---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 12:04:15 -0800
From: Chris Lowe <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
Subject: [wa-afr-network] Re: Fw: [BRC-NEWS] A Preliminary Critique of "Wonders
of the African World" (fwd)
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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