Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
When a trio of scholars decided to partner with Microsoft to create a pan-African encyclopedia, was it a match made in progressive corporate heaven or the founding of an ivory-tower gulag?
Jun 16, 1999 | With a little alcohol, most students make all sorts of embarrassing vows. But one night in 1973, a bunch of promising scholars gathered in an Indian restaurant near Cambridge University and made a doozy. Three bottles deep in wine, a 23-year-old Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr.; 19-year-old Kwame Anthony Appiah; and a Nigerian professor in his 30s, Wole Soyinka, all made an ambitious pledge: to put together a Pan-African encyclopedia.
It was an unusual pact for a trio of men who turned out to be unusually driven: Harvard's Gates is now one of the best-known and best-paid humanities professors in the United States; Appiah is a Harvard professor and philosopher; and Soyinka became the 1986 Nobel laureate for literature. Their objective had been the holy grail of black academics since W.E.B. Du Bois, inspired by the Encyclopedia Judaica, came up with the idea in 1909. When he started out, Du Bois put together a multiethnic staff with a Pan-African editorial mission, i.e., one that would be inclusive of the work of blacks from all over the globe. This drew some bitter criticism from the African-American community. After decades of radicalization, Du Bois changed his mind. By 1959, when he moved to Ghana, he wanted an encyclopedia for Africans by Africans about Africans.
Closer to Du Bois' original vision, Gates, Appiah and Soyinka wanted their encyclopedia to be inclusionary, one that would bring in as many disciplines, cultures and perspectives as they could. "You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty," Gates told Salon during a four-hour discussion. (Gates insisted that his comments be used only on a deep-background basis; all quotes used in this story had to be cleared with him.) "Whoever could edit the Encyclopedia Africana would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution."
Joining a trend of joint ventures between academics and corporations, Gates and company looked outside the university for funding. After a decades-long search for a backer, they landed a big fish -- Microsoft. The company agreed to put up $1 million and technical, design and production support of the CD-ROM. Another million came from Perseus, a publisher, which would produce a printed version of the encyclopedia. After much heartache -- and 25 years after the pact made at the restaurant -- the interactive CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta Africana, arrived on the shelves to near-unanimous praise last February.
Yet while the Africana debut has seen no dearth of press coverage, the story of its painful gestation has never been told. And it is a tale so fabulous -- including accusations of plagiarism, controversies over affirmative action, charges of academic royals oppressing scholarly serfs, Microsoft bottom-line mania, worker revolt and a Rashomon-like tangle of competing truths -- that one might even call it a creation myth for the contemporary university.
