Series profile

The Africans: A Triple Heritage

Written and narrated by Dr. Ali Mazrui in the early 1980s and jointly produced by the BBC and PBS (WETA, Washington) in association with the Nigerian Television Authority. Africa's triple heritage, as envisioned by Mazrui is a product resulting from three major influences: (1) an indigenous heritage borne out of time and climate change; (2) the heritage of eurocentric capitalism forced on Africans by European colonialism; and (3) the spread of Islam by both jihad and evangelism. The negative effects of this history have yet to be addressed by independent African leaders, while the West has tended to regard Africa as recipient rather than as transmitter of effects. Yet Africa has transformed both Europe and America in the past, Mazrui points out, and the difficult situation in which Africa finds itself today (economically dependent, culturally mixed, and politically unstable) is the price it has had to pay for Western development.