Destroy This Temple: A 1967 Interview with Obi Egbuna, Sr.
Interview with Nigerian novelist, playwright and revolutionary Obi Egbuna (1938-2014), president of the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA), by British Member of Parliament David Ennals (Labor-Dover; 0:21), parliamentary under secretary of state, Home Office, with special responsibility for immigration policy and race relations, London, England, Dec. 7, 1967.
BLACK POWER
For a brief, but significant, moment, UPCA was the leading group in Britain's self-determinationist Black Power Movement, which was inspired by and partly modeled after the U. S. Black Power movement, including the latter's use of the term "Uncle Tom" (0:31) to describe accommodationist "black" people and its advocates' use of sunglasses.
Egbuna elaborated his political evolution in "Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in England" (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971).
PAN-AFRICAN CONTACTS AND WORK
Egbuna heard and was deeply influenced by Malcolm X, the African American Muslim and black nationalist leader, when the latter keynoted the first congress of the pan-Africanist Council of African Organisations (CAO) at its headquarters at Africa Unity House, 3 Collingham Gardens, Earls Court, London, on Feb. 8, 1965. Egbuna was a CAO member and edited its newsletter, "United Africa" ("Destroy This Temple," p. 18).
He also attended an unreported discussion that Malcolm X had with Caribbean students at the West Indian Students Centre (WISC) at 1 Collingham Gardens, two doors from CAO. (Three years later, writer James Baldwin and comedian-activist Dick Gregory would hold a similar discussion at WISC, famously memorialized in filmmaker Horace Ové's classic "Baldwin's Nigger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v5sfTgKCe8 [excerpt]).
Ebguna, as a budding revolutionary, carefully memorialized his impressions of Malcolm X, who he considered "ultra-militant" ("Destroy This Temple," p. 39), in his coded diary. Later, he recalled that, when he first caught sight of the fair-skinned modern avatar of global "black" consciousness at WISC, "I thought he was a white man." Malcolm X was assassinated shortly afterward, on Feb. 21.
Egbuna was similarly inspired by the July 1967 London visit of the Trinidad-born American Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, the chief popularizer of Black Power, which gave this modern iteration of black nationalism "a foothold in Britain" (ibid., pp. 16, 18).
Egbuna was photographed and filmed with Ture at the historic "Dialectics of Liberation" congress at the London's famous Roundhouse in Chalk Farm Road on July 18 (Egbuna is at right; British Black Power leader Michael Abdul Malik, popularly known as Michael X, is second from right):
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Egbuna, like Ture, later became a close confident of and aide to Osagyefo ("Redeemer") Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the deposed pan-Africanist president of Ghana and the co-president of Guinea (Conakry). (Their discussions and plans were also recorded in his coded diary.)
Egbuna played an important, but often unheralded, role in developing the ideology, strategies and tactics of Black Power, pan-Africanism and Third Worldism in the fight against racialism (the British term for racism) and monopoly capitalism around the world.
BLACK PANTHER SYMBOL
During the interview, Egbuna is shown wearing UPCA's button (0:54), which featured an exact reproduction of the symbol of the Lowndes County (Ala.) Freedom Organization.
This independent, all-"black" political party was co-founded by Ture when he was a field secretary (later chairman) for the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and popularly known as the Black Panther party:
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A version of this symbol was later popularized by the Oakland, Calif.-based party of the same name, co-founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale.
CHAIRMAN MAO
Egbuna is also wearing a five-star gold pin featuring the likeness of Mao Zedong (0:54), the founder of the People's Republic of China and the chairman of the Communist Party of China, who was then seen by many as a leader of the anti-colonial and Third World liberation movements.
DEDICATION: To Obi Egbuna, Sr., mentor, guide, example and big brother. I'm sorry that I didn't fully thank you when I should have for the enormous role that you played in keeping a very green young scholar from falling off the edge of the earth and helping to set me, I pray, on the path of doing what you used to call "serious work," which will aide our people's liberation fight.
I hope that you knew that, without you, I couldn't, and wouldn't, be me. -- PL.