X-listed by H-AfroAm

REVIEW OF MICROSOFT ENCARTA AFRICANA (edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and K. Anthony Appiah, 1999.)

Reviewed By Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University (Email:
76104.440@compuserve.com)


"African slaves or enslaved Africans?" that is the question
that has caused so much African controversy around
Microsoft's Encarta Africana.  The issue is far more complex
than the choice of words;  however, the choice of terms does
signal how this project was poorly conceptualized.  Encarta
Africana announces itself as the "comprehensive encyclopedia
of black history and culture with authoritative content,"
but it is far from comprehensive or authoritative, and
worse, has numerous inaccuracies and incomplete articles. .
One would have thought that with a reported three millions
dollars, the editors, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  and Kwame
Appiah, would have been able to deliver a much more polished
product, both technologically and scholarly.  Originally
conceived as a completion to the famed project, Encyclopedia
Africana, devised by Kwame Nkrumah and W. E. B. Du Bois, the
Microsoft Encarta Africana project was embroiled in
controversy with Ghana over the name itself. Thus, Encarta
Africana was chosen as the name of the present project.

Among the impressive features of the interactive
encyclopedia are articles, audio clips, videos, and virtual
tours. But these are features that can be bought for the
price of money.  What cannot be bought and therefore is
missing, although it is essential for a project purporting
to be comprehensive on the African world, is an accurate and
rational point-of-view.  Encarta Africana is more like a
collection of documents from someone's attic, put together
without any real order, organization, or objective. In this
respect, it is little more than the sum total of the
numerous articles, some clearly dated, and audio visuals
presented in the encyclopedia, a grab bag of cultural and
historical artifacts.

To be fair to the editors and writers of the Encarta, I have
examined the project from an Afrocentric point-of-view, that
is, from the standpoint of the agency of African people and
the centrality of Africa in its own story. My views,
therefore, will be severe on any project that ostensibly
claims to be about African culture and history but is really
the projection of Europe on and in Africa. I do not claim
that this is a conscious activity on the part of the editors
and authors; rather it is a default position in any
intellectual adventure in the West if one is not
self-consciously directed toward a corrective. Some writers
have escaped the noose more easily than others; some remain
oblivious to the danger. The writers of Encarta are
frequently trapped into arrogant Eurocentric postures
because they have little understanding of the totality of
the story that they are trying to tell. So in telling a
European story of the history and culture of Africa they
become, more than anything, appendages to Europe; thereby
peripheralizing Africa while writing about it. Neither
Europeans nor Africans can really appreciate a project that
rehashes so many sterile ideas.

This is certainly not the project that Du Bois envisioned.
It is not the project that should have been developed at
this juncture in African history. In many respects it is a
great disservice to the African people and is once again an
indication of what happens to our own story when it is told
by someone else. Of course, there are a some African writers
in this project, but the overwhelming list of writers seems
to indicate that the work was done primarily by European
writers, despite the impressive board of black advisors.  If
this proves to be so, as I suspect simply by the name and
credential list of the authors, then we are setback, by this
process, for a generation. Fortunately the Afripaedia and
other products do exist as correctives.

I am not saying that whites cannot write about Africa.
Indeed whites often do write well about Africa, particularly
if they are Afrocentric in their methods and approaches to
African phenomena. However, since most whites tend to be
Eurocentric in their perspective then what they write will
reflect how Europeans see Africa and Africans. The same can
be said of Africans who have imbibed an Eurocentric
worldview. It is not race, but perspective that matters in
the process of analysis. Where one stands has a lot to do
with what one sees and how far one sees.

There are some serious problems with Encarta.  My own
analysis shows four areas that are quite deficient:
conceptual, linguistic, factual, and political.

The conceptual problem, I believe, stems from the fact that
neither of the editors, Gates nor Appiah, is a historian.
Gates is a rather accomplished literary critic and Appiah is
a professor of philosophy.  Now, I am the first to say that
one can overcome these deficiencies but one must have worked
at the craft of historical writing in order to achieve some
perspective. I do not see any historical imagination in this
work and the evidence of literary and philosophical
interests override what should be a strong historical
underpinning. This project suffers because the editors have
little appreciation for either point-of-view or
historiography and have even less appreciation for proper
periodization. Take the piece on Costa Rica. There is a
paragraph that describes the country in the same way you
would find in any encyclopedia. You would not even know
African people lived in Costa Rica if you read the account.
You would not even know the population of the country, not
to mention how many Africans lived in Costa Rica. Where is
the discussion of the Limonenses?  Fortunately there is a
good essay on Quince Duncan written by Dellita
Martin-Ogunsola that explains much about Costa Rica, but you
cannot get to Quince Duncan from the entry on Costa Rica.

When a project of this monumentality is produced there
should be ample checks on the nature of the writing. While
it is true that the Afrocentrists make a big ado about
language liberation, it is for a reason. You cannot use
language that minimizes, penalizes, or degrades African
people or concepts. To that end, when Encarta speaks of
African kingdoms and calls them "great chiefdoms" this is
not an aberration but rather it is the default Eurocentric
position that claims kingship for Europe and chiefships for
Africa and Native Americans. More critical, however, is the
way Encarta speaks of African Religions as developments
"South of the Sahara." There is no place in Africa that is
not Africa.  The Sahara itself is Africa and numerous
peoples and settlements exist in the Sahara. Indeed one of
the greatest legacies of the ancient world was the religion
of the Nile Valley, and the Nile flows through the desert.
One would have expected that even if the editors did not
appreciate the Afrocentric theoretical perspective they
would have examined it in detail to see where they could
have corrected their text.  Clearly there were no "African
slaves" brought to the Americas and Caribbean; there were
only African people, farmers, blacksmiths, fishers, and
members of royal families, brought and then enslaved.

        The factual problem is little bit worrisome because
the facts could have been checked or double-checked even if
some of the 40 members of the advisory committee or 400
writers would have been asked to serve as hands-on editors.
Of course, the editors must know what they are looking for
and at what they are looking. There is no reason for someone
writing on Kwanzaa to speak of the US organization as
"United Slaves,"  when it never referred to itself that way
and the nomenclature is probably that of the COINTELPRO. If
I may be permitted, under the entry on "Afrocentrism" it is
claimed that I coined the word in l976. As far as I can tell
I never used the word "Afrocentrism," it remains a word used
by those who seek to attack Afrocentricity. My book,
Afrocentricity, was published in l980. While I am on
Afrocentricity, let me also say that the most significant
intellectual movement in the African world for the past
twenty years has been the Afrocentric movement and not to
have a thorough and intelligent discussion of it is a major
flaw in this project. Robert Fay, the graduate student who
wrote the piece on "Afrocentrism" spent most of his time
attacking Professor Leonard Jeffries. This leads me to the
political agenda. I did not find a bibliography to indicate
what was read by the writers before they wrote their
entries; Robert Fay surely suffered from the lack of
reading.

The index itself is quite revealing. Amadu Bamba, the
greatest writer, in terms of quantity in the African world,
is not included. Furthermore, the leading contemporary
African thinkers by objective standards are Pan Africanists
and Afrocentrists. They are no where to be found in this
project. Names such as Colin Palmer, Vincent Harding, Asa
Hilliard, Maulana Karenga, Kariamu Welsh Asante, Marimba
Ani, Yosef Ben-Jochannon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Herbert
Vilakazi, Theophile Obenga, Chinweizu, Wade Nobles, Na'im
Akbar, Manning Marable, John Bracey, William Strickland, and
Ronald Walters do not appear in the index.If they appear
elsewhere, they are very difficult to find.  Even if you do
not agree with someone's perspective or orientation you must
demonstrate as a scholar that you are fair in your
presentation of the historical information.  The Encarta
project is woefully lacking in spectrum.  One could argue,
although weakly, that this was a problem of space, that is,
that some people were bound to be missed. However, it is
suspicious when the people who are missed are Afrocentrists
and when the medium has cyberspace capability.

This product is clearly an instruction for future producers
of such works on how not to proceed with an interactive
encyclopedia on the African world.

It is true that this is the first such interactive
encyclopedia on African culture and history, and that is why
it should have given us more, but we are fortunate that this
is not the last. Much like Carter G. Woodson's famed
statement that it took him nearly forty years to get Harvard
out of his brain, we will be trying to get Encarta out of
our brains for several years. It is useful, perhaps, that
Encarta was done;  it is bad certainly that it was done
badly.

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