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Why I Wrote "The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa."
By Milton Allimadi
Why is Hollywood still making a movie like "The Legend of Tarzan " in the 21st Century given the racist depictions of Africa in the original Tarzan movies?
Even the inclusion of Samuel L. Jackson's character, as the Black sidekick to Tarzan (played by Alexander Skarsgard) doesn't erase the reality of the origin and purpose of the Tarzan character; in fact it's an admission that the film's makers know that they are resuscitating a discredited character.
What's more the notion that Tarzan, a White hero --reared by gorillas in Africa and now living in 19th century England-- has to go to Africa to save the "natives" from the evil agents and functionaries of wicked King Leopold of the Belgians is just preposterous.
It simply reinforces the stereotype that Black people everywhere can't do things for themselves.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan in 1912 all of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia was under European control. While many people saw Tarzan movies as "entertainment" the representation of Africa as "primitive" and "backward" was meant to justify its colonization, domination and exploitation by Europeans who supposedly went there only to "spread civilization" and the "gospel."
In fact the history of conquest and plunder is written in blood and well told in a number of books including Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. " In addition to sanitizing the crimes against Africa depicting Africans as sub-humans also served another insidious purpose, as Malcolm X , who was a brilliant student of the media's power of demonization liked reminding his audiences. He once said that when Europeans controlled Africa they "projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light; jungle, savages, cannibals. Nothing civilized and naturally it was negative to you and me. And you and I began to hate it. We didn't want anybody to tell us anything about Africa much less call us an African. And in hating Africa and the African we ended up hating ourselves without even realizing it."
My book "The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa" (Black Star Books) deals with the history of demonization of Africans in Western media from the 18th century to the contemporary era. It critiques the "Journals" of the Europeans who traveled to "discover" lands where Africans had lived from the beginning of humanity and who renamed lakes and mountains after European monarchs and paved the way for later colonization. The book also critiques writings about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times and magazines like The National Geographic, beginning in the 19th century. The book analyzes letters exchanged between New York Times editors and reporters sent to Africa beginning in the 1950s at the beginning of the decolonization process; many of the letters were very racist.
I first published the book in 2003 (Black Star Books).
On August 15, I will publish the second edition of the book. The new edition contains a few additional chapters, including a new introduction that addresses the biased coverage of the NATO war on Libya in Western media (most of the U.S. corporate media outlets except The Wall Street Journal ignored the targeted killings of Black Libyans including the depopulation of the city of Tawergha by the brutal Western-backed insurgents who overthrew and killed Muammar al-Quathafi and turned Libya into a failed state).
I hope you support the book by ordering a copy now and by spreading the word. The money raised will be used for printing and shipping the books and for creating a dedicated website after this campaign so people can continue purchasing the book directly from Black Star Books.
If you're also interested in organizing a book signing or hosting a reading in an informal setting, including your home or apartment and inviting guests, please send me an e-mail message.
The book is paper back and contains 100 pages and is $20 per copy. It will start shipping out on August 15.
Please allow a week for shipment beginning August 15 and two to three weeks for international shipments.
For international orders please add another $10 per copy.
For people who want to purchase by Money Order please make it payable to Black Star Books and mail to: P.O. Box 1472, New York, N.Y., 10274, USA.
There will be an e-book version available at a later date.
(The book won't be available via Amazon.com as the company retains almost 60% of the proceeds when you include shipping and handling making it cost ineffective. There are copies of the original edition that are still sold through Amazon from third-parties unconnected to me).
Over the next several weeks, I will post samples from each chapter from the second edition of the book.
I will also post reviews of the new edition of the book as they become available. Here are comments about the first edition:
WBAI-Pacifica Radio (Gary Byrd)
“Milton Allimadi unveils the racial stereotyping which gave birth to 'all the news that's fit to print…Milton Allimadi takes his scalpel…and unveils the racial stereotyping of African people by the mainstream media.”
GhanaWeb (Francis Kwarteng)
"Mr. Milton Allimadi’s manifold arguments and stiff intellectualism in defense of Africa probably places his thin volume on investigative journalism, “The Hearts of Darkness: How White Racists Created the Racist Image of Africa,” on the same steric plane as Edward Said’s “Orientalism”; Cheikh Anta Diop’s “African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality”; Bernal Martin’s triumvirate volumes: “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece)”; Noam Chomsky’s “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies”; and, Neil Henry’s “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.”
Amazon.com (Karol Nielsen)
"This is a powerful analysis of news coverage of Africa, uncovering how racism shaped stories. One of the most enduring memories of this book is how the conflict in Rwanda was reduced to a "beauty contest."
Amazon.com (Ike Egudu)
"Hearts of Darkness is a must read. Allimadi uses numerous examples consisting of newspaper articles, anecdotes, interviews, correspondence letters, and excerpts from books to show how white writers and ultimately, major western news organizations, over time, shaped an enduring racist image of Africa. If you are not compelled by the quality of each individual example in the book, fine! What cannot be easily disputed is that the sheer volume of the examples Allimadi provides to support his claim, at the very least reveals a historical pattern of sharply irresponsible reporting of Africa by white writers and the western press."
The following introduction is a slightly edited version from the original 2003 edition and offers some insight into my work.
Original Introduction: Crude and Ugly*
"Africa, long thought of as breeding ground for the occult, was more than matched by Europe, with its own manias for alchemy, astrology and witch-burning. In the 15th Century, superstitious parishioners often danced among the graves in churchyards in hopes of protecting themselves from the plaguewhile the skulls of plague victims peered quizzically at them."--Basil Davidson, in "African Kingdoms" (1966)
I wrote "The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa," in order to fight the stereotypical racist representations of Black people and ignorance that still persists in contemporary media and the cover-ups that go with it. During the course of my research, I encountered some gatekeepers who prefer to defend the status quo. I hope that lay readers, students of history and journalism, as well as practicing journalists and editors, can learn from this book.
Africans are still referred to as "tribal" peoples, with all the attendant negative perceptions that spring from the word; sometimes with deadly consequences. When Tutsi insurgents invaded ethnically volatile Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and the war degenerated into genocide in 1994 Western media referred to the conflict as "tribal warfare."
In an infamous article published in its April 25, 1994 issue Time magazine conjured images of cannibalism by explaining that "tribal bloodlust" was fueling the war. Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration blocked any significant intervention by the United Nations because it was believed that tribal wars are intractable and irresolvable. The Hearts of Darkness illuminates the process behind the tribalization of Africa.
Originally, I had intended to write a magazine article focusing on the evolution of The New York Times coverage of Africa entitled "Darkest Times in Africa." I had first conducted the research in 1992 while I was a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. During the course of research for my masters thesis, I gained access to the Times archives and unearthed several racist letters that had been exchanged between the newspapers foreign editor and the reporters sent to cover Africa.
One Times editor, who was involved in some of the most virulent exchanges was Emanuel Freedman, foreign editor from 1948 to 1964; a Times reporter, Homer Bigart, espoused similar racist sentiments in his letters. In one letter, when the Times sent Bigart to cover emerging independence movements in West Africa, he wrote to Freedman that he preferred writing about cannibals over Kwame Nkrumah, the hero of Ghana's independence and the country's first post-colonial prime minister.
Freedman responded with similar venom in his own letters as we will see shortly. The archival documents I obtained enriched and complemented the New York Times news clips that I had read, dating back to the nineteenth century.
At the conclusion of my research, the first magazine that I submitted my masters thesis for publication to was the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), reputed to be the bible of journalistic integrity. My paper was accepted for publication on January 26, 1992 by Michael Hoyt**, the editor, who later became executive editor. Then several months went by and I saw issues of the CJR appear without my article; on April 27 I called Hoyt and demanded to know why my paper had not yet been published.
I was surprised when Hoyt informed me, in a rather timid tone, that a decision had been made not to publish my paper. He said the editorial board, consisting of five members after long discussions had been deadlocked, with two editors voting to publish and two opposing publication. He claimed the executive editor at the time, Suzanne Levine, cast the decisive negative vote. When I asked why some editors were opposed, Hoyt said, "There was a feeling these things happened a long time ago." I was enraged and demanded to have my paper returned. I still recall the chill I felt when Hoyt asked me why I wanted it back. "After all," I recall him saying, "It's been extensively edited and its not the same as what you gave us."
To this day, I am convinced that I would never have gotten my paper back and discovered how the CJR editors had committed journalistic cowardice and betrayal, had I not immediately gone to Hoyt's office to retrieve my paper. When I read the edited version of my paper, which was in galley form in preparation for publication, I discovered that the editors had inserted the following paragraph on my behalf unbeknownst to me and without my consent:
"Recently, the Times granted me access to its archives, including correspondences from the 1950s, when the paper sent Bigart to Africa on a temporary assignment. After studying the archival material, I interviewed several present and former Times reporters. The following excerpts from that material and from lengthy interviews are not intended as an indictment of the Times whose African coverage has occasionally been distinguished but as a means of highlighting a problem that all news organizations need to address."
After reading their insertion, I could only conclude that the CJR editors were afraid of possible reaction by editors of the Times whom they did not want to offend. I decided to do the CJR editors a favor. On October 29, 1992, I sent a shorter version of my original masters paper to the Times with a letter addressed to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. In the letter, I wrote that a "bitter gripe had lodged in my chest" as a result of the CJR's journalistic betrayal because of its editors' fear of the Times. I had been made to feel as if I had committed a crime, when in fact I had gone into the paper's own archives and discovered evidence of culpability by Times editors and reporters in perpetuating racist stereotyping of Africans.
Eventually, I received a letter from Joseph Lelyveld, then the Times managing editor and later executive editor. He wrote that he was responding on behalf of Sulzberger and that, indeed, my research had unearthed articles with "crude and ugly language." He also argued that on the other hand, the Times had published insightful articles about Africa through the years citing that he too had been a part of the coverage, first as a correspondent in South Africa and later as foreign editor.
Prior to my graduation, I felt a small measure of vindication when my paper won the James Wechsler Memorial Prize from the university. After graduation in May 1992, I sent my article to several publications including The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and New York magazine. When all of them declined to publish it, I could not help recall the episode with CJR. In the meantime, students who were aware of the paper invited me to speak about it, ironically, at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and later at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
Most recently, in February 2002, I presented the paper when I was invited to Williams College in Massachusetts. My paper received a warm reception and several students asked me when I would turn the material into a book.
As it turns out, I had broadened the scope of my research over the years to include other publications in addition to the Times, such as The National Geographic, Time magazine, and Newsweek. My study now included the popular journals of the European travelers who explored Africa between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, these journals were the original media responsible for perpetuating the racist representation of Africa throughout Europe, in the Americas, Asia and even in Africa itself.
I'm not here to romanticize Africa's past. To claim that Africa was some sort of paradise before the arrival of Europeans is false and wishful thinking. There were conflicts and there were despotic regimes: yet, these do not diminish Africans' claim to humanity. There were spectacular achievements and there were great civilizations, in Egypt, in Ghana, in Songhay, in Buganda, in Zimbabwe and in many other areas that predated contact with Europeans. As my book shows, these realities were not reflected in any of the writings of the so-called explorers, European colonial officials, and later, professional journalists who wrote about Africa.
Moreover, the portrayal of Africans as superstitious savages belied the fact that Europeans themselves were very familiar with some of the practices for which they denigrated Africans. In his book "African Kingdoms" (1966), Basil Davidson a prominent British historian wrote, "Africa, long thought of as breeding ground for the occult, was more than matched by Europe, with its own manias for alchemy, astrology and witch-burning. In the 15th Century, superstitious parishioners often danced among the graves in churchyards in hopes of protecting themselves from the plague while the skulls of plague victims peered quizzically at them. During the same period, Germany was burning an average of two witches a day." i
"Europeans," Davidson added, "moreover, were constantly duped by promises of miraculous transformations and cures. Elixirs of life, magnets to attract diseases from the body, magic portions and healing fragments of the true cross were common. Even such prominent intellectuals as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon searched relentlessly for the philosophers stone, the mystical charm of alchemy supposed to transform dross into gold. Yet despite all their delusions, Europeans thought of themselves as paragons of dignity and sensibility while regarding faraway Africans as frightened primitives and painted witchdoctors."
Had I not been betrayed by CJR, would I still have embarked on the journey that resulted in this book? I believe so, because I had always been intrigued by the way the Western media have misrepresented Africans and people of African descent.
I am not so naïve to believe that any book will ever eliminate offensive and racist representations of Black people or of any other non-White peoples for that matter. There are powerful entities that benefit from the deep-seated prejudices that have historically distorted Western media's representation of Africa. The racist characterizations justified and sanitized the crimes committed against Africans, from slavery, through colonialism and through the new-colonialism now maintained by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
At the same time, books such as "The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Afric
By Milton Allimadi
Why is Hollywood still making a movie like "The Legend of Tarzan " in the 21st Century given the racist depictions of Africa in the original Tarzan movies?
Even the inclusion of Samuel L. Jackson's character, as the Black sidekick to Tarzan (played by Alexander Skarsgard) doesn't erase the reality of the origin and purpose of the Tarzan character; in fact it's an admission that the film's makers know that they are resuscitating a discredited character.
What's more the notion that Tarzan, a White hero --reared by gorillas in Africa and now living in 19th century England-- has to go to Africa to save the "natives" from the evil agents and functionaries of wicked King Leopold of the Belgians is just preposterous.
It simply reinforces the stereotype that Black people everywhere can't do things for themselves.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan in 1912 all of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia was under European control. While many people saw Tarzan movies as "entertainment" the representation of Africa as "primitive" and "backward" was meant to justify its colonization, domination and exploitation by Europeans who supposedly went there only to "spread civilization" and the "gospel."
In fact the history of conquest and plunder is written in blood and well told in a number of books including Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. " In addition to sanitizing the crimes against Africa depicting Africans as sub-humans also served another insidious purpose, as Malcolm X , who was a brilliant student of the media's power of demonization liked reminding his audiences. He once said that when Europeans controlled Africa they "projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light; jungle, savages, cannibals. Nothing civilized and naturally it was negative to you and me. And you and I began to hate it. We didn't want anybody to tell us anything about Africa much less call us an African. And in hating Africa and the African we ended up hating ourselves without even realizing it."
My book "The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa" (Black Star Books) deals with the history of demonization of Africans in Western media from the 18th century to the contemporary era. It critiques the "Journals" of the Europeans who traveled to "discover" lands where Africans had lived from the beginning of humanity and who renamed lakes and mountains after European monarchs and paved the way for later colonization. The book also critiques writings about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times and magazines like The National Geographic, beginning in the 19th century. The book analyzes letters exchanged between New York Times editors and reporters sent to Africa beginning in the 1950s at the beginning of the decolonization process; many of the letters were very racist.
I first published the book in 2003 (Black Star Books).
On August 15, I will publish the second edition of the book. The new edition contains a few additional chapters, including a new introduction that addresses the biased coverage of the NATO war on Libya in Western media (most of the U.S. corporate media outlets except The Wall Street Journal ignored the targeted killings of Black Libyans including the depopulation of the city of Tawergha by the brutal Western-backed insurgents who overthrew and killed Muammar al-Quathafi and turned Libya into a failed state).
I hope you support the book by ordering a copy now and by spreading the word. The money raised will be used for printing and shipping the books and for creating a dedicated website after this campaign so people can continue purchasing the book directly from Black Star Books.
If you're also interested in organizing a book signing or hosting a reading in an informal setting, including your home or apartment and inviting guests, please send me an e-mail message.
The book is paper back and contains 100 pages and is $20 per copy. It will start shipping out on August 15.
Please allow a week for shipment beginning August 15 and two to three weeks for international shipments.
For international orders please add another $10 per copy.
For people who want to purchase by Money Order please make it payable to Black Star Books and mail to: P.O. Box 1472, New York, N.Y., 10274, USA.
There will be an e-book version available at a later date.
(The book won't be available via Amazon.com as the company retains almost 60% of the proceeds when you include shipping and handling making it cost ineffective. There are copies of the original edition that are still sold through Amazon from third-parties unconnected to me).
Over the next several weeks, I will post samples from each chapter from the second edition of the book.
I will also post reviews of the new edition of the book as they become available. Here are comments about the first edition:
WBAI-Pacifica Radio (Gary Byrd)
“Milton Allimadi unveils the racial stereotyping which gave birth to 'all the news that's fit to print…Milton Allimadi takes his scalpel…and unveils the racial stereotyping of African people by the mainstream media.”
GhanaWeb (Francis Kwarteng)
"Mr. Milton Allimadi’s manifold arguments and stiff intellectualism in defense of Africa probably places his thin volume on investigative journalism, “The Hearts of Darkness: How White Racists Created the Racist Image of Africa,” on the same steric plane as Edward Said’s “Orientalism”; Cheikh Anta Diop’s “African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality”; Bernal Martin’s triumvirate volumes: “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece)”; Noam Chomsky’s “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies”; and, Neil Henry’s “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.”
Amazon.com (Karol Nielsen)
"This is a powerful analysis of news coverage of Africa, uncovering how racism shaped stories. One of the most enduring memories of this book is how the conflict in Rwanda was reduced to a "beauty contest."
Amazon.com (Ike Egudu)
"Hearts of Darkness is a must read. Allimadi uses numerous examples consisting of newspaper articles, anecdotes, interviews, correspondence letters, and excerpts from books to show how white writers and ultimately, major western news organizations, over time, shaped an enduring racist image of Africa. If you are not compelled by the quality of each individual example in the book, fine! What cannot be easily disputed is that the sheer volume of the examples Allimadi provides to support his claim, at the very least reveals a historical pattern of sharply irresponsible reporting of Africa by white writers and the western press."
The following introduction is a slightly edited version from the original 2003 edition and offers some insight into my work.
Original Introduction: Crude and Ugly*
"Africa, long thought of as breeding ground for the occult, was more than matched by Europe, with its own manias for alchemy, astrology and witch-burning. In the 15th Century, superstitious parishioners often danced among the graves in churchyards in hopes of protecting themselves from the plaguewhile the skulls of plague victims peered quizzically at them."--Basil Davidson, in "African Kingdoms" (1966)
I wrote "The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa," in order to fight the stereotypical racist representations of Black people and ignorance that still persists in contemporary media and the cover-ups that go with it. During the course of my research, I encountered some gatekeepers who prefer to defend the status quo. I hope that lay readers, students of history and journalism, as well as practicing journalists and editors, can learn from this book.
Africans are still referred to as "tribal" peoples, with all the attendant negative perceptions that spring from the word; sometimes with deadly consequences. When Tutsi insurgents invaded ethnically volatile Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and the war degenerated into genocide in 1994 Western media referred to the conflict as "tribal warfare."
In an infamous article published in its April 25, 1994 issue Time magazine conjured images of cannibalism by explaining that "tribal bloodlust" was fueling the war. Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration blocked any significant intervention by the United Nations because it was believed that tribal wars are intractable and irresolvable. The Hearts of Darkness illuminates the process behind the tribalization of Africa.
Originally, I had intended to write a magazine article focusing on the evolution of The New York Times coverage of Africa entitled "Darkest Times in Africa." I had first conducted the research in 1992 while I was a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. During the course of research for my masters thesis, I gained access to the Times archives and unearthed several racist letters that had been exchanged between the newspapers foreign editor and the reporters sent to cover Africa.
One Times editor, who was involved in some of the most virulent exchanges was Emanuel Freedman, foreign editor from 1948 to 1964; a Times reporter, Homer Bigart, espoused similar racist sentiments in his letters. In one letter, when the Times sent Bigart to cover emerging independence movements in West Africa, he wrote to Freedman that he preferred writing about cannibals over Kwame Nkrumah, the hero of Ghana's independence and the country's first post-colonial prime minister.
Freedman responded with similar venom in his own letters as we will see shortly. The archival documents I obtained enriched and complemented the New York Times news clips that I had read, dating back to the nineteenth century.
At the conclusion of my research, the first magazine that I submitted my masters thesis for publication to was the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), reputed to be the bible of journalistic integrity. My paper was accepted for publication on January 26, 1992 by Michael Hoyt**, the editor, who later became executive editor. Then several months went by and I saw issues of the CJR appear without my article; on April 27 I called Hoyt and demanded to know why my paper had not yet been published.
I was surprised when Hoyt informed me, in a rather timid tone, that a decision had been made not to publish my paper. He said the editorial board, consisting of five members after long discussions had been deadlocked, with two editors voting to publish and two opposing publication. He claimed the executive editor at the time, Suzanne Levine, cast the decisive negative vote. When I asked why some editors were opposed, Hoyt said, "There was a feeling these things happened a long time ago." I was enraged and demanded to have my paper returned. I still recall the chill I felt when Hoyt asked me why I wanted it back. "After all," I recall him saying, "It's been extensively edited and its not the same as what you gave us."
To this day, I am convinced that I would never have gotten my paper back and discovered how the CJR editors had committed journalistic cowardice and betrayal, had I not immediately gone to Hoyt's office to retrieve my paper. When I read the edited version of my paper, which was in galley form in preparation for publication, I discovered that the editors had inserted the following paragraph on my behalf unbeknownst to me and without my consent:
"Recently, the Times granted me access to its archives, including correspondences from the 1950s, when the paper sent Bigart to Africa on a temporary assignment. After studying the archival material, I interviewed several present and former Times reporters. The following excerpts from that material and from lengthy interviews are not intended as an indictment of the Times whose African coverage has occasionally been distinguished but as a means of highlighting a problem that all news organizations need to address."
After reading their insertion, I could only conclude that the CJR editors were afraid of possible reaction by editors of the Times whom they did not want to offend. I decided to do the CJR editors a favor. On October 29, 1992, I sent a shorter version of my original masters paper to the Times with a letter addressed to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. In the letter, I wrote that a "bitter gripe had lodged in my chest" as a result of the CJR's journalistic betrayal because of its editors' fear of the Times. I had been made to feel as if I had committed a crime, when in fact I had gone into the paper's own archives and discovered evidence of culpability by Times editors and reporters in perpetuating racist stereotyping of Africans.
Eventually, I received a letter from Joseph Lelyveld, then the Times managing editor and later executive editor. He wrote that he was responding on behalf of Sulzberger and that, indeed, my research had unearthed articles with "crude and ugly language." He also argued that on the other hand, the Times had published insightful articles about Africa through the years citing that he too had been a part of the coverage, first as a correspondent in South Africa and later as foreign editor.
Prior to my graduation, I felt a small measure of vindication when my paper won the James Wechsler Memorial Prize from the university. After graduation in May 1992, I sent my article to several publications including The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and New York magazine. When all of them declined to publish it, I could not help recall the episode with CJR. In the meantime, students who were aware of the paper invited me to speak about it, ironically, at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and later at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
Most recently, in February 2002, I presented the paper when I was invited to Williams College in Massachusetts. My paper received a warm reception and several students asked me when I would turn the material into a book.
As it turns out, I had broadened the scope of my research over the years to include other publications in addition to the Times, such as The National Geographic, Time magazine, and Newsweek. My study now included the popular journals of the European travelers who explored Africa between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, these journals were the original media responsible for perpetuating the racist representation of Africa throughout Europe, in the Americas, Asia and even in Africa itself.
I'm not here to romanticize Africa's past. To claim that Africa was some sort of paradise before the arrival of Europeans is false and wishful thinking. There were conflicts and there were despotic regimes: yet, these do not diminish Africans' claim to humanity. There were spectacular achievements and there were great civilizations, in Egypt, in Ghana, in Songhay, in Buganda, in Zimbabwe and in many other areas that predated contact with Europeans. As my book shows, these realities were not reflected in any of the writings of the so-called explorers, European colonial officials, and later, professional journalists who wrote about Africa.
Moreover, the portrayal of Africans as superstitious savages belied the fact that Europeans themselves were very familiar with some of the practices for which they denigrated Africans. In his book "African Kingdoms" (1966), Basil Davidson a prominent British historian wrote, "Africa, long thought of as breeding ground for the occult, was more than matched by Europe, with its own manias for alchemy, astrology and witch-burning. In the 15th Century, superstitious parishioners often danced among the graves in churchyards in hopes of protecting themselves from the plague while the skulls of plague victims peered quizzically at them. During the same period, Germany was burning an average of two witches a day." i
"Europeans," Davidson added, "moreover, were constantly duped by promises of miraculous transformations and cures. Elixirs of life, magnets to attract diseases from the body, magic portions and healing fragments of the true cross were common. Even such prominent intellectuals as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon searched relentlessly for the philosophers stone, the mystical charm of alchemy supposed to transform dross into gold. Yet despite all their delusions, Europeans thought of themselves as paragons of dignity and sensibility while regarding faraway Africans as frightened primitives and painted witchdoctors."
Had I not been betrayed by CJR, would I still have embarked on the journey that resulted in this book? I believe so, because I had always been intrigued by the way the Western media have misrepresented Africans and people of African descent.
I am not so naïve to believe that any book will ever eliminate offensive and racist representations of Black people or of any other non-White peoples for that matter. There are powerful entities that benefit from the deep-seated prejudices that have historically distorted Western media's representation of Africa. The racist characterizations justified and sanitized the crimes committed against Africans, from slavery, through colonialism and through the new-colonialism now maintained by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
At the same time, books such as "The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Afric
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Milton Allimadi
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