The history of the African continent, home to 15% of the world's population, remains
a mystery for many.
Historian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., admits in his youth it was a place
he rarely considered.
Now he has a new PBS documentary series that reveals great moment in the continent's pre-Colonial
history.
It's called Africa's Great Civilizations.
He joins me now to discuss that work.
Henry Louis Gates, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me on.
So you tackled all kinds of African American history, but this goes all the way back, way
back to cave paintings.
So what was the genesis of this idea?
I wanted to do a comprehensive history of Africa, and this is it.
We had to think about it for 5 years, it took us a year to shoot.
We went to 12 African countries, and it's exhilarating.
Six hours on 200,000 years of African history.
When I was growing up, Africa was a place to be avoided, even for Black people.
Our images of Africa came from Tarzan and Ramar and Cheenah of the Jungle, and we were
embarrassed about it.
You talked about the effort to kind of distance, right?
It was used as an insult within the community.
Black Africans?
Oh my God, that was like the N word, but all that began to change in 1960 when I was 10
years old and 17 African nations became independent, and I had a very smart geography teacher,
Mr. McHenry, our only male teacher, and he was very much up on current events, and I
was very much into being a good student, and a lot of the current events featured these
emerging African countries, so I memorize romantic sounding, rhythmic names, like Moise
Tshombe, Patrice Lamumba, and Mogadishu - words like that - and I became fascinated with Africa.
Slowly but surely, making my way to Africa when I was 19 years old.
I think we can hear that in your introduction.
I want to play a clip of that.
Okay.
Africa is the home of the world's most ancient civilizations.
Far too often, Africa has been thought of as isolated, static, but nothing could be
further from the truth.
The roots of every family tree can be traced here to Africa.
So does the history of civilization.
In this series, we'll be going a journey to 200,000 years of history.
We'll explore great cities, built along Africa's trade networks, discover art of unparalleled
beauty and technical brilliance, and marvel at thousands of years of breathtaking architecture.
What struck me watching this is that you use words like merchants and trade and engineering.
It seems you were really trying to stress the achievements here.
Why do you think those achievements have been obscured?
I think the achievements of Africa have been obscured, first of all, because of slavery.
12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, between the 16th century
and the 19th century.
12.5 million Africans shipped to enslavement in the New World, and then, after 1884, there
was a conference in Berlin, when European powers sat down, looked at an empty map of
Africa, and basically, carved it up like you'd carve up a pizza pie, and said, here Spain,
what do you want?
You're Italy, what do you want?
You're England, what do you want?
You're King Leopold, you personally got the Congo.
So they had to create a fiction of Africa as an empty place or a static place, full
of primitive people who were stuck in time, and those were ostensibly, our ancestors.
But the pre-Columbian world knew all about Africa.
There wasn't a moment, really, since the ancient Egyptians when northern Africa, the Mediterranean
world, and the larger world, was not in touch with African civilizations or some part of
Africa.
The Red Sea was a highway, the Nile was a highway, the Sahara was a highway, particularly
after the domestication of camels.
And the Indian Ocean, a highway.
The Emperor of of Great Zimbabwe ate off porcelain plates that came from China.
That's the 13th century.
I mean, it's incredible.
Most of Europe's gold, between 1000 AD and 1500 AD, came from west Africa.
All of our history was stolen from us.
We were robbed of a history because Europeans wanted to justify an economic order which
depended on our ancestors' exploitation.
It's almost as though you are taking these stories out of the footnotes of history and
elevating them.
That's an excellent metaphor.
We need for the facts of African and African American history to be a normal, naturalized
part of the curriculum, to be moved from the footnotes up into the text.
Black History Month is great, but we need every day to be Black History Month, and what's
that mean?
When you take a course in the history of civilization, Africa should be there as well.
Now, I'm not talking about making claims that won't stand scholarly scrutiny; I mean facts
about the history of the world which every educated person should know.
Knowing history is empowering, and Africa stands poised on the verge of resurgence,
a new renaissance.
As you said,15% of the world's population lives on the great African continent, and
knowing about this rich and splendid history will be crucial to the individual self-esteem
of every African and to the collective, as it were, sense of itself of the African people.