West Africa Review (2000)

ISSN: 1525-4488

WONDERGATES

George Nelson Preston

Dear Africanist Colleagues:

I have not gotten sufficiently angry enough to write a letter about this sort of thing since I can remember but the Gatescapades in Africa did just that. But before I go any further, I want to make it clear that in this letter I am not referring to Gates' encyclopedic work for Encarta which I have not seen, nor to his work in literature.

My daughter Afua, born in Africa of an Ashanti mother had just called me. "Dad, are you watching this video version of a bad textbook on Africa? Wonders of the African World." On screen: An archeological zone is to be inundated, and the peasants moved to higher ground and electrified homes with running water. Here is Professor Gates scolding the Islamic Nubian peasants for forsaking their glorious archeological past, informing them that the government of Sudan has coerced them into supporting the destruction of their Meroitic traditions. In Gates' mind they really do not want modern plumbing and electric light. That the government of Sudan may not think much of pagan Meroe and Axum is plausible but it is equally plausible that present day Islamic people inhabiting the sight do not feel culturally related to the people who built them.

It would appear that Gates, who appears on national television in a home filled with the most ludicrous and banal, I must say insulting, tourist caricatures of traditional African art blended in with the occasionally authentic has been crowned as the new Negro in Residence designated to represent us in all matters black be they literature, sociology, anthropology, art history, archeology, art criticism, history. This is what has gotten us so angry. It is not that we look askance at a man of many talents, or a multidisciplinary student of Africa. It is just that Gates has no respect for any of the disciplines he would engage. He hasn't taken anthropology, art history, history seriously. The rest of us have labored lovingly over the mastery of theses disciplines over which PBS has appointed Gates the DHN (Designated Head Negro). The message I get is: I'm Professor Gates and my saying makes it so and the hell with your scholarship. I'm Black, a professor and its Africa, right? And PBS, BBC, the Guggenheim Museum, et al agrees with me.

Professor Gates has the abjectly despicable habit of not being able to admit it when he is palpably wrong, erecting an academic stone-wall and trying to defend the indefensible by bullying. I heard his colleagues have called him on this Mickey Mouse academic bullying, but he will go to the grave insisting he is in the right when wrong. Is it arrogance or ignorance? It is both. I recall a lecture he gave at a 57th Street Gallery on contemporary Zimbabwean stone sculpture in which he stated as fact that this art had its roots in Shona tradition and an archeological past. When three knowledgeable people in the audience attempted to correct this inaccurate assertion by tactfully informing him that no tradition informed the contemporary work; that the style at hand has no art historical precedent and was introduced by Europeans he got downright indignant and even claimed that Picasso was influenced by this art. (Fact: No, not influenced by Zimbabwean stone sculpture but that of western and central Africa, and furthermore the dates of Gate's imaginary Shona influence on Picasso are off by some fifty years difference between Picasso's analytical cubism and the modern Zimbabwean movement.) Yet the bully insisted vehemently, and I must add ill mannerly, that he was right.

This arrogance negates the commendable work that we have done in our fields. It is as if he is saying, "I don't care what your research supports because I'm Professor Gates and my saying something makes it so." But don't think Gates is incapable of scholarly rigor. He sidesteps the Archbishop of Canterbury's insightful reply to the question, does the Ark of the Covenant or an ark really reside in Ethiopia, and tells us he wants proof regardless of what the Ethiopians assert. Lesson: my assertions are based in fact and yours in creed. Okay, what about that ark? According to the Book of Samuel (6) it was so charged that attempting to look into it could kill you. In Samuel 50,070 persons are smitten for the mere vulgarity of their curiosity and the proximity to the ark it brought them. But in another of his glib remarks Gates asks what would happen if he would attempt to scale the gate surrounding the shrine where the ark resides. But at any rate He "doubts the claim" that it is at St. Mary's but "admires the audacity of the claim." By Jeremiah's time, God seems to want us to forget about the ark. An educated guess would remind us that arks were of pagan origin and charged with the symbolism of the vulva and their contents with priapic energy. "...say no more, The ark of the covenant of the Lord, neither shall it come to mind, neither shall they remember it, neither shall they visit it, neither shall that be done any more" (Jeremiah III, 16). Well, if the ark be that of Samuel's speaking, Gates would have more than the guards to worry about, but if it is the ark of Jeremiah's oracle, its only the guards he need fear.

Gates is so besotted with himself that he thinks whatever he does is interesting and apparently worthy of documentation, including gaffs. Details of his personal idiosyncrasies which tactfully should have been edited are filmed: glib remarks in inappropriate contexts (He points to the mummy of a sanctified Ethiopian king and asks, "who's this brother?), taking a sand bath, pulling his shirt over his head as a passing truck makes a miniature dust storm. How about pulling out a clothesline and flossing your - - - in public? You need to be Brad Pitt in front of a groupie audience to make something like that work and Gates is neither a man of charm nor presence. Thus the forcefulness and truthfulness of his ideas is critical.

It's not that a valid documentary cannot be built around a personality or the personal relationship of an individual to a place. It has been done often enough with success. Recall Ali Mazuri's Africa of a decade ago, or more recently, the PBS series on Speke and Burton. But Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is not Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. As I recall, Burton (explorer, linguist, Scholar of the Koran scholar, etc.) couldn't manage a sand bath but was lanced through the cheek in Somalia. Gates shrouding himself with his tee shirt evoked in me the image of Burton in an ihram and other Arab disguises. Burton faced enormous physical hardship in Africa and was at ease there. Gates' obvious lack of ease at simply being in Africa was so apparent that just being privy to it was unsettling for me and the audiences with whom I discussed the programs; and his willingness, along with Colonel Blimp, to go on record as the last two persons to wear short pants in Africa was a poignant antique of an age yet to pass. (In West Africa, that is the attire of school boys.) Yet he is apparently still unaware of the proper dress codes and contexts for them when meeting an Asantehene and other African leaders.

He certainly is blatantly tactless with his glibness and when it comes to grinding his axes. In this regard, what I found most distressing about the entire debacle was the accusatory and patronizing dialogues in which he wants to put words into the mouths of Africans. He became indignant when Zands stood their ground on their cultural definition of self rather than the one based on colour which Gates virtually insisted they accept. He wears a tee shirt with a Hebrew inscription when visiting Ethiopian Jews and then asks if they speak Hebrew. Do Roman Catholics speak Latin?

It would have been informative to remind us of the fact that both Ethiopian Judaism and Christianity are isolates which due to their combined segregation and antiquity make them truer to the original forms than most sects practiced today. The Akan, Edo and Yoruba are attacked for "selling their own people." Gates has now taken it upon himself to condemn contemporary Africans for the "selling of their own people" by their ancestors. (He and his family must have some interesting dinner talk.) What is he, a white apologist for the peculiar institution? Professor Gates, why don't you tell this to the Germans because the Jews are white people; or the Serbs because the Croatians are white; the Irish Catholics and Protestants; the Basques and Spanish....... Apparently retarditaire whites and Gates think that skin colour makes one responsible for one's own people. Does he rail at his wife because her ancestors sold, bought and enslaved his ancestors? It would appear to me that while we cannot be responsible for the sins of our fathers, we can be accountable for them and by that I mean not think and do things that would make it possible for slavery and its legacy to repeat itself.

On this point it is refreshing to know that a White man, guided by nothing other than his sense of right can have more sense about these issues than Gates. Turn to the page in Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family in which he, the descendant of slave owners, and the Kaba clan, descendants of slave brokers, go down to the dock of no return and pour libations of reconciliation for each others ancestors at Ball's suggestion.

A racialist element among the decision-makers at PBS and Gates, have conspired, willy-nilly I am sure, to present this shadow play. I can't imagine such an irresponsible lack of quality control on some comparable program about say, ancient Greece or the Celts. Gates did praiseworthy work in literature, became highly visible and Whites now use this high profile visibility as the criteria to make him expert in everything Black. It is an open admissions ticket of a sort as the most knowledgeable Black about every and Anything Black. This is the definition of DHN and eventually it will lead to the powers that be replacing Gates with Queen Lateefah. Yo, she be Black, she be born on Jump Street, she know all about Black literary criticism.

Citation Format

Preston, George Nelson. (2000). WONDERGATES. West Africa Review: 1 , 2.[iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.2.17]