Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gives African Civilizations the PBS Treatment They Have Always Deserved

Writers, are you currently procrastinating writing? Artists, did you miss Inktober for lack of ideas? Y’all feeling pretty guilty right now? Stop! I have something new to inspire and motivate you. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (“Skip” to his friends) has a documentary on African Civilizations on PBS and it is the cure for your creative blues.

As creatives, and consumers, there are two utterly untrue things that we’re told regularly:

All the good stories have already been told. European history is the best/truest source of content, particularly fantasy content. Any other source is not “universal” enough to have wide appeal.

This documentary reveals both of those things as the lies they are. In the 6-part series, Africa’s Great Civilizations, Gates Jr. gives us a beautiful survey of the history of civilizations in Africa. North, south, east, and west, this show travels from earliest antiquity to the Congo Conference (1884). With expert input from African scholars, Africa’s Great Civilizations traces the lines of descent from one civilization to another. Gates Jr. emphasizes the importance of trans-Saharan trade, the impact of religion on the directions of development, and the connections that existed within Africa and between Africa and other regions, including Arabia, India, and Europe. It is the documentary we’ve been missing. Throughout, the show highlights African rulers and thinkers who should be as well known as the Tudors of England. Kings like Mansa Musa, a man so wealthy hi…