That’s just what Gates had in mind. In a recent interview, he said that ever since he saw Clark’s “Civilization” series years ago, “I have dreamed of somebody doing ‘The Wonders of the African World’ as a response to Kenneth Clark. It was obvious to me that nothing in Africa outside of maybe the pyramids would interest him, because these Africans could have nothing to do with his definition of civilization. I thought, somebody needs to do that.” Not surprisingly, to anyone who has kept tabs on this 50-year-old MacArthur fellow and director of Harvard’s Afro-American studies program, that somebody turns out to be Gates himself.
A born educator, he moves easily from the intricacies of ancient Nubian culture to current dilemmas of African identity–one of his subjects kept insisting he was Persian. In the series, and in the companion book of the same title (288 pages. Knopf. $40), he delights in uncovering surprising truths–such as the fact that the library at Timbuktu held more than 50,000 volumes during the Middle Ages. “African-Americans were raised with images of ourselves as savages waiting to be discovered by Europeans and rescued from our own barbarity. So the main thing I want African-Americans to get is that they are descended from great peoples all over a continent. I want white Americans to get that, and people around the world. Africans don’t even know that about themselves.” But they surely will if the indefatigable Gates has anything to say about it.
