The
Hearts of Darkness
By Milton Allimadi
Inventing
Africa: New York Times
Archives
Reveal a History of Racist Fabrication
By
Milton Allimadi
When New
York Times reporters such as Lloyd Garrison in the 1960s and
Joseph Lelyveld in the 1980s filed news stories from Africa,
editors at the Times routinely fabricated scenes and
manufactured quotes for their articles. In some instances, the
foreign editor colluded with the reporter to manufacture scenes
that they believed would conform to the racist stereotypical
biases that U.S. readers had come to expect in reports from
Africa.
When I brought these
examples of racist journalistic concoctions to the attention of
New York Times editors more than 10 years ago, I was virtually
ignored. That's why recent assertions by Times editors that
reporter Jayson Blair's concoctions and fabrications reflected a
"low point" in the newspaper's 152-year history
(5/11/03) were disingenuous. A much lower point had been reached
in the 1960s, when the newspaper began covering Africa
consistently, as I discovered when I dug up documents from the
Times' archives in 1992.
At the time, I was a
Columbia journalism grad student researching the evolution of
the paper's African coverage. As nationalism swept across Africa
in the early '60s, the New York Times sent Homer Bigart, the
famous two-time Pulitzer-winning reporter, to cover the
transition. In Ghana, Bigart wasn't impressed by independence
hero Kwame Nkrumah, as a letter he sent to foreign editor
Emanuel Freedman in January 1960 reveals:
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.
When I first
discovered Bigart's letter, I assumed that--even with the
prevalent racism of the time--it reflected the ranting of one
racist reporter. Then as I read the reports that Bigart filed
from Africa that purported to be straight news reporting, I
found a near-perfect correlation between the language he used in
his letters and the feelings he expressed in the purported
"news" reports. Bigart's favorite terms in reference
to Africans included "barbaric," "macabre,"
"grotesque" and "savage."
 |
Typical of his prose
was an article published in the Times on January 31, 1960, under
the headline "Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria."
Focusing on a reported incident of communal violence, 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 went on:
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 26 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.
|
"Where
else but the Times?"
Foreign editor
Freedman shared Bigart's contempt for Africans and the
assignment. In a letter to his African explorer, dated March 4,
1960, Freedman wrote:
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?
When the savages
were nowhere to be found, Bigart and Freedman took matters into
their own hands. As independence neared for what was then
Belgian Congo, Bigart complained to Freedman in a May 29, 1960
letter from Leopoldville, which is now Kinshasa: "I had
hoped to find pygmies voting and interview them on the meaning
of independence but they were all in the woods. I did see
several lions, however, and from Usumbura I sent a long mailer
about the Watutsi giants." (Usumbura is a Burundi city now
known as Bujumbura.)
The Belgian Congo
had experienced the most bloody and brutal history of European
colonial rule and exploitation in Africa. During the rule of
King Leopold II, an estimated 10 million or more Africans were
exterminated and countless more permanently maimed or
disfigured, all in the quest for wealth. African slave laborers
who did not deliver their designated quota of ivory and rubber
had their hands severed, to motivate other slackers. Yet Bigart
and Freedman's utmost concern was to find pygmies to malign.
When he failed to
find pygmies, Bigart did the next best thing: He concocted them,
as indicated by his article published in the Times on June 5,
1960 under the derisive headline, "Magic of Freedom
Enchants Congolese." The article began: "As the hour
of freedom from Belgian rule nears, 'In-de-pen-dence' is being
chanted by Congolese all over this immense land, even by pygmies
in the forest."
"Independence
is an abstraction not easily grasped by Congolese and they are
seeking concrete interpretations," Bigart added, before
continuing to denigrate the pygmies. "To the forest pygmy
independence means a little more salt, a little more beer."
Continued
concoctions
Was this some
aberrant episode between Bigart and Freedman? Hardly. The Times
tolerated concoctions so long as the newspaper could get away
with it. Even when Times reporters complained, editors continued
to insert concocted scenes and quotes into their articles.
Consider the case of
Lloyd M. Garrison, a descendant of the great American
abolitionist, who was the Times' first West African
correspondent during the 1960s. Garrison covered the Nigerian
civil war, but was expelled by the military regime for alleged
bias in favor of the Biafran secessionists.
In a letter from
Nigeria dated June 5, 1967, Garrison complained bitterly that
"tribal" scenarios had been inserted into the edited
version of his story, which had been published on May 31, 1967
in the newspaper: "The reference to 'small pagan tribes
dressed in leaves' is slightly misleading and could, because of
its startling quality, give the reader the impression there are
a lot of tribes running around half naked," Garrison wrote
to the foreign desk.
He protested the numerous uses of the
derogative term "tribes" in his story, and added:
"Tribesmen connote the grass-leaves image. Plus tribes
equals primitive, which in a country like Nigeria just doesn't
fit, and is offensive to African readers who know damn well what
unwashed American and European readers think when they stumble
on the word." Garrison noted that the insertion
"invites the image of savages dancing around the
fire."
Editorial insertions
of stereotypes and fabrications into a Times reporter's copy
extended at least into the 1980s. Consider the case of Lelyveld,
who completed two tours as a correspondent in South Africa. In
the '60s he was expelled by Pretoria for suspected socialist
leanings; he returned as the Times' correspondent during the
1980s.
In December 1982
(12/19/82, 12/26/82), Lelyveld wrote a pair of articles about
South Africa's segregated education system and its denial of
adequate funding to black schools. Editors watered down his
reporting, prompting Lelyveld to fire off an angry complaint to
foreign editor Craig Whitney. In one letter, dated January 6,
1983, Lelyveld complained that "virtually all the original
reporting" conducted over a one-month period had been
omitted. In one story, the subject of white control and racial
hierarchy in the education system was completely deleted, he
complained. The printed version of the article was like "a
salami sandwich without the salami, just slabs of stale
bread"--or, "if you prefer a baseball image, the wind
up without the pitch, in other words a balk."
When fictitious
"officials" were inserted into another one of his
stories, Lelyveld was livid, as indicated in a letter dated
April 18, 1983, which he sent to Whitney:
I wrote the
following sentence: "The idea of a referendum among blacks
was never considered for the obvious reason that it would be
overwhelmingly defeated." That became: "Officials made
it clear that the idea of a referendum among blacks . . .
etc." To what officials did the rewrite person talk? How
does he or she know they made it clear? This exact phrase has
been written in my copy before. Officials make damn little clear
here.
Lelyveld later wrote
Move Your Shadow, a sensitive book outlining the corrosiveness
of apartheid, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He later
became managing editor and retired as executive editor in 2001,
before coming back to serve as a transitional editor in the wake
of the Blair fiasco.
"Occasionally
distinguished"
While one can
understand why Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and
the newspaper's top editors would prefer the public to believe
that Blair's transgressions are uniquely aberrant, the evidence
indicates otherwise. Moreover, Sulzberger and Lelyveld certainly
can't pretend they are unaware of this research.
In January 1992, the
Columbia Journalism Review agreed to publish excerpts of my
master's paper about the Times' African coverage. After CJR
backed out, I obtained a copy of the edited version of my paper.
To my astonishment, this is what CJR editors had inserted on my
behalf before rejecting the article:
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.
Presumably some CJR
editors feared how the Times would react; after all, CJR was a
possible beneficiary of largesse from the Times' foundation, and
many editors and reporters hope to end up at the Times. So I did
the CJR editors a favor and sent a copy of my paper to
Sulzberger. Eventually I received a letter from Joseph Lelyveld,
then the managing editor, on behalf of Sulzberger. He conceded
that my research had unearthed articles with "crude and
ugly" language. Yet there was no offer to publish
corrections. Later, when I proposed to publish an op-ed article
in the Times to shed light on its ugly past with respect to
Africa coverage, the op-ed editor--Howell Raines--didn't
respond.
This February, I
published
The Hearts of Darkness, How White
Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa, a book that details Western
newspapers' history of demonizing Africans, including the Times'
racist fabrications.
I sent copies to
Sulzberger and to other Times editors before Jayson
Blair's lies burst into the limelight. I still await a response
from the Times and an offer to acknowledge the wrongs
perpetrated against Africa.
Milton
Allimadi, a former New York
Times stringer, publishes The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New
York City. The author of
The Hearts of Darkness, How White
Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa( Black Star Books, 2003), his
email address is miltonallimadi@hotmail.com.
For speaking engagements or book signings: Please contact Milton
Allimadi through (212) 481-7745 or Milton@blackstarnews.com
http://www.blackstarnews.com/index.html
* *
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 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have
disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue
to do so until we are finally living on one
integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of all this
remarkable change will survive the process they
helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago
remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.
* *
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|
Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). |
 |
Ripostes from proponents, the Federalists, animate
the great detail Maier provides, as does her recounting how one
state convention’s verdict affected another’s. Displaying the
grudging grassroots blessing the Constitution originally
received, Maier eruditely yet accessibly revives a neglected but
critical passage in American history.—Booklist
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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