A MILLENNIUM LETTER TO HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.: CONCLUDING A DIALOGUE?
Ali A. Mazrui
This may be my last public statement on the Internet about your television series, WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD. Like you, but by a lesser volume, I have been bombarded by hundreds of e-mails on the subject. Like you, I do think such a debate is healthy. But unlike you, I am worried about the wider world of television-viewers and video-viewers, totally unaware of this debate and its incisiveness, and potentially vulnerable to the negative effects of your television series.
Can I go Shakespearean for a minute? I have risked my friendship with you, not because I love you less, but because I love Black AMERICA more. Let me explain. Although it is too early to be sure, it is conceivable that your television series is the most serious threat to relations between Africa and African Americans since the United States authorities destroyed Marcus Garvey's movement in 1922 with Garvey indictment for mail fraud. Are we confronted with a saga entitled "From Garvey to Gates?"
As you know, Garvey was the Black man who tried to build bridges between the Harlemites and the Hausa, between Black Africans and Americans of colour. His efforts were destroyed by the White American establishment, especially between 1922 and 1927. Your own long- term impact on relations between Africans and African Americans is still unknown. Some of us fear that in your efforts to repair relations between White America and Black America, you may be sewing the seeds of discord between African Americans and the peoples of the African continent. By trying to shift the main burden of guilt for slavery from Whites to Blacks, you may conceivably help race- relations in the United States. But does the price you are exacting amount to raising levels of animosity among the next generation of African-Americans towards Africa?
As you know, Marcus Garvey was the Black man who pointed to the humiliation of Africa and yet aspired to lead a Back to Africa Movement. Skip Gates is the man who made fun of those Pan- African idealists from the Diaspora who tried to reverse the march of history by allegedly throwing their American passports into the sea on their arrival in newly independent Ghana. Even if you, dear Skip, thought they were mistaken, you did not have to make fun of Black Zionism! That is precisely what you were doing! (The story of passports being thrown into the sea was at best a metaphor! You did not have to take it so literally!)
I am convinced that my critique of your chapter about the Swahili people did make a difference. Bless you. But judging by the state of that chapter before I criticized it, I am not convinced that the other Swahili experts you consulted made the slightest difference to what you wanted to say. I agree with Martin Kilson that you covered yourself academically by consulting experts and then ignored most of what they had to say! No other theory would explain the gap between your authorities and your lapses.
There is a logical fallacy you commit more than once in the TV series. You claim that a Zanzibari claiming to be Arab or Persian is like your claiming to be WHITE! The analogy is totally false. It is like your claiming to be IRISH, White. If one of your great grandparents was Irish, there are societies which would permit you to be Irish. It just so happens that mainstream America does not permit you to identify yourself with your Irish ancestor. That is a decision made by mainstream America and not by you. The lineage system in Zanzibar, on the other hand, does permit people to continue to be Arab or Persian generations after their Arab or Persian great forebear. Why did you choose to interview simple people in Zanzibar who claim to be Persians? Did you want to embarrass them before cameras by their apparent lack of sophistication?
I could go to Mississippi and interview Black people who refuse to acknowledge descent from Africa. Or I could interview Black people in the U.S. who claim to be descended from ancient Israelites! Why were you taking advantage of simple people instead of experts on such big issues?
In your "Preliminary Response to my Preliminary Critique," you quoted in full my published blurb for your book. I do not detract anything from the blurb. I accepted your own personal assurance that you loved Africa in your own tough way. But talking of "Preliminary response to preliminary critique," let me now refer to my preliminary blurb which was sent to you in London before the definitive blurb. The earlier one made you laugh, before we revised it in due course:
"Is this book a portrayal of Africa, or does it mirror the soul of one of its lost sons, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? Gates' talent for both stimulation and irritation is brilliantly at work in these pages. You must read this work and then look back in anger!"
On the Ark of the Covenant, you are too intelligent not to have known in advance that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was not going to show the Ark to a T-shirt-wearing travelogue American or break off a piece of the Ark for you to take to Harvard. Then why was the whole program based on whether you could get evidence for this Ethiopian claim? What was the point of the Inquisition, dear Skip? We think the Patriarch put you in your place! But what was the point of it all?
The English poet, Alexander Pope [1688-1744] authored many memorable couplets. These included the following: "For wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." The trouble with you, dear Skip, is the opposite. Nature has made you a great wit. Yet you are undressing Nature in this television series by making yourself appear less intellectually smart than you are. It is almost as if you were called upon by your TV producers to disguise your natural brilliance. The producers advised: it is not enough to be simple. Try your best to be simplistic. Even when comparing your book with your television series I am reminded of what Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) said in 1973: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." In your case, you have sometimes CHOSEN to speak like a mischievous boy in the TV series. Why? I am an old man and your elder brother. So permit me to be presumptuous about this aspect. Elements of the motif of the naughty boy persists in the series. Some toilet jokes here and there! Some jokes about the fun of having four wives! And an inane joke about the Queen Mother of Asante (Ashanti) being more powerful than Hilary Clinton or Queen Elizabeth II! Skip, I am prepared to believe that you think like a genius. I even have evidence that you write like a distinguished author. But why on earth must you deliberately speak like an irrepressible boy before these particular cameras? Your elder brother, an admirer of your intellect, is baffled by your verbal behaviour before cameras.
Biodun Jeyifo (B.J.) tries to squeeze you into an old NEGRITUDE school. I in turn try to squeeze you into a new school of BLACK ORIENTALISM. But Negritude is not about saluting the glorious. Negritude is about glorifying the simple. As Aime Cesaire puts it:
Hooray for those who never invented anything
Hooray for those who never discovered anything...
My negritude [my Blackness] is no tower, and no cathedral,
It delves into the deep red flesh of soil.
I do not know how B.J. discovered any Negritudist in you. You were in Africa to salute the glorious (such as the Nubian pyramids or the Timbuktu manuscripts) rather than to glorify the simple. Leopold Senghor, on the other hand, wanted to glorify the simple things about Africa such as excitement, joy, and feeling. In Senghor's immortal words, "Emotion is Black .... Reason is Greek." The Africa which you portrayed, dear Skip, was definitely not a celebration of the simple. You even complained about the isolation of an Ethiopian monastery and virtually complained about the ancient monastery not having an elevator!!
Quite frankly, I think you belong more convincingly to my proposed category of BLACK ORIENTALISM than to the Negritude school. Classical Orientalism was Eurocentric and condescending to non-Western cultures. I fear that is how you appear in your television series. You emerge as a friendly Western tourist, eager both to discover glories of the black experience and extract confessions of black misdeeds on slavery. You want to salute Africa and demonize it at the same time.
What has NEGRITUDE got to do with that contradiction? However, saluting Africa and demonizing it at the same time has everything to do with ORIENTALISM. This latter tradition is about for better or for worse. In spite of your ancestry, you do treat Africa as the Othering your television series (though not necessarily in every aspect of your life). The TV series does inaugurate a tradition of black public condescension towards blacks in the new era. It inaugurates BLACK ORIENTALISM.
Quite frankly, I am less bothered by what colour the ancient Egyptians were than by how they are supposed to have treated the Nubians. I know the Egyptian accent in the English language so well that I am surprised you thought I would mistake an Egyptian accent for an Italian one. After all, I am a professor at an Islamic Institution, where I hear Egyptian and other Arabic accents every week. I also have reservations about your portrayal of modern Egyptians as villains in their treatment of Nubians over the High Dam. Is the Aswan Dam a metaphor of Arab oppression of the Nubians? Nasser's Egypt needed the Aswan Dam at least as much as Nkrumah's Ghana needed the Akosombo Dam. Some would argue that the Aswan Dam was more fundamental to Egypt's survival than Akosombo was to Ghana's. But both dams had negative as well as positive consequences. I was waiting to hear you make a case as to how Egypt could have done without the High Dam, or how it could rationally have been built anywhere else. I waited in vain for your elaboration.
At the 1999 annual meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in Philadelphia, the session about your television series turned out to be the best attended and perhaps the liveliest, although it was organized impromptu. The initiative to hold such a session was taken by the President of the Association, Professor Lansine Kaba, without any input from me. President Kaba wrote to me about the proposed session, rather than I to him. It was also Professor Kaba who asked me to invite you to the session to defend your TV series, the way Professor Philip Curtin came to defend his own very unpopular article in The Chronicle of Higher Education at another convention of the ASA a few years ago. People like Biodun Jeyifo think I am a demagogue who picks his causes to gain racial popularity. Such simplistic people should be reminded that I was almost the only defender of Philip Curtin in a tense room packed with extremely angry critics of Curtin in 1995. I knew I was swimming against the tide, and that I risked losing some friends by defending Curtin. But I was convinced that the charges of racism against him were unjust, and I stood up to say so amidst howls of dissent. Curtin himself was totally unrepentant about his notorious letter in The Chronicle. I was not defending what he had written for The Chronicle. I was defending the man against charges of racism.
I agree with you that we must mention what is wrong in Africa as well as what is right. Did you know that before my own TV series, THE AFRICANS, was shown in this country, some militant African American lovers of Africa in California threatened to initiate a national boycott of the series? My critics in England (who had seen my TV series on the BBC) passed the word around to the U.S. that my series was anti-African. In what sense could it possibly be anti-African? Because my TV series discussed military coups in Africa, summary executions, corruption in high places, and drought and famine! The Pan-Africanists regarded this as ammunition for right-wing white racists.
PBS asked me if I was prepared to face my Pan-Africanist critics in California if PBS could arrange a meeting. I agreed to fly to California to face what was potentially a very ugly meeting with my American brothers and sisters. Was I a racial traitor? I went to convince them that I was not. The meeting did have one or two very ugly moments, but the second half of the session was very constructive. I believe I won most of the audience over except for one or two die-hards.
When THE AFRICANS was finally televised in the United States, it was not militant Pan- Africanists in California who led the pack against it. It was right-wing Reaganites like Lynn Cheney, Head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and wife of President Reagan's Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney. Mrs. Cheney denounced the series and demanded the removal of the name of the Endowment from the credits. Black people in the United States, on the other hand, closed ranks behind the series and supported me on my tour in its defence. So where you and I differ is not in our readiness to criticize Africa (though we may criticize different things). Perhaps we differ mainly because I am much more prepared to criticize the West than you are. In your TV series you seem to be asking for an apology from Africa for the slave trade. I wonder if you have ever asked in the media for an apology from descendants of white slave owners in the United States. If you have, please forgive me. If you have not, why not do so now, publicly and unequivocally?
In Abomey you dealt with Martine de Souza, descendant of a Portuguese Brazilian slaver, Francisco de Souza. Martine looked as African as you did, so presumably her great-grandmother was African. So why was a Diaspora African whose great-grandfather was an Irish slave owner (Gates) seeking an apology from a continental African whose great-grandfather was a Portuguese Brazilian slave-dealer (de Souza)? What was the difference? Or did I misunderstand the story you were telling us both about Martine and about yourself? If I got the facts wrong, please accept my unreserved apologies. If you had not referred to your Irish forebear yourself as an argument in the series, I would not have touched that issue.
Since I am myself descended from both slave owners and slaves, I got confused when two other Africans (yourself and Martine), comparable in ancestry to myself, seemed to be seeking forgiveness from each other on the slave issue.
Your friend, Wole Soyinka, thinks that I criticize your TV series in order to protect my own. Does he think I am protecting an INCOME from THE AFRICANS? You may have struck a better financial deal with the BBC and the PBS than I did fifteen years ago, but I do not get a single penny of royalties for my TV series! Nor am I paid for the videos which are still on sale. Please explain to Wole that I do not regard your TV series as a threat to me personally in the least. I regard your series as a threat to wider societal concerns.
You say your television series was intended as an autobiographical travelogue (instead of a scholarly documentary?). The series was neither advertised as a travelogue nor is it now promoted as one. Senior scholars cooperated with you in Africa and elsewhere partly on the assumption that you were engaged in a scholarly enterprise. Your repeated introduction of yourself as a Harvard professor when you were in Africa underlined the scholarly expectations. Now you tell us that you were not trying to produce a scholarly documentary at all, just a tourist guide in motion!
Was that fair?
Skip, if your mission in WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD was to mend and heal relations between Black America and White America, that is a very worthy ambition. But if the means of uniting White with Black was through damaging relations between Africa and its Diaspora, then such a price is not only too high. It would be, you will agree, unethical. However, I am sure such a price was not intended by you.
Perhaps one day you and I will do a joint television series together. I have a title for it already. It is BRANCHES (instead of ROOTS). We could look at the different parts of Africa's Diaspora Africa sons and daughters in North and South America, in the Caribbean, in the Middle East, in Europe and in other parts of the world. One of the themes of BRANCHES would be comparative slavery, especially Africa's triple heritage of slavery (indigenous, Islamic and Western). Perhaps out of this ferocious debate today something constructive may come out in the new Millennium.
Meanwhile, Happy 2000, my friend!
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© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center
Citation Format
Mazrui, Ali A.. (2000). A MILLENNIUM LETTER TO HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.: CONCLUDING A DIALOGUE?. West Africa Review: 1, 2.[iuicode: http
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