INTERVIEW WITH ALI
MAZRUI
(1994) - Summary
Agatucci, Cora, ed. Summary of
Interview with Ali Mazrui. [Audiotape, Boulder, CO; 1994.]
National Public Radio, 11 March 1994.
Ali
Mazrui is a respected African historian and scholar.
This interview was conducted on March 11, 1994, in Boulder, Colorado, and
aired on National Public Radio. Mazrui
created and narrated the acclaimed and controversial PBS TV series The
Africans (1986), and edited the book of the same title.
Partially funded by National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the project
was denounced by then NEH Chair Lynn Cheney because it sometimes presented views
critical of the U.S. Mazrui’s
most recent work (as of 1994) is Africa Since 1935, part of the UNESCO
General History of Africa, a multi-authored series of which Mazrui is the
General Editor. In
the audiotape interview summarized below, Mazrui discusses the tension-filled dialogue between Africa and
the West regarding African history and media coverage of African contemporary
events.
[
Revising/Correcting
Western-produced Histories of Africa]
Mazrui
cites the recent work of Martin Bernal, especially Black Athenian, which
posits the debt of the ancient Greeks to ancient Africa (especially ancient
Egypt). Bernal argues that this
debt to ancient Africans and Semites has been de-emphasized because of Western
racist attitudes toward Africa and the desire to deny that Western civilization
has been influenced or shaped by African sources .
[
Images
of African History]
In response to a question about Africa’s images of itself,
Mazrui states there are 3 schools of African history.
The first two respond directly to Western accounts of African history,
which have traditionally presented Africa’s past as full of simple,
“primitive” peoples that have not yet evolved to the West’s definitions of
high levels of civilization:
- “Romantic
Primitivism”:
responds to Western images of African history by celebrating the simple
African herdsman—accepting Western accounts of African history as full of
simple “primitive” peoples, but
rejecting what the West values (ie., complex,
monument building empires as the mark of advanced civilizations).
- “Romantic
Gloriana”:
responds to Western images of African history by celebrating African
castle-builders and empires, thereby rejecting Western accounts of African
history (as full of simple “primitive” peoples), but accepting what the
West values (ie. complex, monument-building empires as the mark of advanced
civilizations) and trying to show that Africa’s past does meet these
Western definitions of advanced civilizations.
- A
"Third School"
(Mazrui places himself here): “look at the facts of African
history”—both the African herdsmen and the castlebuilders are
“facts” of African history—and “forget the West,” its distorted
images of African history, and its values.
[“Definitions belong to the definers,” as African American Nobel
prizewinner Toni Morrison has observed; Mazrui thinks Africans should define
themselves rather than letting others—i.e. the West—define them.]
[Western Media
Coverage of African Current Events]
Mazrui
discusses a case of Western media
“disinformation” in its coverage of modern-day African events. The
example suggests that Western audiences often gain distorted, sensationalized,
and inaccurate images of contemporary Africa from Western media.
Mazrui is especially concerned that Africans themselves rely on Western
news sources for information about Africa.
Mazrui bemoans the demise of the UNESCO attempt to establish a “new
[world] information order,” largely because the U.S. withdrew its support.
"ISSUES
IN AFRICAN HISTORY" (James Giblin, 1999) - EXCERPTS
Giblin, James (Dept. of
History, Univ. of Iowa). "Issues in African History." Rev.
2003. Art and Life in Africa Project. Univ. of Iowa,
School of Art & Art History, Iowa City, IA. 2003. 1 Jan. 2003
<http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/history/giblinhistory.html>.
"Like
the art of all peoples, the art of Africans expresses values, attitudes, and
thought which are the products of their past experience. For that reason, the
study of their art provides a way of learning about their history. Through
the study of African art we can study the questions which have long
preoccupied historians of Africa. This essay -- written by an historian who
studies the African past -- presents an introduction to these questions. Its
purpose is to encourage students to use their knowledge of African art to
think about issues in African history.
[Racial
Stereotypes]
"As
students of African art begin to consider the African past, they must also
consider how Western conceptions of 'race' and 'racial' difference have
influenced our notions of the African past. These ideas, which have
usually contrasted the presumed inferiority of black peoples with the
superiority of whites, arose in Western societies as Europeans sought to
justify their enslavement of Africans and the subsequent colonization of
Africa. Historians now recognize that ideas of racial inferiority have
inspired the belief that in the past African peoples lived in a state of
primitive barbarism. At the same time, they have realized that many of the
European writings which they use to reconstruct the African past -- such as
accounts by nineteenth-century missionaries and travelers, for example -- are
themselves tainted by these same notions of African inferiority.
[African
Perspectives]
"This
realization has led historians to seek out alternative sources of information
less influenced by European preoccupation with racial difference. These
alternative sources include writings by Africans* (which are found in
only a few portions of Sub-Saharan Africa before the twentieth
century), the much fuller bodies of oral tradition which are found
throughout Africa, the vocabularies and structures of African languages
themselves, and the physical artifacts uncovered by archaeologists. African
art is also one of these alternative sources of information. Like the other
alternative sources, it helps us to understand African history not from the
standpoint of Europeans, but from the perspective of Africans themselves. . .
."
[Challenging
the Tribal Model of the African Past]
"Perhaps no idea about the African past is as persistent and
misleading as the idea that Africans traditionally lived in isolated and
homogenous 'tribes.' This idea implies that connections among different
societies, language groups and regions were unimportant. It also implies that
Africans lived in a politically undeveloped condition, for 'tribes' are
usually assumed to be based on kinship and genealogical descent (they might be
thought of as very large extended families). Thus African 'tribal' life might
be regarded as being governed not, as in Western societies, by sophisticated
political institutions, but rather by primordial bonds of kinship and
affinity. An additional implication of this 'tribal' conception of African
life is that difference and conflict existed between different
"tribes" (hence the idea of "tribal" warfare), but not
within tribes. Consequently, the 'tribal' model of the African past leads
us to overlook the importance of inter-regional connections, to underestimate
the political sophistication of African cultures, and to ignore the importance
of conflict between social classes, genders, and generations in African life.
"In
recent decades, historians have questioned the 'tribal' model by investigating
inter-regional connections, political institutions, and the multiplicity of
social identities which existed in the African past. Historical research
has been particularly effective in demonstrating that, far from living in
isolated "tribes," Africans developed institutions which maintained
political, social and economic relationships across wide regions.
Consequently, African identities were shaped by both village life and the
world of road and market, and by highly localized concerns as well as
inter-regional relationships. This historical research poses a formidable
challenge for students of African art history. It not only challenges them to
seek manifestations of these aspects of social life in African art, but also
forces them to ask whether we should be satisfied with the conventional ethnic
or 'tribal' classification of African art."
Read
Prof. Giblin's online article in its entirety
for more issues in African art history:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/history/giblinhistory.html
Courtesy of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 2003:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/index.html
Art
and Life in Africa Online - Table of Contents:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/index.html
INTERVIEW WITH CHINUA ACHEBE
(2000) - EXCERPTS
Bacon, Katie. " An African Voice." Interview
with Chinua Achebe. Atlantic Monthly 2
Aug. 2000. Atlantic Online, Atlantic Group, 2000. 1 Jan.
2003 <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-08-02.htm>
[Access now restricted to Subscribers, Aug. 2004 ~CA]
"Chinua
Achebe's emergence as "the founding father of African literature ... in the
English language," in the words of the Harvard University philosopher K.
Anthony Appiah, could very well be traced to his encounter in the early fifties
with Joyce Cary's novel Mister Johnson, set in Achebe's native Nigeria.
Achebe read it while studying at the University College in Idaban during the
last years of British colonial rule, and in a curriculum full of Shakespeare,
Coleridge, and Wordsworth, Mister Johnson stood out as one of the few
books about Africa. Time magazine had recently declared Mister Johnson
the "best book ever written about Africa," but Achebe and his
classmates had quite a different reaction. The students saw the Nigerian hero as
an "embarrassing nitwit," as Achebe writes in his new book, Home
and Exile, and detected in the Irish author's descriptions of Nigerians
"an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and
mockery." Mister Johnson, Achebe writes, "open[ed] my eyes to
the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house
or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story."
In 1958, Achebe responded with his own novel about Nigeria,
Things
Fall Apart, which was one of the first books to tell the story of
European colonization from an African perspective. (It has since become a
classic, published in fifty languages around the world.) Things Fall Apart
marked a turning point for African authors, who in the fifties and sixties began
to take back the narrative of the so-called "dark continent."
Home and Exile, which grew out of three lectures Achebe gave at Harvard
in 1998, describes this transition to a new era in literature. The book is both
a kind of autobiography and a rumination on the power stories have to create a
sense of dispossession or to confer strength, depending on who is wielding the
pen. Achebe depicts his gradual realization that Mister Johnson was just
one in a long line of books written by Westerners that presented Africans to the
world in a way that Africans didn't agree with or recognize, and he examines the
"process of 're-storying' peoples who had been knocked silent by all kinds
of dispossession." He ends with a hope for the twenty-first century -- that
this "re-storying" will continue and will eventually result in a
"balance of stories among the world's peoples."
[Q:]
In Home and Exile, you talk about the negative ways in which British authors
such as Joseph Conrad [in Heart of Darkness] and Joyce Cary [in Mister
Johnson] portrayed Africans over the centuries. What
purpose did that portrayal serve?
[Achebe:] It was really a straightforward case of setting us up, as it were.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a
body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in
very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the
slave trade and slavery. The cruelties of this trade gradually began to trouble
many people in Europe. Some people began to question it. But it was a profitable
business, and so those who were engaged in it began to defend it -- a lobby of
people supporting it, justifying it, and excusing it. It was difficult to excuse
and justify, and so the steps that were taken to justify it were rather extreme.
You had people saying, for instance, that these people weren't really human,
they're not like us. Or, that the slave trade was in fact a good thing for them,
because the alternative to it was more brutal by far.
"And therefore, describing this fate that the Africans would have had back home
became the motive for the literature that was created about Africa. Even after
the slave trade was abolished, in the nineteenth century, something like this
literature continued, to serve the new imperialistic needs of Europe in relation
to Africa. This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the
twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story.
[Q:] You
write in Home and Exile, "After a short period of dormancy and a
little self-doubt about its erstwhile imperial mission, the West may be ready to
resume its old domineering monologue in the world." Are some Western
writers backpedaling and trying to tell their own version of African stories
again?
[Achebe:] "This tradition that I'm talking about has been in force for
hundreds of years, and many generations have been brought up on it. What was
preached in the churches by the missionaries and their agents at home all
supported a certain view of Africa. When a tradition gathers enough strength to
go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day. When the African
response began, I think there was an immediate pause on the European side, as if
they were saying, Okay, we'll stop telling this story, because we see there's
another story. But after a while there's a certain beginning again, not quite a
return but something like a reaction to the African story that cannot, of
course, ever go as far as the original tradition that the Africans are
responding to. There's a reaction to a reaction, and there will be a further
reaction to that. And I think that's the way it will go, until what I call a
balance of stories is secured. And this is really what I personally wish this
century to see -- a balance of stories where every people will be able to
contribute to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other
people's accounts. This is not to say that nobody should write about anybody
else -- I think they should, but those that have been written about should also
participate in the making of these stories.
[Q:] And that's what started with Things Fall Apart and other books
written by Africans around the 1950s.
[Achebe:] Yes, that's what it turned out to be. It was not actually clear to
us at the time what we were doing. We were simply writing our story. But the
bigger story of how these various accounts tie in, one with the other, is only
now becoming clear. We realize and recognize that it's not just colonized people
whose stories have been suppressed, but a whole range of people across the globe
who have not spoken. It's not because they don't have something to say, it
simply has to do with the division of power, because storytelling has to do with
power. Those who win tell the story; those who are defeated are not heard. But
that has to change. It's in the interest of everybody, including the winners, to
know that there's another story. If you only hear one side of the story, you
have no understanding at all . . . .
[Q:]
There
are those who say that media coverage of Africa is one-sided -- that it focuses
on the famines, social unrest, and political violence, and leaves out coverage
of the organizations and countries that are working. Do you agree? If so, what
effect does this skewed coverage have? Is it a continuation of the anti-Africa
British literature you talk about in Home and Exile?
[Achebe:] "Yes, I do agree. I think the result has been to create a fatigue,
whether it's charity fatigue or fatigue toward being good to people who are less
fortunate. I think that's a pity. The reason for this concentration on the
failings of Africans is the same as what we've been talking about -- this
tradition of bad news, or portraying Africa as a place that is different from
the rest of the world, a place where humanity is really not recognizable. When
people hear the word Africa, they have come to expect certain images to follow.
If you see a good house in Lagos, Nigeria, it doesn't quite fit the picture you
have in your head, because you are looking for the slum -- that is what the
world expects journalists covering a city in Africa to come back with.
"Now, if you are covering America, you are not focusing on slums every day of
your life. You see a slum once in a while, maybe you talk about it, but the rest
of the time you are talking about other things. It is that ability to see the
complexity of a place that the world doesn't seem to be able to take to Africa,
because of this baggage of centuries of reporting about Africa. The result is
the world doesn't really know Africa. If you are an African or you live in
Africa, this stands out very clearly to you, you are constantly being bombarded
with bad news, and you know that there is good news in many places. This doesn't
mean that the bad news doesn't exist, that's not what I'm saying. But it exists
alongside other things. Africa is not simple -- people want to simplify it.
Africa is very complex. Very bad things go on -- they should be covered -- but
there are also some good things.
"This is something that comes with this imbalance of power that we've been
talking about. The people who consume the news that comes back from the rest of
the world are probably not really interested in hearing about something that is
working. Those who have the ability to send crews out to bring back the news are
in a position to determine what the image of the various places should be,
because they have the resources to do it. Now, an African country doesn't have a
television crew coming to America, for instance, and picking up the disastrous
news. So America sends out wonderful images of its success, power, energy, and
politics, and the world is bombarded in a very partial way by good news about
the powerful and bad news about the less powerful."
[Q:] You mentioned that literature was used to justify slavery and
imperialism. What is this negative coverage of Africa being used to justify now?
[Achebe:] "It's going to be used to justify inaction,
which is what this fatigue is all about. Why bother about Africa? Nothing works
there, or nothing ever will work. There is a small minority of people who think
that way, and they may be pushing this attitude. But even if nobody was pushing
it, it would simply happen by itself. This is a case of sheer inertia, something
that has been happening for a long time just goes on happening, unless something
stops it. It becomes a habit of mind.
. .
. .
[Q:] Has living here [in the
U.S.] changed the way you think about Nigeria?
[Achebe:] "It must have, but this is not something you can weigh and measure.
I've been struck, for instance, by the impressive way that political transition
is managed in America. Nobody living here can miss that if you come from a place
like Nigeria which is unable so far to manage political transitions in peace. I
wish Nigeria would learn to do this. There are other things, of course, where
you wish Americans would learn from Nigerians: the value of people as people,
the almost complete absence of race as a factor in thought, in government.
That's something that I really wish for America, because no day passes here
without some racial factor coming up somewhere, which is a major burden on this
country."
Learn
more about Achebe's home country Nigeria:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Nigeria.html
Learn more about Achebe's people the Igbo:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Igbo.html
Courtesy
of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 1999
Works Cited
Agatucci, Cora (Prof. of English, Humanities
Dept., Central Oregon Community College). African Timelines: History, Orature, Literature, and
Film. Humanities 211: Culture & Literature of Africa, Central Oregon
Community College, Bend, OR; Fall 2007. 15 Sep. 2007
<
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimelinetoc.htm
>.
Agatucci, Cora, ed.
Summary of Interview with Ali Mazrui. National Public Radio, 11 March 1994.
[Audiotape, Boulder, CO; 1994.]
Bacon, Katie. " An
African Voice." Interview with Chinua Achebe. Atlantic Monthly 2
August 2000. Atlantic Online, Atlantic Group, 2000. 1 Jan. 2003
<http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-08-02.htm>.
Giblin, James (Dept. of
History, Univ. of Iowa). "Issues in African History." Rev.
2003. Art and Life in Africa Project. School of Art & Art History,
Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. 2003. 1 Jan. 2003
<http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/history/giblinhistory.html>.
The Story of Africa.
BBC World Service [n.d.]. 11 Aug. 2004 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index.shtml>.
Wonders of the African World with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. PBS Online:
Public Broadcasting Service. 1999. Jan. 2000 <http://www.pbs.org/wonders/>.