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.”

The archival materials I obtained enriched and complemented the New York Times news clips that I had read and assembled, dating back to the 19 th century. At the conclusion of my research, the first magazine I submitted my Master’s thesis for publication to was the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) which is reputed to be the bible of journalistic integrity. My paper was accepted for publication on January 26 th, 1992 by Michael Hoyte, who at the time was the editor and is today executive editor. As the months went by and I saw issues of the Review without my article, on April 27 th I called Hoyte and demanded to know why my paper had not yet been published.

I was surprised when Hoyte informed me, in a rather timid tone, that a decision had been made not to publish my paper. He said the editorial board, consisting of five members “after long discussions” had been deadlocked, with two editors voting to publish and two opposing publication. He claimed the executive editor at the time Suzanne Levin, cast the decisive negative vote. When I asked why some editors were opposed, Hoyte said, “There was a feeling these things happened a long time ago.” I was enraged and demanded to have my paper returned. I still recall the chill I felt when Hoyte asked me why I wanted it back. “After all,” I recall him saying, “It’s been extensively edited and it’s not the same as what you gave us.”

To this day, I am convinced that I would never have gotten my paper back – and discovered how the Review’s editors committed journalistic cowardice and betrayal – had I not immediately gone to Hoyte’s office and retrieved my article. When I read the edited version of my paper – it was in galley form in preparation for publication – I discovered that the Review’s editors had inserted the following sentence on my behalf:

“Recently, the Times granted me access to its archives, including correspondences from the 1950s, when the paper sent Bigart to Africa on a temporary assignment. After studying the archival material, I interviewed several present and former Times reporters. The following excerpts from that material and from lengthy interviews are not intended as an indictment of the Times – whose African coverage has occasionally been distinguished – but as a means of highlighting a problem that all news organizations need to address.”

After reading the CJR editors’ insertion, I could only conclude that they were afraid of possibly offending or embarrassing editors at the Times. I decided to do the Review’s editors a favor; On October 29 th, 1992 I sent a shorter version of my original master’s paper to the Times with a letter addressed to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. In the letter, I informed him that a “bitter gripe” had lodged in my chest as a result of the Review’s journalistic betrayal because of the editors’ fear of the Times. I had been made to feel as if I had committed a crime, when in fact all I had done was gone into the paper’s own archives and discovered evidence of culpability by Times’ editors and reporters in creating and perpetuating racist stereotypes against Africans.

Eventually, I received a letter from Joe Lelyveld, who at the time was the Times’ managing editor and later became executive editor. He wrote that he was responding on behalf of the publisher Sulzberger and that, indeed, my research had unearthed articles with “crude and ugly” language. He also argued that on the other hand, the Times had also published insightful articles about Africa through the years citing that he too had been a part of the coverage, first as a foreign correspondent to South Africa and later as foreign editor. Since the exchange of letters, I have on several occasions demanded that The New York Times publicly acknowledge and apologize for the racism and fabrications about Africa that I discovered in their coverage—the newspaper has remained mute.

Prior to my graduation, I felt a small measure of vindication when my paper won the James Wechsler memorial prize from the university. After graduation in May 1992, I sent my article to several publications – including The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and New York magazine. When all of them declined to publish, I could not help but recall the experience with CJR. In the meantime, students who were aware of the paper invited me to speak about it, ironically, at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and later at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and later at William’s College. The reception was always warm and several students invariably asked me when I would turn the material into a book.

As it turns out, I had broadened my research over the years to include other publications in addition to the Times, including The NationalGeographic, Time magazine, and Newsweek; My study now also included the popular journals of the European travelers who “explored” Africa between the 18 th and the 19 th centuries. In fact, these journals were the original media responsible for disseminating and perpetuating the racist image of Africa throughout Europe, in the Americas, Asia and even in Africa itself.

I’m not interested in romanticizing Africa’s past. To claim that Africa was some sort of paradise before the arrival of Europeans is false and wishful thinking. There were conflicts and there were despotic regimes; yet these do not diminish Africans’ claim to humanity. There were also spectacular achievements and there were great civilizations, in Egypt, in Ghana, in Songhay, in Buganda, in Zimbabwe, and in many other areas, that predated contact with Europeans. As my book shows, these realities were not reflected in any of the writings of the explorers, European colonial officials, and later, professional journalists who wrote about Africa.

Moreover, the portrayal of Africans as superstitious savages belied the fact that Europeans were very familiar with some of the practices for which they denigrated Africans. In his book African Kingdoms (1966), Basil Davidson a prominent British historian wrote, “Africa, long thought of as breeding ground for the occult, was more than matched by Europe, with its own manias for alchemy, astrology and witch-burning…

“Europeans,” Davidson added, “moreover, were constantly duped by promises of miraculous transformations and curses. Elixirs of life, magnets to attract diseases from the body, magic portions and healing fragments of the ‘true cross’ were common. Even such prominent intellectuals as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon searched relentlessly for the philosopher’s stone, the mystical charm of alchemy supposed to transform dross into gold.”

Had I not been betrayed by CJR, would I still have embarked on this journey that resulted in this book? I believe so, since I have always been intrigued by the way the Western media have represented Africans and people of African descent.

I am not so naïve to believe that any study will ever eliminate offensive and racist representations of Black people or of any other non-white peoples for that matter. There are powerful entities and constituencies that benefit from the deep-seated prejudices that have historically caused the distorted Western media representation of Africa. The racist characterizations justified and sanitized the crimes committed against Africans, from slavery, through colonization and through the new colonialism now maintained by the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank…