IT isn't always easy going home, as the Rev Louis Farrakhan discovered this week. Touring Africa to drum up support for his vision of black, Arab, and Muslim unity against white oppression, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam nearly blew the highlight of his trip when he twice stood up President Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
When the meeting eventually went ahead at noon on Sunday, many of the press who had waited for hours, even days outside Mr Mandela's Johannesburg home, had given up and gone for coffee. At a press conference later, Mr Farrakhan was at pains to explain the delay to the journalists present and to his chanting local Muslim supporters.
"As you know, we've embarked on a world friendship tour, coming out of the success of the Million Man March," he said, referring to the Washington march last October. "This is the 12th day and the ninth country. When we reached Zaire the pilots [of his chartered aircraft] informed us that they needed a 24 hour period of rest and that they could not go any further without that rest. That 24 hour period of rest would have caused us to miss all of yesterday's [Saturday's] programme.
"President Mobuto [of Zaire] was kind enough to otter us one of the commercial planes that would fly us here in order to make the proper time. We were at the airport yesterday for nearly five hours waiting for the plane and there were so many problems coming up that we never saw the plane," Mr Farrakhan said.
It was 7 p.m. and nearly dark before the party decided it might as well wait until morning, when its own aircraft would be ready. Throughout this period Mr Farrakhan's aides were unable to find a telephone they could use to contact their organisers in South Africa, or indeed the waiting President Mandela. "The phones in other parts of Africa are certainly not like they are in South Africa," Mr Farrakhan remarked.
"We got to the airport I think around 2.15 or so this morning. The pilots and crew left ahead of us and the car that was to take them did not show up, so they had to hire taxis, and the two taxis had flat tires on the way to the airport. When the delegates turned up they could not get on the plane, because it was not cleaned and ready."
Mr Farrakhan was eventually allowed to board the plane where he fell asleep - and woke up still on the ground.
"There was a problem that morning with filling the plane with fuel. There were clouds over Johannesburg so we needed more fuel to circle. We had to pay that in cash, and there must be some sort of counterfeit problem going on here because they had to check all the money.
They had timed their flight so they could easily make a 9.30 appointment with Mr Mandela, he said, but they did not get off the ground until 6.30 a.m.
Despite his reputation as a racist firebrand, Mr Farrakhan spoke calmly, illustrating his talk with the kind of downhome parables so beloved of American politicians. And yet, apart from the tone, it was hard for journalists present to differentiate Mr Farrakhan's detailed "explanation" from the familiar strains of the old African colonial rant.
In general, the white media has questioned Mr Mandela's decision to meet Mr Farrakhan, whose supporters have in the past called for the extermination of whites and Jews. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for one, politely declined to meet him, saying he did not have time.
Not surprisingly, South African blacks are more inclined to take an indulgent view of the man who, following his Million Man March last year, now seems to lead black America in its struggle for empowerment. The country's leading black newspaper, the Sowetan, yesterday led its front page with an approving report that seemed to endorse Mr Farrakhan's denial that he is racist or sexist. Inside it published a letter from a black reader in Johannesburg.
"He [Mr Farrakhan] says the Jews keep pushing the Holocaust story to get sympathy for themselves but deliberately ignore the horror of the American slave trade in which they played a part and also the brutalisation of the Palestinians. Isn't this true?
"Farrakhan made some fiery, and by his own admission, ill considered speeches in the early 80s from which the Jewish controlled media extracted certain parts in order to harass and discredit him in the same way that those who pronounced one settler, one bullet were."
The latter is a reference to the Pan African Congress, which in the early 1990s organised a number of machine gun attacks on white civilians and families, including the massacre of 13 people in a Cape Town church in 1993. Coincidentally, Mr Farrakhan's visit to South Africa was organised by the PAC leader, Mr !Khoisan X (the exclamation mark represents a click sound in the "Bushman Hottentot" Khoisan languages), formerly Mr Benny Alexander.