"A Preliminary Response to Ali Mazrui's
Preliminary Critique of Wonders of the African World"
Only rarely as a scholar does one have the opportunity to discuss one's
passion for a subject, the reasons for one's choice of it as one's
life's work, and the raison d'être for the production of a specific
work about it. The extraordinarily energetic reactions to my film
series, "Wonders of the African World," provide such an occasion for me
to address these issues generally and, more specifically, to respond to
questions raised by the distinguished African scholar, Professor Ali
Mazrui.
Before I do so, however, let me state frankly that I relish the fact
that so very many people academics and non-academics alike have felt
moved to write to me and to each other about the series. I am first and
last a teacher, and anytime so many people are moved to discuss and
debate African history must be seen as a good time, indeed, for our
field. We are, after all, scholars, not devotees of a religion or an
ideology, and the free exchange of ideas without vilification or
name-calling is one of the fundamental aspects of the scholar's
calling.
Like so many of my contemporaries in African and African American
Studies, I came of age in the early sixties, just as many African
countries were gaining their independence. I was ten years old in 1960,
that great year of African independence, and for reasons even I do not
understand, I busied myself memorizing the names of each African
country, its capital, and its leader, pronouncing their names as
closely as I could to the way our evening news commentator did on the
nightly news.
Enamoured of Africa and keenly curious about socialism, I spent the
1970-1971 academic year living in an Ujamaa village in central
Tanzania, where I was trained to deliver general anesthesia at an
Anglican Mission Hospital. After an extended time there at Kilimatinde,
I moved to Dar es Salaam, where I lived for two months, then
hitch-hiked across the Equator, managing to travel from Tanzania
through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo, by land and by river,
from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean without leaving the ground.
By the age of 20, I had traveled through nine African countries,
saddened only that illness a severe case of dysentery prevented me from
fulfilling another dream, which was to cross the Sahara by land.
After graduation from College, where I majored in History, I went to
the University of Cambridge where I enrolled in the Faculty of English,
under the direction of Wole Soyinka. Much of my passion for African
Studies was generated by Soyinka's sublime example, and it is clear to
me today that had it not been for our chance encounter, and my deep
friendship with a fellow African student, Kwame Anthony Appiah, I would
have ended up neither as a professor, nor as a scholar of African or
African American Studies.
Soyinka taught me many things, far too many to detail here. But what
most struck me about him was his dictum that a fundamental aspect of
commitment to a field indeed, to one's people, however broadly that may
be defined was the willingness both to praise and to criticize,
whenever the occasion called for one to do so. "Criticism, like
charity," Wole would repeat, again and again like a mantra, "starts at
home." And so, in the pages of his journal, Transition, on whose
editorial board I have sat since 1973, Soyinka attacked the excesses of
brutal dictators such as Idi Amin, Mobutu, or Sani Abacha, as well as
the reluctance of other African and African American intellectuals to
do so in public for fear, somehow, of giving comfort to colonialists,
racists, or neo-colonialists. Since graduate school, I have taken
Soyinka's notion of "tough love" as the ultimate sign of passion and
true commitment that a scholar can demonstrate in his devotion to her
or his field.
Like many of my contemporaries, I have long been appalled by the
penchant of white racists to demean, deny, or denigrate the
civilizations that black people have produced on the African continent.
The sustained, systematic attempt of European scholars to lift Egypt
out of Africa, to whiten its people, and to deny its hybrid culture any
influence from sub-Saharan African civilization is one of the great
scandals of Europe's attempt to dominate the African continent and to
justify the enslavement of tens of millions of its people. I vowed to
fight that early on in my career, and as a student produced a 500-page
Ph.D. thesis about the racist discourse of Enlightenment philosophers
such as Hume, Kant, Jefferson, and Hegel, and their denigration of
Africans as a people without reason, and Africa as a "continent without
History. "Wonders of the African World" is my attempt to bring into the
homes of average Africans, African Americans, Europeans, and Americans,
some of the monuments of civilization created by people living in
twelve countries on the African continent, delivered in an accessible
form.
To do so, I wrote to two dozen scholars in Africa, Europe, and America,
inviting them to send me suggestions for the "seven wonders" of the
African world. I compiled their suggestions into a list of twenty-four,
then grouped these by region. For example, five on my original list the
Sahara, the River Niger, the Grand Mosque at Djenne, the Sankore Mosque
at Timbuktu, and the Dogon people all reside in Mali. Hence, Mali
became a site for one of my programs.
Let me state the obvious: I am a professor of literature, not an
historian, an archeologist, or an anthropologist. Accordingly, the
Wall-to-Wall Production Company and I consulted with a wide range of
scholars to shape my approach to this vast and complex subject, on both
the film series and the book that accompanies it. I have attached, at
the end of this piece, a list of some of the scholars whom I consulted.
Each draft of the chapters of my book was critiqued several by
other scholars, none more thoroughly than the chapter on the Swahili
coast, which was reviewed by Ali Mazrui himself, whose opinion of it,
printed on the dust-jacket, reads as follows:
"This is more than a book about Africa. It is a study in black
America's profound ambivalence about our shared ancestral continent.
Caught between a distaste for Africa within his own family and his
abiding love for and fascination with Africa, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
traverses the continent with a keen eye, a brilliant mind, and an
ambivalent heart."
Now, having seen the film series, Professor Mazrui has shared his
reactions and concerns, to which I should now like to respond. Let me
repeat that I cherish the sort of debates and discussions that his
critique has generated, especially given the fact that it has occurred
on the Internet. Perhaps this debate will be recalled by our
descendants as the first such use of the Internet by scholars in
African and African American Studies to air their views. If so, this
will have been a signal moment for our field.
Since Professor Mazrui's critique has been so widely disseminated, let
me refer to the questions he raises by implication, by .
Perhaps because of his haste to share his initial responses, his
critique contains a number of factual errors.
1. I did not attempt to "dis-Africanize
ancient Egypt." Rather, I sought to accord ancient Nubia its due
recognition. The difference is critical. I hope to deal with the
question of the color of ancient Egyptians in a special one-hour
documentary that will feature a wide array of experts. I would hope to
invite Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Dr. Ben and Martin Bernal among
those to appear on camera. What do I think about this issue? Though not
an expert, I suspect that if the average ancient Egyptian had shown up
in Mississippi in 1950, they would have been flung into the back of the
bus. And that is black enough for me. But the fundamental fact, on
which there is no reasonable disagreement, is that Egypt is first and
last, an African civilization. (Mazrui mistakenly claims that I am
speaking to a European guide at Abu Simbel. I am not. I am speaking to
an Egyptian. That's a pretty good example of "dis-Africanizing modern
Egypt!)
2. The Swahili. Ali erroneously argues that I
failed to consult with Swahili experts, or to put them on camera, or to
include Muslims. This is just not true. Ummi Ali Hammid, the descendent
of Tippu tip, is a Swahili and a Muslim, and it was she that said: "it
was the trend of the time, that was business, purely. You either be a
slave or a slaver. You choose the lesser of the two evils. And if you
are in a position to be a slaver why should you be a slave?" (I assume
that Mazrui is not questioning the fact that thousands of slaves were
sold in Zanzibar.) As for the experts we consulted, look at the list
below.
3. Asante and Benin. The source
of the statement about the slave trade that there would have been no
slave trade in these countries without the complicity and collaboration
of the kings (and their representatives) in Asante and Dahomey was not
me, but Dr. Akosua Perbi, a Ghanaian historian.
This is indeed a vexed and painful issue. I know that it was, and
remains, a painful issue for me. How I envy my African friends's easy
accessibility to their people's languages and cultures! How much I
lament all that our ancestors suffered to survive the Middle Passage,
slavery, and Jim Crow racism and segregation. But don't ask me, a
descendant of slaves, to avoid addressing this complex issue, which
disturbs so many of us so deeply simply because it is so confusing, so
troubling, so anguishing. No one I interviewed thought my questions
inappropriate or felt that I wanted to make them fell guilty. I don't
believe guilt to be heritable. I merely wanted to bring a dialogue into
the open between Africans and African Americans that has long been
simmering beneath the surface. We all feel discomfort in discussing
the contributory role of African hierarchies in the slave trade. If
"Wonders" succeeds in opening this deeply buried matter to sober
reflection, then the series will have made an important contribution.
Need it be said that to acknowledge that Africans participated in the
slave trade along with Europeans is not to exclude the horrible crimes
of the latter?
4. Ethiopia. Mazrui chides me for interviewing the
Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church wearing a T-shirt. The shirt
bears an image from one of the holiest sites in Ethiopian Christendom.
Nevertheless, I myself apologized to the Patriarch on camera for my
inability to return to my hotel to change after shooting another scene
earlier that morning. He accepted my apology and we moved on.
As for my supposed "sarcasm" "about the authenticity of the Ark," I
happen to believe that there is an ancient Ark housed in St, Mary's
Church at Axum, and that it most probably is the best candidate for the
ark that some claimed housed Moses' Tablets. (Whether or not you
believe that Moses went up to the mountain, and God inscribed on two
tablets the Ten Commandments is entirely a matter of personal belief.)
Let me put it this way: along the way to Ethiopia I interviewed the
Patriarch, Minister Farrakhan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Given
the belief system that each represents and claims to believe more or
less literally, why is it so hard to believe that the Ethiopians
possess a holy relic of such antiquity? Why make such a bold claim in
the first place unless someone has solid reason to believe it to be
true? The Ethiopian government, by the way, has hailed the series "for
unveiling so many wonders of Africa and Ethiopia" and for "combating
flat, superficial images." "Wonders" is, it concluded, " a wonderful
piece of work." (Letter from the Embassy of Ethiopia, Washington, D.C.,
November 5, 1999).
5. Timbuktu. As Mazrui knows, I have never called
anyone on the African continent or on any other continent a barbarian:
I called the practice of female genital mutilation barbaric, and it is.
And until it is eradicated from the African continent, I shall not
disguise my opposition to it. No apologies there.
Second, I did not describe the relation between the Bella and the
Tuareg as slavery; Mr. Baba, my informant, did. What I said was that
the relation between the Bella and the Tuareg was "as close to slavery
as I ever want to get." And I mean that. I will not do Ali the
discourtesy of suggesting that he aimed to defend a relationship of
domination based on heredity and skin color.
6. South Africa and Zimbabwe. Ali's only objection
to this is that it is a "tourist travelogue "Wonders" is an
autobiographical essay, narrated and written by an African American,
one who has traveled extensively by land and water from Johannesburg to
Cairo, from Zanzibar to Dakar, on over 50 trips to the Continent; The
whole series was framed as a travelogue which allowed me to show both
the diversity of the vast African continent and the African peoples
themselves.
I am proud of "Wonders of the African World," and I stand by the mode
of film making that it embodies. As I said at the outset, I relish
debate and the free exchange of ideas. Ali Mazrui is an admired friend;
but in his haste to share his disagreements with me on the Internet, he
has accused me of saying several things that I simply did not say.
Yet I think there is a deep difference in attitude between us that
underlies Ali's response to my series. The role of African
collaboration in the slave trade (though hardly a major part of my film
series) is anguishing to me. He displays no such anguish. While
intellectually I know that kingdoms engaged in war and sold their enemy
captives to Europeans, and that they did not think of these captives as
"fellow Africans" still I wonder why the King of Dahomey forced the
slaves to march around the "Tree of Forgetfulness" six ,
counter-clockwise, so that they would forget those who had enslaved
them into the horrors they would face on the Middle Passage and in the
New World, so that their souls would not return to Dahomey to haunt the
guilty. (Go to the Route des Esclaves in Benin and see the tree
yourself.) Does this sound as though those in Africa were unaware of
the depth of suffering that New World slavery held? Does it not suggest
they felt guilty about it? You decide. But don't ask me not to wonder
what in the world was on these brothers' minds when they sold other
black people to these strange Europeans!
Let me end with a piece of good news. So many people have asked me
about the fate of the books at Timbuktu. When I returned from filming
in Mali, I secured a grant from the Mellon Foundation to catalogue the
manuscripts that we filmed, to construct a building to house them, and
ultimately to digitize and translate them. The film series would have
been justified, in my opinion, if this accomplishment had been the sole
benefit that generated. The Malian government and the W.E.B. Du Bois
Institute at Harvard are collaborating jointly on this crucially
important project.
I invite all who would care to discuss these ideas further to
participate in an on-line chat that we shall conduct soon on our
website, Africana.com. Please check the site for further details.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
List of Consultants:
For the film series, we consulted, among others, the following
scholars:
Our series consultant was Dr David A Anderson, from the African History
Department at SOAS.
The Slave Kingdoms: We interviewed Dr Akosua Perbi, from the History
Department at the University of Ghana, Legon. Her research area is the
history of West African indigenous slavery and West African involvement
in the transatlantic slave trade.
At the research stage, we also consulted Professor John Fynn ( a
Ghanaian), also from the History Department at University of Ghana.
On Asante history we spoke to: Dr Tom McCaskie, Centre for West African
Studies, University of Birmingham Professor John Aquandah, authority on
early Akan history in Ghana. Prof. Adu Boahen, authority on Asante
history. Formerly of University of Ghana at Legon and at Kumasi, now
retired. Professor Mawere Opoku, also at Legon.
Of course, as those who saw the program know, we also interviewed the
Oheneba Adusei Poku, son of the late Asantehene, who was quite open
about the role of the Asante rulers in the slave trade.
In Benin, we consulted with and interviewed Dr Joseph Adande, art
historian from the Faculté des Arts et des Lettres at the University of
Benin, Cotonou, who specializes in the history of the kingdom of
Dahomey, and the chief consultant to the Royal Palaces of Abomey
Museum.
Swahili: David Anderson was our principal consultant for the Swahili
programme. Other scholars whom we consulted person and through their
work in the course of our research were: Dr Farouk Topan, lecturer in
Swahili and cultural forms, SOAS (Zanzibari) Dr Mark Horton, Dept. of
Archaeology, University of Bristol (principally Shanga and the
archaeology and history of the Lamu area).
On Zanzibar, we spoke to: Prof. Abdul Sherrif, U. of Dar es Salaam Also
principal curator of Dept. Antiquities in Zanzibar, campaigning for the
preservation of Old Town
Nubia:
Dr Ali Osman Saleh, Department of Archaeology, University of Khartoum
Dr Hassan Hussein, Director, Dept of Antiquities, Museum of Khartoum Dr
Salah ad Din, Dept of Antiquities, Museum of Khartoum Dr Zahi Hawass,
Director of Antiquities, Pyramid District, Cairo
Holy Land (Ethiopia):
Roderick Grierson and Stuart Munro-Hay, Dr David Phillipson, Dept of
Archaeology and Anthropology, Univ. of Cambridge (an archeologist
working at Axum), Dr Richard Pankhurst
Dr Merid Woldearegay Chairman
History Dept
Addis Ababa University
Tsegaye Gabre Nadhin
Poet/playwright/translator
Professor Teddesse Tamrat
Addis Ababa University Press
Dr Abdussamad Ahmad
Director of Institute of Ethiopian Studies
Addis Ababa University
Ato Jarra Hailemariam Head
Centre for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage
CRCCH
Nubre'id of Aksum
(Chief Priest)
Timbuktu:
Dr Kevin MacDonald
Institute of Archaeology
UCL
Dr Samuel Sidibe Director,
Musee National, Bamako,
Mali
Dr Tereba Togola Directeur,
Institut des Sciences Humaines, Bamako, Mali
Dr Boubakar Diaby
Chef de la mission culturelle de Djenne (UNESCO)
Dr Timothy Insole (archaeologist)
St John's College, Cambridge
Mohammed Dicko, director of Centre Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu
Ali Ould Sidi, Chef de la Mission Culturelle, Timbuktu
South Africa/Zimbabwe:
UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE History dept
Dr Gilbert Pwiti
Proof Peter Garlake
UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN
Professor Martin Hall
For the book, I also consulted with the following scholars:
Professor David Anderson (All Segments)
School of Oriental Studies University of London
Professor Emmanuel Akyeampong (Ghana and Dahomey)
Department of History
Harvard University
Professor Anthony Appiah (Ghana and Dahomey)
Department of History
Harvard University
Professor John Hunwick (Mali)
Department of History
Northwestern University
Professor Kevin McDonald (Mali)
Department of Archeology
University of London
Professor Martin Hall (South African and Zimbabwe)
Department of Archeology
University of Capetown
Professor John Middleton (Swahili)
Department of History
Yale University
Dr. Roderick Grierson (Ethiopia)
Independent Scholar Author of The Ark of the Covenant
Professor Harold Marcus (Ethiopia)
Department of History
University of Michigan
Professor Ali Mazrui (Swahili)
Department of African Studies
SUNY at Binghamton
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