Help Regain Copyright To My Book Exposing Anti-Africa Racism

When I was 12 years old I began to notice that Africa was projected as “primitive” in British and American publications I read in the library. At the time my family lived in Tanzania having fled from Uganda then ruled by dictator Gen. Idi Amin. (Today the U.S.-backed dictator is named Gen. Yoweri Museveni).

I was too young to do much at that time. I took out my disappointment by writing “Letters To The Editor.” It was only many years later when I was a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia that I embarked on a mission to counter the negative image of Africa in Western media.

The project started with my Masters Paper at Columbia and culminated decades later with my book “Manufacturing Hate—How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media” (Kendall Hunt Publishing Co., 2021).

My book details the demonization of Africa—and by extension Africans in Diaspora—over the last three centuries in European and American media—books, newspapers, magazines—to justify and rationalize slavery, colonialism, and in our modern era, neocolonialism.

“Manufacturing Hate” starts off by critiquing the so-called “journals” of the European “explorers” who discovered and renamed lakes, rivers, mountains, water falls, and even countries (Rhodesia) after Africans led them to the locations. These so-called explorers were the early scouts for imperialism, mapping out the African continent for later conquest.

The book then critiques American and British newspapers. One of the earliest editorials in The New York Times about Africa was from 1876—a commentary claiming that Africans were “affiliated” with the ancient hippopotamus and crocodile and that the solution for removing them out of their misery was for English colonization.

What set my book apart from similar projects was the material I was able to unearth from The New York Times’ archives—dozens of personal correspondences, many very racist, between editors here in New York and the reporters sent to cover Africa, especially during the 1960s when decolonization accelerated.

One of the most notorious racist New York Times correspondent was Homer Bigart, who’d already won the coveted Pulitzer Prize twice--from his previous newspaper The Herald Tribune--by the time the newspaper sent him to write about decolonization in Africa in late 1959.

When he got there here’s what he wrote to his boss, the New York Times foreign news editor Emanuel Freedman from Africa: “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.”

Bigart’s contempt for Africa was conveyed in his articles. On January 31, 1960, The New York Times published an article by Bigart under the hateful headline “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” Bigart wrote in his lead sentence that “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.” Yet, in the same article Bigart contradicts his own salacious claims of alleged cannibalism, when he continues: “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.” He added, “No trace has been found of these bodies. A few were buried in ant heaps. But most became human fertilizer for the yam crops.”

Editor Freedman delighted in Bigart’s racist demonization of Africans. “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,” Freedman wrote to Bigart, in a letter dated March 4, 1960. “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?”

Some Times correspondents complained about fabrications inserted into their stories. “The reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give the reader the impression that there are a lot of tribes running around half-naked,” Lloyd Garrison, a Times’ correspondent in Nigeria during the civil war, complained in a letter dated June 5, 1967 to the foreign news editor.

The article Garrison complained about had been published on May 31, 1967. Garrison’s original version had no such reference to Nigerian “small pagan tribes dressed in leaves”; that incident had been entirely fabricated and inserted into the article by editors in New York, perhaps to give the story a more “savage” flavor. Garrison also objected to the insertion of the words “tribes” and “tribesmen” by the editors in many of his past articles.

My critique includes the impact of centuries of demonization. Here’s the link to an interview I did on “I Never Knew TV” about how demonization in Western media have conditioned Africans and African descendants to internalize inferiorization.

Malcolm X discussed this same problem in the early 1960s when he said you can't hate your origins without hating yourself.

When Kendall Hunt published the book in 2021 here’s what KIRKUS Reviews said in part, “A study of how Western reporters and editors have contributed to a distorted and derogatory representation of African people…In this disturbing and compelling account of Western media’s inglorious coverage of Africa, John Jay College adjunct professor and Black Star News publisher Allimadi reveals how ‘Demonization of Africans was the handmaiden of conquest and colonization’ and shows how reporters at distinguished publications manufactured ‘stereotypical racist representations’ of Africans that persist to this day.”

In another review, UNC-Chapel Hill Professor of African and Afro-American Studies Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, wrote in Review of African Political Economy, “Overall, this is an outstanding work of scholarship , and one that should be read by undergraduates and students enrolled in studies of journalism and communications generally, as well as by the general public. It is very timely, given the increasing migrations of peoples of colour to Europe and North America, which is being exploited by right-wing extremism.”

The book was doing well and I got decent royalty checks. Then in 2022 people started contacting me about how they’d have to wait for as many as six months to get the book after ordering via Amazon. Why would a publisher not want to make a book readily available after someone paid for it? Was the publisher totally unaware of the potential impact of the book? Were there “hidden” hands at play?

In 2023, when my students at John Jay told me that my publisher had stopped selling the hardcopy version of the book I immediately demanded for the return of the rights.

The publisher said I’d have to buy it back. I offered $500. The publisher rejected that amount and asked for $3,000.

I hope you'll support this campaign. I can't wait to make the book widely available.

We can’t allow potential gatekeepers to suppress knowledge of history—the good, the bad, the ugly.

Asanteni sana!

Milton