DECONSTRUCTING GATES' "WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD"

West Africa Review (2000)

ISSN: 1525-4488

Gwendolyn Mikell

These comments were delivered on November 13, 1999 at the African Studies Association Meetings in Philadelphia Pennsylvania on the ASA Board Sponsored Roundtable on the Wonders of the African World film series, which aired in late October 1999 on PBS.

It seems fitting that in a gathering of Africanists such as this, we should assess the images of Africa with which we are being presented on the eve of the 21st century. This means that our Africanist credentials are sufficient, and we need not be filmmakers or journalists in order to comment on the Wonders of the African World, the series which was directed and narrated by Henry Louis Gates. After all, many of us have predicted that the year 2000 is supposed to be the African century; that having begun to clean house by removing the cobwebs of colonialism and the East-West conflict during the last decade of the twentieth century, Africa was positioning itself for a renaissance in the 21st. Indeed, the ending of apartheid through democratic elections in South Africa 1994 and the holding of democratic elections in Nigeria in 1999 gave indications that these two sleeping giants would help lead the renaissance we envisioned.

Along those lines, some of us here who have been working with the National Summit on Africa have taken a special interest in making sure that Americans have positioned themselves as public partners and supporters of the soon to be empowered Africa. We have been working to make sure that African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans and all Americans across the country who have an interest in the Continent have been involved in a dialogue about the direction of American policy toward Africa. We have been working to construct the first new policy¹ one that is equitable, and just, and fair, and sensible.

Likewise, we have been interested in making sure that new images of Africa are available to counter old stereotypes, both in drama and film and video. The celebrated 9-part film series by Professor Mazrui on The Africans has been seen again by audiences across the country, and the National Summit on Africa has worked with the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center to craft new programs and offer a platform to African artists and performers so that Americans could recognize the vitality present in African culture. It is in this frame of mind that we welcomed Skip Gates’ PBS production of Wonders of the African World. After all, over the past two years this well-known “public intellectual” and head of the recently developed African Studies Program at Harvard University has been pronounced an “African Studies elder” by the powers that be. We can argue about the origins of this position, but that is not a fruitful exercise at this moment. Sometimes it takes a leader to push forward a project and propel it to success. Therefore, I and others felt that Gates and his visual project would assume the responsibility of leadership implied by his position.

Unfortunately, it now appears to me that we have been sold a bill of goods. We have been betrayed! Despite wonderful photography and rich visual images of Africa presented in the film, we have been let down. It appears to me that the content of Gates’ video built up and glorified Africa on the one hand, and denigrated it by flinging mounds of mud on the other hand. It seems to me that Gates’ pain about the Trans-Atlantic slavery have twisted his objectives as film-maker and narrator. We all understand pain and suffering related to slavery, but it is not acceptable to present negative personal and a-historical opinions as if they are fact in material that pretends to be scholarly. It seems to me that Gates has crafted his own attack on Afrocentric views of the greatness of Africa. It seems to me that the Gates’ video attempts to paint a picture of an imaginary divide between African Americans and African views of the Continent and its role in history. As an African American, this offends me and many others among my colleagues greatly.

Since I have done considerable work in Ghana in Ashanti and Akan communities, I will use this context for my own response. Chiefs and elders are supposed to use their wisdom for the communal good, and to keep their societies on an upward trajectory. Dropping back into the rich Ashanti proverbs that speak to us about the responsibility of Chiefs and Elders, we find this assertion:

The word of an Elder is more powerful than the suman (magical charms).²

But we know that it is unseemly behaviour, very disappointing and harmful activity, when an elder allows his words to be consistently disrespectful and vicious. The social harm that is inflicted is incalculable. There is another proverb that I recall that counsels about this:

An Elder does not break wind in public, but in a latrine. ³

So what words of this Elder have caused so much harm? The video was filled with examples, but I have to focus on only a few. One of them has to do with the disrespect that Gates showed toward African leaders in general, priests of the Coptic Church, traditions of the Ark of the Covenant, West African chiefs, members of the Ashanti royal family, and women in general. This does not mean that I think that leaders and women are sacrosanct, but African culture finds it objectionable when standards of decency about how one relates to elders, religion, women, the public, and truth are consistently broken in public and on camera.

A second and equally significant type of example for us as scholars has to do with the historical distortions and factual errors that are scattered throughout the film, relating to various groups, their origins, their racial composition, their agency, and their participation in the making of history. Gates pretended that the West was not hegemonic in its relationships with Africa during the pre- colonial and colonial periods that transverse the slave trade. He pretended that the only pressures creating TransAtlantic slavery came from African greed, from forces within the Continent.

Gates charged that “if Africans had not sold slaves, there would not have been any slavery.” But, as I have repeated over and over to undergraduates, one cannot understand African culture and history (or any culture and history) by beginning just at the moment of one particular action, ⁴ you must put that action into social context, into historical context, and into global context. The video is often devoid of historical and cultural context when Gates renders devastating critiques. If we insert context, then we begin to see that the pressures of British colonial expansion and conquest on the Ashanti leaders and the Asantehene demanded that they protect their territory and their currency (the gold supply) from external control. Given the warfare that was set in motion by foreign intrusions, the Ashanti acquired and used slaves to exchange for guns to prevent British incursions from the south and French incursions from the west, and the jihads and expansions of Samori from the north and west. These war pressures also contributed to massive population movements inside the Gold Coast that were not just related to slaving, but that had the effect of depopulating whole parts of the country. Slaves were also needed to replace soldiers and other agricultural labor inside Ashanti as the conflicts continued. As I indicate in Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana, the Ashanti people were well aware that a social price had been paid for the conflicts set in motion by the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. However, instead of acquiring accurate information on the forest kingdoms and slavery, Gates encourages Africans to make admissions of complicity in “slavery” that he conveniently interprets as sole causal factors for the TransAtlantic Slave Trade.

By failing to engage Africanist scholars as commentators (anthropologists, historians, political scientists, theologians, etc), Gates allows his film to convey historically inaccurate inferences. He left the impression that the bulk of the slaves who made the middle passage came out of the Gold Coast and the Whydah area because of the greed of the Ashanti and Dahomey kings, which is far from historically accurate. Those of us who have read Joseph Holloway’s Africanisms in American Culture, or John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, or Joseph Miller’s Way of Death, know that the reality is far more complex and varied. ⁵ Slaves from the Guinea Coast of Senegambia, the rice coast of Sierra Leone, the Rivers areas of Nigeria, and more importantly, from the Congo-Angolan coasts, formed an enormous portion of the total numbers that made the middle passage to the Americas. Many were stolen by Western slave- traders and separated from families and communities, leaving them poorer than before. So where does Gates get his unique histories and interpretations of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade that appear to address his own psychological concerns with slavery?

We can take African proverbs further to look at what they say about Chiefs and Elders who acquire or maintain their power without the concurrence of the people; Chiefs who have failed their people, Chiefs who break customary norms of social behaviour, or Chiefs who aggrandize themselves at their peoples’ expense. Custom requires that they be called to a “palaver” to be accused and to explain their actions. If they persist, they may be destooled so that they have no power; or they are abandoned, and “A Chief without people is poor indeed.”

When does our palaver with Gates begin?

Citation Format

Mikell, Gwendolyn. (2000). DECONSTRUCTING GATES' "WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD". West Africa Review: 1 , 2. [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.14].