Ideology and Ignorance: American Attitudes toward Africa

Abstract

The United States and Africa are in deep trouble when the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities disowns its sponsorship of the Ali Mazrui series The Africans on the grounds that it is an “anti-Western diatribe…and politically tendentious.” It bodes ill for the U.S. because it marks a return to the “know nothing” approach to Africa which has dominated American thinking about the African continent throughout most of our history. And it lends respectability to a cold war view of that continent which can only lead to greater misunderstanding, confrontation, and bloodshed for African peoples. What is so disturbing about the reaction of the NEH and a number of the series' reviewers is their exclusive focus on Mazrui's view of the West. Of the many important themes running through the series, did they not see or hear anything else? This self-indulgent preoccupation with the occasional opinion about “the West” is all too indicative of our times. That criticism of colonialism can somehow be interpreted as “anti-American” points not only to a profound lack of comprehension of the nature of colonialism, but to the proclivity in U.S. policy toward Africa to identify with the wrong side. “Colonization should not be attacked,” claim many on the American right, “because that era was not only the apex of African development but a time when there was no communist threat on the continent.” The right wing, however, has no monopoly on such myopia and misperception. America and Africa are also in deep trouble when specialists attribute all of Africa's maladies to colonialism or neo-colonialism.