James Farmer arrived in Africa on January 7, 1965, and stayed five weeks, visiting nine countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Southern Rhodesia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Congo, and Ghana. His personal reputation, combined with the good offices of AMSAC, ensured him access to an extraordinary range of African leaders. As he recalled in his memoirs,
I saw the heads of state of practically every country: Julius Nyerere and two vice-presidents, Karume and Kawawa, in Tanzania; President Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia; President Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya; His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia; President Nnamde Azikiwe in Nigeria; Moise Tshombe and Joseph Kasavubu in the Congo; President Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. In every country I met with cabinet ministers, members of parliament, and university students. I lectured at universities in several countries and spoke at meetings sponsored by social and civic organizations. And I met with trade unionists.94
Farmer returned to the United States very pleased with the tour, reckoning that he had been able to view Africa with greater objectivity than had been possible on his previous trip and had therefore performed his role as a representative of black Americans all the more effectively. This positive assessment was shared by official America. “From [a] public relations point [of] view [the tour was a] great success,” the U.S. embassy in Lusaka reported to Washington. “Farmer attracted favorable comment from almost everyone who met him.”95 AMSAC too was delighted with the fruits of its patronage, Baker describing the tour as “easily the most significant happening in the last five or six years insofar as relations between Africans and American Negroes are concerned.”96 Farmer was the “perfect speaker for the forensic-minded African,” AMSAC’s man in Lagos explained to Raullerson, echoing earlier comments by Richard Wright about the need for a “rational” approach to a continent still supposedly mired in tribal superstition.97
Not everything about the trip went according to plan, however. To
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start with, U.S. diplomats in Africa displayed a “heavy hand” at a number of Farmer’s public engagements, stirring suspicions that his tour was in fact officially sponsored. “In Dar [Es Salaam] and Addis [Ababa], I was aggressively asked [about official sponsorship],” Baker told Raullerson, “the in-terrogator stating that he received his information from persons in the respective Embassies.”98 According to Bill Sutherland, an old colleague and friend of Farmer’s who provided an important point of private contact and support during his time in Africa, the source of such rumors was a Tanzania–based official named Barney Coleman, who “was using this as a wedge to get more credit and involvement for the Embassy in Dar.” The effect of Coleman’s machinations was disastrous. As well as jeopardizing Sutherland’s own relationship with the Tanzanian government, they caused the cancellation of a potentially momentous meeting between Farmer and the African Liberation Committee and cast “an air of suspicion” over the whole tour. From now on, AMSAC officials decided, they would have to watch “the eagerness of the Embassy to get in on a free ride.”99
In addition to this crossing of wires between the overt and covert agencies of U.S. diplomacy, AMSAC faced another potential problem: Farmer’s tendency to criticize American foreign policy. One complaint voiced several times by the civil rights leader, concerning the lack of African American representation in the nation’s foreign service, was predictable enough; AMSAC itself had made it on a number of occasions.100
Harder to handle were Farmer’s frequent and unequivocal condemnations of U.S. policy in South Africa, the Portuguese colonies, and especially the Congo.101 These remarks were usually made within a Cold War frame of reference: if American officials continued to support repressive regimes in these regions, they would not only drive Africans “into the arms of Peking and the Soviets,” Farmer claimed, they would also help forge a domestic alliance between white communists and black nationalists. Still, there came a point when such comments ceased being supportive of the wider American Cold War effort and became merely embarrassing, as when Farmer described sharing a ride on a U.S. transport plane in the Congo with “a sleazy bunch” of white mercenaries, “every one with a pistol on his hip,” who were only able to carry out their campaigns of “nigger-killing”
because of “the support we gave them.”102 As has been seen in earlier chapters, covert CIA sponsorship of individual American citizens had its share of unintended consequences, and this incident, which clearly deep-
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ened Farmer’s alienation from aspects of U.S. African policy and increased his militancy as a civil rights leader, must surely be counted as one of them.