America's Other Motherland
By William Langewiesche
Published: October 24, 1999
THE AFRICAN WORLD
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Photographs by Lynn Davis.
275 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
Africa is vast and poor and far away, and in practical terms it is terribly neglected, but it remains a central place in our consciousness, the continent of the deepest human history. I've been struck on several occasions there by a fleeting sense of time yawning open, and of shared origins -- on the banks of the upper Nile and the Niger rivers, at night in the mountains of the central Sahara and on a certain sunlit trail at the edge of an equatorial forest. Despite its dangers and difficulties, Africa can feel strangely like a motherland, even to those of European descent. Some people see it as the Garden of Eden. It comes as no surprise to learn that science agrees.
For Americans, the connection is more immediate still. No matter why or how each of us has come to live in the United States, our relationship with Africa and its people is a big part of who we are as a nation. There is perhaps no better guide to Africa and its history than Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and prolific essayist. Gates imposes a certain ''ironic detachment'' on his observations. He identifies himself implicitly as an ''American Negro,'' and rejects the tendency to make greater claims for Africa than it deserves -- the 'Beethoven is Black' school of history'' -- yet he also insists that we look beyond the images of African chaos and barbarity and recognize the continent's real achievements. For 30 years Gates has traveled in Africa and studied its history and literature, and it shows. His latest book, ''Wonders of the African World,'' is a lively, if selective, introduction to the archeology and history of Africa, and a reminder as well of the subject's particular importance to the United States.
It's too bad that it is also a picture book in a slick coffee-table format, and is meant as a ''companion'' to a six-hour PBS series of the same name. The pictures are artistic but they interrupt the text. More seriously, television companionship is an uncomfortable role for what is often a subtle and absorbing narrative, and it diminishes the final product with the suspicion that the book is an afterthought. Gates's asides about his experiences as a television correspondent are endearingly candid, but they do not mitigate the concern that he has been limited here to the sort of explorations that make for good video but do not fully exploit the freedom and power of the written word. Gates is a personable man, and he clearly enjoyed the company of the TV crews that traveled with him on the six trips dedicated to this project, but perhaps even he wished that for this book he could have escaped the cameras and walked more lightly.
But these are quibbles. ''Wonders of the African World'' is an excellent book. Gates writes with concentration and clarity, and anticipates the questions that arise in the wary reader's mind, delivering the answers at just the right time. In a powerful first chapter on the meaning of Africa to him personally, he establishes the authority and trust that is necessary to lead the way across some politically tricky ground. The chapters that follow explore the ancient Nubian empires of the Nile, the early history of Christianity and black civilizations in Ethiopia and the story of Timbuktu, the once-great university and trading center of West Africa.
Though Gates is clearly fascinated by this history, he never loses sight of the related and for us perhaps equally compelling issue of racial identity and how Africa defines itself. His book is most interesting in the second half, where it turns to the East African coast and Zanzibar for an intricate discussion of the multinational Swahili culture -- a culture that has repeatedly changed its identity according to the exigencies of the times. Faced with such confusion, Gates writes: ''The Swahili have always defined their collective identity in cultural terms rather than racial terms, and neither Eurocentric nor Afrocentric interpretations have been able to pigeonhole them into neat definitions. Their identity is inclusive and hybrid, which is also true of more African ethnicities than is commonly imagined. . . . In spite of the apparent tensions within Swahili history and in Swahili historiography, perhaps it is the very way that the Swahili have reimagined and forgotten their origins time and time again with such conviction that forces us to look at the way we self-righteously imagine our own.'' This is the sort of thinking that we can hope will be a prelude to a return without cameras for a deeper examination of American and African notions of identity.
If so, Gates will have a lot of work to do, because he'll then need to return for an entirely different book based on the chapter that follows, a stunning examination of the North American slave trade, of African complicity and of the effects of this atrocity on the people of both the old world and the new. It is the strongest part of a strong book, and must have been the most difficult to film. Gates writes: ''Unlike guilt, privilege is heritable, and so, too, is the lack of it: it is from the lingering consequences of a systematic, legalized deprivation that such a large part of the African American people will be struggling to emerge a century hence. But who can say when black Africa, its people brutalized for centuries by the slave trade and its resources then plundered by an additional century of colonialism, who can say when Africa will escape the effects of its past?''
But the book is not ultimately pessimistic. Gates concludes it with a chapter on the most recent form of African slavery -- apartheid and the intentional denial of African history that was an essential part of that arrangement. In a discussion that the reader understands is as much about the traditions of race and segregation in the United States, he writes, ''While the political strictures of apartheid may have been dismantled, the effects of the old order on the consciousness of South Africa's people -- including their understanding of their nation's history -- will take much longer to undo.'' That of course is true here, too. The optimistic view is that Henry Louis Gates is on the right track, and that work like this may help American readers to see Africa whole.