Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Between
the World and Me (2015) makes a distinction between Howard University, the institution of higher learning with its
classrooms which were a jail of other people’s theories, ideas and Howard University, the Mecca, “the crossroads
of the black diaspora.” Whereas the Mecca nurtured his black consciousness, the
institution of higher learning disabused him of his hopes and dreams generated
by Howard University as The Mecca.
Coates says quite clearly that he has the History Department
of Howard University to thank for disabusing him of his fantasy black
consciousness. He writes: “My history professors thought nothing of telling me
that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I wanted to tell myself
could not be matched to truths. Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me
of my weaponized history” (52). Coates singles out Linda Heywood, whom he
remembers as “slight and bespectacled, spoke with a high Trinidadian lilt that
she employed like a hammer against young students like me who confused agitprop
with hard study” (54) The entire scholarly edifice of Cheikh Anta Diop, even
Martin Bernal, James P. Allen is debunked as “agitprop,” “fantasy history.”
Heywood is guided by the views of her husband John Thornton,
a white man from Virginia, whom the white supremacist Academy has transformed
into a black history expert. Thornton is proud of having concocted his thesis
and first book The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil
War and Transition, 1641-1718 (Madison, 1983) “by
mining carefully the extensive documentation of the Capuchin missionaries in
the country… [and] deliberately [ignoring] using either earlier or later
materials and much of the ethnographic materials so as to determine continuity
and change in the kingdom” (Wikipedia).
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