Are you an admirer of Muammar Quaddafi? Are you looking forward to a world where Africans (from Africa) will be the new Brahmins while Westerners are the new Untouchables? Where the roles of privilege will be unabashedly reversed? Where Africans, taking their lead from OPEC at its height and Qaddafi (whose terrorist bombs in airports and discotheques are perfectly reasonable) will have the West over a barrel economically? Where they will be able to ground Western military and civilian aircraft by withholding precious minerals? Will squeeze us, sweat us, get back at the West for what it has done to them, "from slavery straight to multinational corporations?" Where South Africa will be a black-ruled state with "convincing nuclear credentials"? (in plain language: nuclear weapons)?
Are you a supporter of Jesse Jackson and his Marxist-Leninist friends? Do you, like all fair-minded people, share their impartial eagerness to "run Reagan out of Washington, and it won't be long!" (I quote Rev. Jackson.) Do you believe that a person of even partly African ancestry can live in America "for a thousand years" without becoming an American? In short, are you a vengeful black racist? Perhaps a masochistic white flagellant?
Book of Your Dreams
If so, look no further. The book of your dreams has been written. It is a companion "teaching tool" to a nine-part television series called The Africans, which aired recently on the Public Broadcasting Service. Despite contemptuous descriptions in reviews as a "pretentious fraud" (The New York Times), it is now being gobbled up for "educational" purposes by university black studies departments throughout the country. You will be particularly gratified, as you thrill to the book's racist fantasies and kindergarten Marxism, to know that the series on which it is based was funded by over $2 million in U.S. public, or public-controlled, monies - meaning our friends at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Broadcasting Service, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Greatly to her credit, Lynne Cheney, the new NEH chairman, protested vigorously when the originating PBS television station came to her for an extra $50,000 to promote this wonderful series. She not only refused the money but made the producers remove the name of her organization. PBS was conspicuously unrepentant, however, and despite the series' blatant violation of every one of its own guidelines for balanced presentation - including a requirement for contrasting points of view - has marked in bold letters on the present book: "COMPANION VOLUME TO THE ACCLAIMED PBS SERIES." One might well ask, acclaimed by whom?
Africa. Ah, Africa. It sounds romantic, perhaps, if you're thinking of a recent movie with Meryl Streep (Out of Africa, itself a circumspect distortion of the memoir by Isak Dinesen). But it isn't very romantic as you read Ali A. Mazrui, professor at universities in Michigan and Nigeria (and the television series monologuist), ranting on in fruity prose about the "soil of Africa recoiling with a whimper" at the arrogant Europeans' arrival, about it "not being the natives but the Europeans who needed to be civilized," and about steel-mill-building capitalist "sharks in search of their pound of flesh."
Malignant Fog
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