-----Original Message-----
From: Ali A Mazrui <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 31 October 1999 05:42
Subject: [BRC-NEWS] A Preliminary Critique of "Wonders of the African World"
>October 28, 1999
>
>A PRELIMINARY CRITIQUE OF THE TV SERIES by HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
>
>By Ali A. Mazrui <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Since I have myself done a television series about Africa, perhaps I
>should keep quiet about Skip Gates' WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD
>especially since I agreed to write a blurb for his companion book. I saw
>the book as a special *African-American view of Africa*. But I had not
>seen the TV series when I wrote the blurb for the book. In any case Skip
>is a friend with whom I have profound disagreements.
>
>I believe the TV series is more divisive than the book. The first TV
>episode sings the glories of ancient Nubia (understandably) but at the
>expense of dis-Africanizing ancient Egypt. On the evidence of a European
>guide, Gates allows ancient Egyptians to become racist whites trampling
>underfoot Blacks from Upper Nile. Are ancient Egyptians no longer
>Africans?
>
>The second episode of the TV series on the Swahili supremely ignores the
>scholarly Swahili experts on the Swahili people. He interviews none on
>camera. Instead Gates decides to confront either carefully chosen or
>randomly selected members of the Swahili community with racial-questions
>which were abstracted from survey-forms of North American opinion polls.
>
>The program is obsessed with RACE in American terms. Did the people Gates
>was interviewing have the remotest idea what he was really talking about?
>What is more, his translator seems determined to give the worst possible
>interpretation of what was being said by interviewees in a place like
>Lamu.
>
>Who is the best authority on Muslim atrocities in Zanzibar? Well, of
>course a Christian missionary priest in Zanzibar! Gates does not find it
>necessary to balance the testimony of such a biased witness with anything
>else. Any journalist worth his salt would have done better than Gates!
>
>I thought that in episode three, which concerned the Trans-Atlantic slave
>trade, Gates would at last regard the West and the white man as relevant
>actors in the African tragedy. Before seeing the episode I said to a
>colleague in Ohio that surely Gates could not deal with the Trans-Atlantic
>slave trade without regarding the West and the white man as crucial! Boy!
>Was I wrong? Gates manages to make an African to say that without the
>participation of Africans there would have been no slave trade! How naive
>about power can we get?
>
>Without the involvement of Africans, there would have been no colonialism
>either. Without the involvement of Africans, there would have been no
>apartheid. Without the involvement of African Americans, there would have
>been no segregationist order in the Old South. Without Jewish capital,
>there would have been less trans-Atlantic slave trade. Why did Gates pick
>on the Asante (Ashanti) as collaborators in the trans-Atlantic slave-trade
>and never mention European Jews at all as collaborators in the
>slave-trade? (Leonard Jeffreys paid a price for involving the Jews in the
>trade, but will Gates pay a price for involving the Asante?)
>
>I was so afraid that Gates' fourth program would be insulting to Ethiopia
>that I was relieved that it was merely disrespectful. I wished he was more
>politely dressed when he was granted an audience to a major religious
>leader. I wished he kept his sarcasm about the authenticity of the
>Covenant in check. I wished he did not make as many snide remarks which
>trivialized other people's values. And I wished viewers were not kept
>informed on camera as to how many car breakdowns he had had. Surely he had
>better footage of African scenes!
>
>His fifth programme on Timbuktu returned to the issue of Africans
>enslaving each other. Gates seemed incapable of glorifying Africa without
>demonizing it in the second breath. Mali and Benin, countries of great
>*ancient* kings, were also countries of *contemporary* slavery.
>
>Gates refused to listen when he was told that the new "slave" could
>disobey his master, and was free to take autonomous employment. Gates was
>given this information and chose not to pursue it. Was it really a case of
>slavery?
>
>In this fifth episode Gates chose to denounce "the barbarity of female
>circumcision". And yet the institution had just been mentioned in passing.
>There was no attempt to introduce the viewer as to why millions of
>Africans belonged to this culture of female circumcision in the first
>place. Africans were not, after all, innate barbarians. So why had this
>tradition survived for so long? The institution was mentioned as a
>throw-away "play to the Western feminist gallery" (I am myself opposed to
>female circumcision but I do not call its practitioners barbarians).
>
>His sixth episode on Southern Africa was to be the least upsetting. Gates
>did try to capture the glories of pre-colonial Southern Africa and did
>pose some of the challenges of the post-colonial and post-apartheid eras.
>But even this sixth program was more of a tourist travelogue than a
>serious portrayal of a people. It is hard to believe that such a TV series
>was the product of such a brilliant mind!
>
>These are my first reactions. If I can bear to view the series again,
>perhaps I should give it a second chance! But I fear that we have been let
>down badly.
>
>
>Ali Mazrui is Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert
>Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, State University of New York at
>Binghamton, New York, USA; Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large, University
>of Jos, Jos, Nigeria; Ibn Khaldun Professor-at-Large, School of Islamic
>and Social Sciences, Leesburg, Virginia, USA; and the Andrew D. White
>Professor-at-Large Emeritus and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies,
>Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
>
>-30-
>
>
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