Reflections on the Journey to Truth - Malcolm X, Walter Rodney, & Cheikh Amadou Kane

One of the great blessings of my life is that I was guided by the vision of Malcolm X and his belief that we could change the world through a lifelong commitment in the fight for truth and justice. His struggle for racial justice and work for transnational solidarity, his life as a Muslim, and his life as a media theorist impacted me in ways I didn’t fully understand until many years later. I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 20 years old, and within 2 years I was a Muslim. Three years after I read it I became an Ethnic Studies major in College. Within four years I was working in PR and media production, and beginning to think about how to shift narratives. Six years after reading Malcolm I was living in Ghana, studying the history of enslavement in West Africa as I wrote a report on corporate mining colonization by Newmont Mining, a company from my hometown, Denver, Colorado.

While I was living in Ghana, the true blessing of West Africa and its people allowed me to reflect on my life as a White American in ways I couldn’t have without leaving the country. I also read two of my all-time favorite books that semester I lived in Cape Coast, Walter Rodney’s classic book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Amadou Kane. Taken together these books represent the materialist and metaphysical critiques necessary in understanding the world we inhabit today.