American literary critic and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr has launched his documentary series titled ‘Africa’s Great Civilisations’ in which he has unveiled Africa’s hidden figures.
He told reporters, “Africa has been recognized as the ultimate ‘other,’ the negation of the West. And that started when the slave trade reached its zenith and it got even worse when the colonial era started after 1884 and the Berlin Conference, when the Europeans just carved up Africa, as if there was no people living there, and just gave chunks of it to each other. And so they created an image of African people as subhuman, primitive, static, and soulless.”
“People thought not only were Africans primitive and savage, but isolated,” he continued. “And what we show is, over and over again, some parts of Africa were in contact with the larger world. The Africans were just as curious about people outside of Africa, just as much as people outside of Africa were about Africans.”