In the spring of 1964, only weeks after completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X, now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, set out on a transformative journey across Africa and the Middle East. His purpose was larger than diplomacy or religion. He wanted to connect the struggles of African Americans to the broader liberation movements sweeping across the African continent.
Nigeria, then just four years into independence, was a focal point for post-colonial energy and Pan-African thought. For Malcolm X, it represented the living proof of a new Black sovereignty. He arrived there in early May 1964, coming from Egypt and Sudan before continuing to Ghana and beyond. The Nigerian leg of his trip would mark one of the most memorable moments of his life: an encounter that gave him a new name and a renewed sense of belonging.
The Naming at Ibadan
Malcolm X’s most documented stop in Nigeria was at the University of Ibadan, where he was invited to speak before students and faculty. The young audience, eager and politically awake, saw in him a symbol of the wider African struggle against oppression.
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During this visit, members of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria honored him with a Yoruba name, “Omowále,” meaning “the child has come home.” The moment captured the essence of what Pan-African unity meant: not just political alignment, but a spiritual reunion between Africans and the descendants of the enslaved who had been taken across the Atlantic centuries earlier.
Malcolm X himself confirmed this in his correspondence. In a letter written from Lagos shortly after the visit, he described the warmth of the Ibadan crowd and their renaming ceremony. When he later spoke at the University of Ghana, he proudly told the audience that “students at Ibadan gave me a new name, Omowale, which means, ‘the child has returned.’”
The naming resonated deeply with him. For years he had spoken about the dislocation of African Americans—the loss of language, heritage, and roots. In that moment, standing on Nigerian soil, he was no longer an exile. Africa had welcomed him back by name.
Faith and Pan-African Vision
Fresh from the spiritual clarity of his pilgrimage, Malcolm X’s Nigerian speeches intertwined faith with freedom. He spoke not as a nationalist alone, but as a man who had seen Islam practiced across color lines and who believed that moral renewal could unite the oppressed.
In Ibadan, he urged students to embrace education as a weapon of truth. He emphasized that the struggle for civil rights in America was part of a global human-rights battle. His words reflected a shift in his worldview; he was now speaking not just for African Americans but for people of African descent everywhere.
Nigerian students, many of whom had grown up amid the final years of British rule, recognized the shared urgency in his voice. Reports from those present recall an electric atmosphere, where every sentence drew applause. For them, Malcolm was proof that the diaspora’s fire for justice had not been extinguished; it had merely crossed oceans.
Meeting Isa Wali in Accra
After Nigeria, Malcolm X flew to Ghana. There he met Alhaji Isa Wali, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Ghana. Their meeting, captured in a photograph by Alice Windom, remains one of the clearest visual records of his first African tour. In the image, Malcolm stands beside Wali and other diplomats, holding a Qur’an that Wali had gifted him.
The exchange was more than ceremonial. Wali, a respected Muslim intellectual and diplomat, represented the emerging African leadership Malcolm admired—educated, faith-driven, and uncompromising in the pursuit of dignity. Though later retellings sometimes misplaced this meeting in Nigeria, archival evidence confirms it took place in Accra in May 1964.
This encounter reinforced Malcolm X’s belief that the future of Black freedom was inseparable from Africa’s destiny. The Qur’an he received became a symbol of his journey’s spiritual and political convergence.
Return to New York and the Birth of the OAAU
By June 1964, Malcolm X had returned to the United States, profoundly changed. In his letters, he wrote of the confidence and consciousness he witnessed among African youth, particularly in Nigeria. Their sense of history and independence inspired him to organize African Americans around a similar international vision.
That summer, he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a body modeled after the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which had recently been established in Addis Ababa. Through it, he sought to link the African diaspora’s struggles with those of newly independent African nations. The “Omowále” experience at Ibadan became a cornerstone of that mission: a reminder that African Americans’ liberation was not a domestic question but a global one.
Legacy of “Omowále”
More than six decades later, the story of Malcolm X’s Nigerian visit endures as a symbol of homecoming and reconnection. The name “Omowále” has since become part of his legend, appearing in plays, poems, and Pan-African commemorations across the world.
For many, it captures the spiritual reversal of the transatlantic slave trade: a single word restoring centuries of severed identity. In it lies a profound truth, that the struggle for Black freedom, whether fought in Harlem or Ibadan, is one and the same.
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Author’s Note
Malcolm X left Nigeria with a new name, a renewed faith, and a vision that transcended borders. His journey through Ibadan and Accra was not only a diplomatic passage but a homecoming written in history.
References
The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X and Alex Haley (Grove Press, 1965)
The Malcolm X Papers – Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
Letters from Abroad – Malcolm X (1964)
Malcolm X: Speech at the University of Ghana, May 13, 1964 – University Archives Collection
Africa Today, Vol. 39 No. 2 (1992): “Malcolm X in Nigeria” by Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah
Alice Windom Photograph Collection, Accra, May 1964
African Voices of the Diaspora – University of Illinois Press, 1993
