Chris,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. graduated summa cum laude from Yale with a degree in
History before later receiving his Ph.D. in English and literature from
Cambridge University. It would therefore not be incorrect to consider
Prof. Gates a historian. Besides, as the W.E.B DuBois Professor of the
Humanities, Chair of Afro-American Studies and Director of the W.E.B DuBois
Institute for Afro-American Research at Havard, one cannot over-emphasize
the importance of his Yale history degree in relation to his work. I refuse
to imagine that he tossed his Yale degree into the bin.
In his book, Colored People: A Memoir.- Alfred K. Knopf, New York, 1994,
here is how Gates described his first image of Africa;
"In 1960, when I was in fifth grade, we started to hear about Africa as part
of current events, for the independence movement was sweeping that
continent. At home, stories about Africa and Africans started turning up on
TV. We used to make jokes about Ubangi lips, and poke ours as far as we
could. The older boys would talk about them, too, in marvelling tones:
Black Africans, man those Africans are black, blue-black...those French
women like those Africans too, boy. I saw them arm in arm, walking down the
streets in Paris like it was the most natural thing in the world - kinky,
beady-headed too.
And they don't want you over there, either. They don't want you. Dem
Africans. They say they're not Negroes; they are Africans, and don't you
call me black. Big-dick motherfuckers too, swing in trees and shit, living
in grass huts". p. 100-101.
Am I reading a script from Tarzan?
Yet, Prof. Gates acknowledges that at the age of nineteen he went to Africa
"to live in the bush in a socialist village in Tanzania for a year". I
thought he could have dilated on his experiences in the Tanzanian "bush" for
the sake of his readers.
You asked the question: "Is Egyptocentricity really African-centered?". I
would have tried to answer your question better if I understood what it
means? All I expected from Prof. Gates's was to "debunk the myths of Africa
being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived", as
he himself said, by pronouncing himself clearly on the "Black Kingdoms of
the Nile" without any nuances. It is unfortunate that each time an African
makes a statement relative to Africa's present and past values and glory, he
is accused of being Afrocentric. Maybe I am Afrocentric, I mean
Egyptocentric, to borrow your term. To be fair, the same yard-stick should
be used for Western scientists who talk about Stonehenge or Latin Americans
who glorify Inca civilization.
You opined that you'd have rather lived as a common person in Igboland than
pharaonic Egypt. Maybe human chattels never existed in Igboland, which I
strongly doubt. Slavery however did not start with pharaonic Egypt, and
needless to say, nor did it stop there. You may need to find out from the
black populations in southern Sudan, where Western organizations are
presently buying back slaves from their Arab owners for $50, less than a
good pair of Nikes.
All civilizations have, at a certain moment in their history, gone through
one form or another of slavery. Human freedom has come a long way to where
it is today. However, the fact that pharaonic Egypt owned slaves does not
nullify its greatness as a civilzation inasmuch as The US does not lose its
achievements as a global power just because they practised slavery.
PS: You may forward my response to the lists of your choice.
______________________________________________________
>From: [log in to unmask] (Chris Lowe)
>To: [log in to unmask]
>CC: <[log in to unmask]>, <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: [wa-afr-network] Re: Fw: [BRC-NEWS] A Preliminary Critique of
>"Wonders of the African World" (fwd)
>Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 12:04:15 -0800
>
>Allow me to point out that Professor Gates is not actually a historian by
>training, but a literary scholar. Moreover, he is a scholar of
>African-American literature, not African literature. Partly because of his
>work on this series and its accompanying book, and because of his role in
>producing the _Encarta Africana_ (the Microsoft digital encyclopedia), much
>of the popular media has dubbed him a historian, e.g. the _New York Times
>Book Review_. It is an indictment of academic African history in the U.S.
>(which includes me) that there is so much of a vacuum for him & his
>collaborator on the Encarta, the philosopher Anthony Appiah, to fill.
>(Appiah's work, unlike Gates', does focus mainly on Africa).
>
>Personally I find it troubling that "Africa's contribution to human
>civilization" so often gets reduced to "the black origins of pharaonic
>Egypt." (I know that Dr. Mazrui does not do this). There are two levels of
>problems here. One is that the whole definition of issues really derives
>from the Western intellectual tradition -- the definition of
>"civilizations" involved, the preoccupation with "races" as collective
>actors who somehow can be given or denied "credit," the idea that culture
>is defined exclusively at the point of origin, so that whoever is given
>"credit" for origins somehow "owns" everything afterwards, unless perhaps
>it is "stolen". These all seem to me to be structures of thought rooted in
>19th century colonial justifications.
>
>The comment that "it looks like Prof. Gates is trying to uplift Africa's
>past from that abyss of prejudice to show the whole world that "look, after
>all, we also did contribute something" " is very apt. But how different
>really is the stress on ancient Egypt over all else, whether by Cheikh Anta
>Diop, Molefi Asante or whomever? Is Egyptocentricity really
>African-centered?
>
>This leads into the second level of the problem, which is that in focusing
>on "great civilizations," as defined by 19th century Europeans, measured in
>terms of buildings and monuments, we don't question the definitions of
>greatness involved. We ignore the fact that all these great empires
>(Egypt, Athens, Rome, China, Aztecs, Incas, Mali, Spain, Britain), whatever
>"race" we assign to their founders and rulers, were based at the end of the
>day on the exploitation of the great majority of the population, on
>military aggressions against neighbors, and usually on large-scale
>enslavement. When I ask myself, would I prefer to have been a common
>person in pharaonic Egypt or stateless Igboland, I don't think the answer
>is obvious from the "greatness" of the government. It occurs to me that
>possibly the achievement of a means of organizing society that didn't
>depend on military and slave based states was even greater than that of
>building the pyramids.
>
>As for contributions to human civilization, I would like to advance the
>proposition that Africa's greatest contribution, or better, that of African
>people and their descendants, has been the lessons that they have taught
>the world about freedom and justice in fighting off enslavement and
>colonization. Likewise with the focus on defining culture only at the
>point of origin, rather than looking at it as process, opportunity,
>interchange, and creation out of interchange. Africans have been among the
>most inventive adapters of culture, and brokers of cultural interchange and
>creativity, over the millenia, including recent centuries. Obsession with
>origins and the myth that culture can be "owned" obscures so much of what
>Africans have achieved.
>
>Chris Lowe
>(Portland, OR)
>
>
> >---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 10:33:08 PST
> >From: Hamadi Banna <[log in to unmask]>
> >Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
> > <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: Re: Fw: [BRC-NEWS] A Preliminary Critique of "Wonders of the
> > African World"
> >
> >Ndey,
> >
> >Prof. Ali Mazrui's critique of the BBC/PBS series "Wonders of the African
> >World" by Havard Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. could not have been more
>apt.
> >
> >Having closely followed the programme on PBS myself, I was astounded by
> >Prof. Gates's utter disregard for certain significant facets of Africa's
> >past and his sneering and distorted view of present-day social and
>cultural
> >practices in Africa. His presentation, while having the allure of a
> >fruitful intellectual research, bore the hallmarks of Western prejudice
> >against Africa's contribution to human civilization. On the surface, it
> >looks like Prof. Gates is trying to uplift Africa's past from that abyss
>of
> >prejudice to show the whole world that "look, after all, we also did
> >contribute something". Therein lies the contempt and the irony! In some
> >instances, he arrogantly portrays the colonial picture of a
> >Stanley-meet-Mutesa.
> >That a historian of Prof. Gates's calibre would deliberately ignore the
> >black origins of pharaonic Egypt is an indication of the very Western
> >prejudice he was all along speaking against. He, without any doubt,
>needs
> >to re-read Cheikh Anta Diop!
> >
> >It is time that African-American intellectuals such as Prof. Gates
>discard
> >their Hollywoodian approach to reading African history.
> >
>
>
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