A PBS Special on Africa

THIS IS NOT TO BE MISSED!

Your local PBS station on Monday, Oct. 25th at 9:00 PM central time will
present "Wonders of the African World" with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Black
Kingdoms of the Nile" & "The Swahili Coast" (Parts 1 & 2 of 6) A look at
Egypt and the Sudan and places where few visitors have ever set foot.

Also, journey from the palm-fringed coasts of Kenya and Tanzania
to the legendary island of Zanzibar. Continues Wednesday the 27th at 9
p.m. Dr. Gates was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show and promised to be
one of the most important series since Roots.

One example: He comes across a library in Timbuktu in private
hands of 50,000 books dating from the 14th Century - books on indigenous
religions, on astrology, on accounting, etc. written by African scholars of
the time--books which have never been cataloged or their existence known. He
said it made him weep. They were remarkably preserved because of the dry
weather and Harvard University and the Mellon Foundation have given him a
grant to catalog and digitalize these books before private collectors
descend on the place and buy them up.

Did you know there are more pyramids in Africa than there are in
Egypt?
they have not been excavated. In this series Dr. Gates tries to give
back to the world the African history that has been literally stolen. Not
only from the African people and their descendants, but from the world. This
is because in order to justify the slavery of African people, humanists had
to argue that they had no written language, no history, no culture, and were
not capable of great thought or reason. i.e., [blacks] were a different kind
of human being and therefore it was okay to enslave. Quite to the contrary,
there were great
civilizations, literature and art in Africa dating back to 4th
Century B/C.
Dr. Gates says the series just barely scratches the surface.

Please pass this information on to all your friends. It promises
to be a most extraordinary series that begins on PBS Oct. 25th.

I encourage you to please get in touch with the principals and
history teachers of your local high schools and encourage them to
inspire their students to view this series. If I can get a transcript of the
Charlie Rose interview with Dr.Gates I will forward it to you.

Please mark your calendar. You can also go to the PBS website
(www.pbs.org) and have the weekly schedule sent to your e-mail address -
which will serve to remind you the week the series begins.

Good day


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