Ali Mazrui's book The Africans is, as he puts it, "both the mother and the child of the television program": the book was developed to accompany his television series. The Africans, and related course (which consists of cassettes of the television series, plus Mazrui's book, a study guide, a faculty guide, and a reader that contains a collection of essays). The faculty guide begins: "The American broadcast of The Africans, a series of nine one-hour television programs, provides you with a dynamic teaching resource and an unusual opportunity to support your teaching efforts about the continent of Africa." The package is being heavily promoted and is likely to be used in classrooms from junior high on up.
According to the faculty guide, the basic content areas include: environment, geography, families, culture, ancient history, history, colonialism, slavery, religion, technology and development, natural resources, agriculture, climate, government, economics, international affairs, and a host of other goodies. Sounds straightforward enough.
But The Africans has provoked enormous controversy.
In case you missed it when it aired last fall, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer aptly described the series this way:
"The Africans" is nine hours of historically ambitious, technically superb (the sound track alone is worth the price of admission), visually arresting political tendentiousness. The subtitle is "A Triple Heritage." The theme (I simplify only slightly): indigenous heritage, good; Islamic, better; Western, worst....Is there any evil under the African sun that Mazrui will not lay at the feet of the West and its bastard son, capitalism?...The 1980 massacre of Liberia's leadership by revolutionaries? "Carnage by the sea. The West's technology of destruction still decimates Africa." The (Liberian) executioners, you see, shot their victims with Western rifles.
Writing from Nairobi, Kenya, Washington Post foreign correspondent Blaine Harden reacted to the series this way:
Unfortunately, for what may well amount to the biggest blast of Africana that most Americans ever will have, much of what Mazrui has to say is misleading, if not erroneous...."The Africans" fails to explain a tide of economic reforms sweeping across the continent, a free-market movement that could prove to be the most influential change in Africa since independence....Yet, to American viewers, the most egregious omission in "The Africans" is the lack of any assessment of why a million people starved to death in Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985.
Suzanne Garment in the Wall Street Journal:
[When public-TV officials] do not see why explaining to the U.S. about its moral equivalence with Col. Qaddafi [is crossing] the line - they are asking for enemies."
Guidelines for Public Funding
The Africans was produced by public television station WETA, Washington, D.C., and by the BBC, London. Funding came from several sources that spend U.S. taxpayers' money: the Corporation
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