black Power movement elsewhere in the world too. The smear operation against Carmichael received enthusiastic endorsement from officials within the IRD and elsewhere in the British government, including in the Foreign Office west African department. “We are capable of formulating our own plans for our part in the struggle for equal rights and freedom for the Black man everywhere … and when we are launching ‘Black Power’ it will be our own brand ‘African Power’ and not the African American brainchild Stokely is trying to impose on us,” the fake statement read. It also claimed Carmichael was a “burning zealot”, who seemed to imagine Africans as “savages” and compared him unfavourably with other radical activists who had recently arrived on the continent from the US such as Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, who was living in Algeria. Instead, the unit sought to portray its target as a traitor to other Black Power activists with a patronising attitude to African peoples.īy coming to Africa, Carmichael had “deserted the cause” in the US “which needs him more than we do” and had been arrogant in preaching Black Power to a continent “where it already truly belongs”, the pamphlet said. The IRD’s effort did not attack Carmichael as a pro-Soviet or communist stooge, a hitherto frequent line of attack. “Enough is enough – why Stokely must go! – and do his thing elsewhere,” read the pamphlet, alleging Carmichael was “weaving a bloody trail of chaos in the name of Pan-Africanism” and was controlled by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and former president of Ghana who had been deposed in a coup in 1966.Ĭarmichael attends a non-violent student protest in Alabama in June 1967. The documents show the IRD created a fake west African organisation called The Black Power – Africa’s Heritage Group, which produced a pamphlet calling Carmichael an “unbidden prophet from America” who had no place on the continent. The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent.īased mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials.

Photograph: © Horace Ové/Courtesy Horace Ové Archives Carmichael gives a Black Power speech at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London in 1967.

Stokely carmichael mfah