The Caribbean Review of Books (New vol. 1, no. 19, February 2009)

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009
Malik, born in 1933, grew up in the Port of Spain suburb
of Belmont as Michael de Freitas, “Red Mike.”
His mother was a black Barbadian, obsessed with
colour: white was good, black was bad. His father was a
white (or whitish) “Portuguese” who absconded before
Michael even knew him. His mother remarried, but his stepfather
saw him as simply a “red bastard.” He lived mostly
with relatives, eight people crammed into three rooms. In
due course he dropped out of school and went to sea, winding
up in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and later, in 1957, London’s
Notting Hill.
By that time, London had been absorbing black immigrants
for a decade and was in a panic. Jobs and accommodation
were hard to get. The unhinged Conservative politician
Enoch Powell was having visions of blood flowing like a
river. The “Notting Hill riots” were just ahead. The sadness,
laughter, and frustration of the West Indian community was
captured in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, published the
previous year.
The (white) English journalist Colin MacInnes remembers
Michael as
short, stocky, soft-voiced, eloquent, crafty, and seductive;
and also, one suspects, capable of violence and duplicity.
He is highly intelligent and, when speaking off the record,
lucid and sardonic . . . however mixed his motives may be,
however ambitious and potentially unscrupulous, he is a
creative man of undoubted personality, will, and ultimate
seriousness.
John Williams calls Michael a “born hustler.” He was into
scams of various sorts, small-time pimping, gambling, drugs,
worthy-sounding charities which never materialised. He
could play the tough gangster, or he could be gentle, charming,
and sociable (though one of Williams’s interviewees says
“I wouldn’t like to have been on the receiving end of any bad
shit from him”).
As the years went by, Michael extended his repertoire,
bouncing from one role to another: small-time crook, community
leader, party-lover, enforcer, idealist, pragmatist, playboy,
national Black Power celebrity. He transformed himself into
Michael X after meeting Malcolm X in London, and into Michael
Abdul Malik when he converted to Islam soon after. He
became an expert in extracting funds from the wealthy, especially
“white liberals” sympathetic to the cause of the month
or buying remission for ancestral sins. He became a celebrity.
John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Muhammad Ali, Dick Gregory, and
Malcolm X all spent time with him.
There was an eagerness among the new wave of black Britons
for some kind of political organisation, and there was an even
greater eagerness among the British media to identify a black
figurehead to feature in news stories about the race problem.
Michael’s visibility, backed up by his existing reputation in
the ghetto, began to push him to the fore. The newspapers
came back for more lively — if factually dubious — quotes,
and gradually more serious political figures began to get in
touch with Michael to discuss this new movement of his.
Michael spent more than thirteen years in London, including
a couple of jail sentences and another stint as a seaman.
“No one would condone the violence that he became
involved in at the end of his life,” Williams writes, “but [in
London] there was . . . a sense that here was a life full of potential
that had become twisted up.” Michael wasn’t just “bad
or fraudulent or [an] insincere Black Power leader”: he was
“shoehorned” into “ghetto rackets,” and later into pretending
to be a Black Power leader, because English racism left
him no choice.
Of the many people Williams interviewed for this book,
those who had been in serious politics in the 1950s and 60s
had no time for Michael, because he “used Black Power
politics as a hustle, a way of making money.” But more artistic
types, especially as the “counterculture” of the late 60s
warmed up, saw Michael quite differently: the driving force
of the movement was fun and play, as Williams observes, and
Michael, with his constant image-changing, wildly chasing
new ideas, was accepted as part of the scene.
In this spirit, Williams takes seriously the more respectable
projects Michael was involved in: a community school, a legal
assistance programme, development of the Notting Hill Carnival,
rent reduction. He understands why Michael would
have worked with the legendary slum landlord Peter Rachman,
another English hate-figure. Rachman too
was an immigrant survivor,
traumatised by
experiences
in the Second
Michael de Freitas transformed himself into
Michael X after meeting Malcolm X in London,
and into Michael Abdul Malik when he converted to
Islam soon after. He became an expert in extracting
funds from “white liberals”
7