People Magazine Excerpt…
“For too many Americans, Africa is a distorted collage of images from fantastic Tarzan
films and horrifying famine footage. The Africans comes as a rude awakening. The nine-
part series currently airing on PBS is a political tract delivered by Kenyan-born scholar
Ali Mazrui, who blames Western colonialism for much that ails Africa, from unstable
governments to telephones that don't work. "Colonialism weakened many of Africa's
indigenous institutions," he maintains. "We're still dealing with artificial boundaries that
were created when the European nations carved up Africa for themselves."
Lambasting "Western sharks," Mazrui warns that Africans will one day be powerful, and
no longer be "pawns in other people's designs." He even suggests that after "a final racial
conflict," blacks will inherit South Africa's reported atomic weapons and constitute "a
black-ruled republic with convincing nuclear credentials."
Mazrui's radical views have made The Africans one of the most controversial series ever
seen on American television. The Washington Post calls it "biased and preachy and
didactic, and fascinating," bringing Africa into "new, sharp...focus." The New York
Times slams it as "a pretentious fraud," so intent on its position that it is "capricious
about facts." Lynne Cheney, the Reagan-appointed chairman of the National Endowment
for the Humanities, which helped fund the series, blasted The Africans as "an anti-West
diatribe" and had NEH's name removed from the credits.
WETA, the Washington, D.C. PBS station that co-produced the series with the BBC,
defends Mazrui's work. "It was always intended as one scholar's view," argues WETA
president Ward Chamberlin. Mazrui himself is unrepentant about his West-bashing. "I
believe I'm restoring balance about Africa, giving an African's view that should be
heard," says the 53-year-old University of Michigan professor. "The United States is a
great communicator, sending jeans, Coca-Cola and music around the world. But Uncle
Sam is a poor listener, with a hearing aid he switches off to what the rest of the world is
saying."
Time Magazine excerpt
“Those realities -- at least, one person's view of them -- are the subject of The Africans, a
series that has ignited PBS's latest brush fire of controversy. The nine-week survey of
African culture, history and politics has drawn a sharp attack from Lynne Cheney, the
Reagan-appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which
supplied $600,000 of the program's $3.5 million budget. The series, she charges,
"frequently degenerates into anti-Western diatribe" and fails to meet NEH's "standards of
balance and objectivity." Among her complaints: a sympathetic portrayal of Libyan
Leader Muammar Gaddafi. At Cheney's insistence, NEH's name was removed from the
show's credits, and a request for funds to promote the show was denied.
Executives at Washington's WETA-TV (which co-produced the series with the BBC) and
at PBS have stood by the program, pointing out that it is intended to be an African's view
of Africa. Its writer and host, Ali A. Mazrui, a Kenya- born professor of political science
at the University of Michigan, admits that his opinions do not "fall into the mainstream of
American thinking." But he argues that NEH ought to be willing to "fund things that are
outside the perspective of the Western world."
Most of the problems of present-day Africa, Mazrui suggests, can be traced to Western
interlopers: from the missionaries and slave traders of early days, through the European
colonialists who carved up the continent with arbitrary national borders, to capitalists
who have plundered its natural resources, "often bequeathing decay rather than
development." The series contains no on-camera interviews, just Mazrui's narration set
against striking shots of African life and landscapes. The rhetoric is sometimes excessive
("the collective burial of a people," "Western sharks in search of a pound of flesh"). And
Mazrui's approach can be annoyingly simplistic: his blaming, for instance, virtually all
African violence on weapons imported from the West and his naive romanticizing of
Gaddafi.
But Mazrui's personal, impassioned views are what set The Africans apart from most of
PBS's good gray fare, and he makes telling points about his homeland's cultural
predicament. Africa today, he says, is dependent on the West in ways it cannot control:
without the English and French languages, | public business in most countries would
come to a halt. Western moral standards have often seemed as impenetrable to Africans
as theirs have to us. "Early European missionaries," Mazrui notes, "found it easier to
admit a slave owner to Communion than a member of a polygamous household."
Meanwhile, Africa still has to import most of the manufactured goods made from its own
abundant raw materials. For all its polemics, The Africans has a great deal to say, and it
does so with eloquence and power.”
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962528,00.html#ixzz1FZ2EgUZn