About The Author

While growing up, Uganda-born Milton Allimadi always detested the Tarzan-image of Africa and has been fighting it since then. While attending Syracuse University in the 1980s, he recalls sitting in an English literature class where the professor and students fawned over the most racist depiction of Africans by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. While attending the graduate school of Journalism at Columbia University in the 1990s, Allimadi researched the history of Western media’s representation on Africans and people of African descent globally. Allimadi’s study went as far back as Herodotus’ “The Histories,” (484-425 B.C.) which explained that Ethiopians were black because the men ejected black semen into their women. Allimadi also studied the journals of the so-called explorers—he calls them trespassers and interlopers—such as Samuel Baker, Henry Morton Stanley and Samuel Baker; he reviewed the reportage –and fabrications and lies—of 20th century American journalists with publications such as Newsweek, Time magazine, National Geographic, The Times Of London, and The New York Times.

In the course of his research, Allimadi discovered damning documents from the New York Times archives, implicating some editors and reporters with the newspaper, in formulating and perpetuating racist representation of Africa in the newspaper and going as far as concocting events that never occurred and inserting them into articles which were printed as factual news reports in The New York Times. Eventually, Allimadi published his work as a book—The Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (Black Star Books; 2003. ISBN 0-9740039-0-5) $12. Allimadi is currently working on two books; a memoir and a study of the life of Ethiopia’s Menelik II. He is also the publisher of The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York City and www.blackstarnews.com He loves traveling, sports and fine cuisine.