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Historian Astray
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12749 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
3,499 Words |
| Author
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Lewis H. Gann
Lewis H. Gann is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. |
The ancestors of Africa are angry" - Ali A. Mazrui expostulates at the beginning of his nine-part television series, now embodied in a full-scale book. Africa since independence has experienced political violence, ecological degradation, and economic failure. The continent is in the throes of dis-Africanization, Westernization, and spiritual alienation. Things fall apart.
What has gone wrong? According to Mazrui, Africa bears the burden of a disparate heritage - its own indigenous culture, the Islamic religion, and the Western legacy. Mazrui regards himself as the product of these three forces. Coming from a distinguished Muslim family of Swahili provenance in Kenya, he was educated at British colonial school and now teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Culturally he is a Westerner, but at the same time he professes a special affinity for Africa's true ancestors, the ancients, who supposedly dwelled in harmony with nature and were endowed with a profound spiritual comprehension of life, death, and eternity.
As Mazrui sees it, Islam and Africa's ancient traditions gave life. Africa's Western heritage, by contrast, was disruptive, a force for disintegration, a tale of cultural rape and robbery. Westerners, for example, achieved prosperity for themselves by "riding on the backs of Black slaves on distant plantations" (p.160). The effects of the slave trade were disastrous, playing havoc with population patterns and social institutions in western Africa.
Westerners, an ignoramus might imagine, then at least should be given credit for ending the slave trade and for establishing an imperial Pax in Africa that put the slavers out of business. Recognitions might be owed also to those Americans who fought a bloody civil war to end slavery in the United States. But no. Westerners acted only from the worst of motives. "With urbanization of the West, one did not have to brave the seas to risk the diseases of West Africa to get cheap labor....The high technology of wage labor had made the high morality of abolitionism possible at last" (p.160).
What followed, according to Mazrui, was the long night of colonial domination. Colonialism degraded the Africans, robbed them of political independence, and demeaned their cultural heritage. The Western colonialists stripped Africa of its mineral wealth, impeded African technological development in a great variety of ways, disrupted African society, and prevented the independent industrial takeoff that might otherwise have occurred in West Africa. There was no genuine
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