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Excerpt From the Book’s Introduction: I wrote The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa in order to fight the stereotypical racist representations of Black people and ignorance that still persists in contemporary media and the cover-ups that go with it. During the course of my research, I encountered some gatekeepers who would prefer that works such as mine never be published. I hope that lay readers, students of history and journalism as well as practicing journalists and editors can learn from this book. Africans are still referred to as “tribal” peoples, with all the attendant negative perceptions that spring from the word; sometimes with genocidal consequences. When Tutsi refugees in Uganda formed the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded ethnically volatile Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and the war degenerated into genocide in 1994 Western media referred to the fighting as a “tribal” warfare. In an infamous article published on April 25, 1994, Time magazine conjured images of cannibalism –long established in Western lore about Africa – by explaining that “tribal bloodlust” was fueling the fighting. Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration blocked any significant outside intervention by the United Nations because it was believed that “tribal” wars are intractable and not resolvable. The Hearts of Darkness illuminates the process by which Africa was “tribalized.” Originally, I had intended to write a magazine article focusing on the evolution of The New York Times’ coverage of Africa entitled “Darkest Times in Africa.” I had conducted the original research in 1992 while I was a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University for my Master’s thesis – during the course of the research, I gained access to the Times archives and unearthed several racist letters that had been exchanged between the newspaper’s foreign editor and the reporters he sent to cover Africa. One notorious Times editor who was involved in some of the most virulent racist exchanges was Emanuel Freedman, foreign editor from 1948 to 1964; a Times reporter, Homer Bigart, espoused similar racism in his letters. In one letter, when the Times sent Bigart to cover emerging independence movements in West Africa, he wrote to Freedman that he was not thrilled with the assignment. His letter, in part read: “I’m afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics…The politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork. I vastly prefer the primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population explosion everyone talks about.”
Freedman responded with an equally offensive letter, which in part read: This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public. By now you must be American journalism’s leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in The New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?” Typical of the prose that Freedman found so much to his liking was an article by Bigart –possibly partly concocted from his hotel room—published on January 31 st 1960, in The Times under the headline “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” Bigart assumed a jaunty and derogative tone, writing: “A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi.” He added, “A momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra. Garroting was the society’s favored method of execution. None of the victims was eaten, at least not by society members. Less lurid but equally effective ways were found to dispose of them. According to the police, about twenty-six were weighed with stones and timber and thrown into flooded rivers. No trace has been found of these bodies. A few were buried in ant heaps. But most became human fertilizer for the yam crops.”
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