Eight years earlier, Patrice Lumumba had been killed; four years earlier, Malcolm X; and the year before that, Martin Luther King. In contrast, Carmichael wanted to live, longing for a home he had never inhabited but deeply regarded as his own. In 1969, Stokely Carmichael arrived in Conakry, Guinea, the land of his ancestors.

Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1941 and moved to the United States as a child. After his studies, he became an activist for black civil rights. He joined the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was arrested about 30 times. Inspired at first by Reverend King, he later drew closer to the more radical Malcolm X. He became convinced that integrating blacks into white society was futile, as it would not change existing power relations. During this period, he coined terms like "institutionalised racism," "white supremacy," and "Black Power."

After expelling white activists from the SNCC leadership, he was expelled from the group and joined the Black Panther Party in 1967. He soon clashed with them as well because he opposed admitting white militants. He believed whites should address their own problems before involving themselves in those of blacks. Later that year, he traveled to Guinea for the first time, invited by President Ahmed Sekou Touré. Around this time, he decided to move to Africa, motivated by a desire to escape possible CIA plots and by his belief that the natural allies of African Americans were Africans, not progressive whites.

In Conakry, Carmichael became a close associate of Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, the former president of Ghana, who fled to Guinea in 1966 after Touré's deposition. Following Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Carmichael shed his "slave name." From then on, he called himself Kuame Ture, in honour of Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. After Nkrumah's death in 1971, he became leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), which sought to unite the struggles of African Americans with the anti-colonial demands of Africans.

Stokely Carmichael, better known as Kwame Ture, lived in Conakry until his death from cancer in 1998. He did not speak out or advocate for the tens of thousands of Guinean dissidents imprisoned or shot by Sekou Touré's regime. This suggests that, despite his activism elsewhere, he chose not to challenge abuses within the government he was closest to.