With this verbal trickery, then, Gates is pretending a kind of
   "progressivism-by-association syndrome," so to speak. But what has
   been unique about Wole Soyinka - whom Gates parades around in his
   speaking and writing as his African intellectual mentor - is precisely
   Soyinka's lack of verbal trickery. For Gates, however, verbal trickery
   is his stock-in-trade. During the past 30 years of predatory and
   kleptocratic governing classes in most African states including
   especially Soyinka's own country of Nigeria, Wole Soyinka has
   exhibited a courageous and rare commitment to a progressive African
   intellectual identity. The kind I wish I could live up to if required.
   The kind that the great Frantz Fanon and the great Camara Laye (in
   Sekou Toure's Guinea) represented in their intellectual careers. The
   kind, that is, that dares to critique and challenge what's vicious,
   venal, and predatory among one's own natal cultural and political
   milieu - one's own ethnic/tribal and nation-state milieu that is - and
   thereby run the clear risk of autocratic and cruel retaliation that
   has been a built-in component of most independent African states over
   the past 30 years.

   It takes a special kind of intellectual gall and chutzpah - as well as
   an incredible capacity for intellectual fantasy for a Henry Gates to
   portray himself at intellectual parity with Wole Soyinka. Such
   self-portrayal by Gates is not just an historical travesty, but just
   plain laughable, I submit. I hope Wole Soyinka is aware of how his
   name is being manipulated by Henry Gates. What is more, note that
   Gates does this with the use of what he thinks is a hip term - "tough
   love."

   I seriously doubt that in articulating the proposition that
   "Criticism, like charity, starts at home," Soyinka was trying to teach
   what Gates characterizes as a "tough love" lesson to his Nigerian
   intellectual colleagues who were more reluctant to challenge
   authoritarian regimes in their country. Put another way, Soyinka was
   not beating-his-chest in public around attributes of his own genuinely
   progressive intellectual makeup, he was not showing-off with his
   political discourse that is - something Henry Gates is manicly
   addicted to, I think. Though Henry Gates is not aware of it, "tough
   love" is a lightweight pop-journalistic term that tells us nothing
   about a genuinely courageous and independent progressive African
   intellectual like Wole Soyinka. On the other hand, however, "tough
   love" has much utility for Henry Gates' perpetual bid to cloak his
   penchant for what I call Black put-down discourse in seemingly high-
   minded language like "tough love." In doing so, Gates aims to deflect
   attention from the true goal that his Black put-down discourse serves
   - namely, the establishmentarian and conservative patterns in
   contemporary American society, and globally too. In putting "tough
   love" into Soyinka's mouth, Henry Gates is, above all, trying to
   play-back his way to a special public self-portraiture - one he
   considers politically serviceable.

   At bottom, Henry Gates' myopia regarding his own self-importance can
   be viewed as the main source of both the filmic failure of "Wonders of
   the African World" and the intellectually tacky Black put-down aura
   that pervades it - an aura that bespeaks the film series' politics,
   actually. What else can explain the absence of a serious didactic
   format for the narration of the series - a formalized instructional
   design or format for conveying to American viewers a serious quantum
   of substantive information about African History and Culture? What
   else can explain the unbelievably arrogant irreverence that Henry
   Gates exhibited at so many levels in the series? The irreverence
   associated with wearing the lounge attire found in bourgeois quarters
   of our American suburbs when visiting traditional sanctuaries of the
   Ethiopian Coptic Church, for example. The irreverence associated with
   snide comments about the historical authenticity of the Coptic
   Church's claim of possessing the Ark, and the related irreverence
   associated with Gates' posturing about climbing the gate to the
   hallowed site where the Ark is located. Henry Gates wouldn't dare
   behave with such flippant and infantile irreverence in a comparable
   visit to a traditional sanctuary of Judaism in Israel, of the Church
   of England, of the Holy See in Rome, or anywhere else in the West. He
   wouldn't dare, I assure you....This kind of behaviour by Henry Gates
   is reserved only for Black-world realities! And that Gates can quote
   to his readers a fawning comment on "Wonders of the African World" by
   the current governing class in Ethiopia as a serious rebuttal of the
   charge by Mazuri and others that his demeanor as interviewer was
   irreverent toward traditional sanctuaries of African civilization is
   another dimension of Gates' myopic self-importance. His chutzpah too.

   Above all, the irreverence associated with Henry Gates'
   characterization of the historical dynamics of the Atlantic Slave
   Trade - the man's lack of simple decency-of-spirit toward that
   devastating historical trauma visited upon Black people in the
   tens-of-millions by capitalist Christendom at its crudest - struck me
   as the foulest of all. If American viewers - White Americans
   especially - were relying upon Henry Gates' "Wonders of the African
   World" for a chance to finally come- to-grips with the raw cultural
   barbarity of the Atlantic Slave Trade that our own component of the
   capitalist Christian state system helped to perpetrate against African
   peoples, their disappointment must have been gigantic. Or perhaps not,
   for what Henry Gates dished up in his film series was a
   characterization that enabled many of our White American compatriots
   to persist in their longstanding, arrogant, and stubborn condition of
   moral denial - denial of systemic collaboration in and much
   responsibility for what can only be called the "Black Holocaust." Like
   Ali Mazuri and other critics of "Wonders of the African World," I was
   aghast at Henry Gates' indecent verbal maneuvers in his interviews
   relating to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Verbal maneuvers that emphasized
   almost solely the role of African errand boys for European dominance
   (African slave raiders, predatory African traditional chiefs and kings
   and religious authorities, etc.) in fostering the Atlantic Slave
   Trade. As Black-world scholars for a century now - from the great
   W.E.B.Dubois (the research institute Gates directs at Harvard bears
   his name) to the late Trinidad scholar Eric Williams and the late
   Nigerian scholar and dear friend of mine Kenneth O. Dike - h ave
   uncovered along with White scholars, the Atlantic Slave Trade stemmed
   overwhelmingly from the military, naval technological prowess, and
   political -economic prowess of Europe via-a-vis African peoples and
   other world peoples too, regardless of what African errand boys (or,
   as the case may be, Chinese errand boys in the East Asia context, Arab
   errand boys in the Middle East context, so forth and so on) did or did
   not do. As Ali Mazuri rightly characterized this part of Henry Gates'
   series: "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?"

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