African History at Your Fingertips

SUMMARY

Microsoft Encarta Africana CD-ROM for Windows 95/98 or NT Workstation 4.0 or later $69.95 (with a $20 mail-in rebate) Microsoft 877-363-2374 encarta.msn.com/africana/

For 25 years, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ph.D., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, dreamed of developing a comprehensive encyclopedia of black history, a dream first envisioned by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1909. Last January, with the launch of Microsoft Encarta Africana, the dream was finally realized, and the result is a remarkable achievement.

Edited by Dr. Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ph.D., a Harvard colleague, the two-disc CD-ROM multimedia encyclopedia is crammed with over 3,000 articles and more than 2,500 pictures, maps and audio and video clips detailing nearly all aspects of the history of Africa.

For example, a mouse-click sends users on a 360-degree, 3D tour of six places. These include the slave castles of Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal in West Africa and the Egyptian ruins at Medinet Habu, as well as a virtual walk of Harlem in New York, Paris and Bahia in Brazil. Users can retrace centuries-old transatlantic slave routes to the New World or explore historical events spanning four million years of black experience by following a time line divided into sections labeled Prehistory and Antiquity, Kingdoms of Africa, Exploring Africa and Exporting Africans, Abolition and Emancipation, Color Line and Colonialism, Civil Rights and Independence, and The Face of the Future.

A click on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the '60s exemplifies the tumult of that decade through a video clip of civil-rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama, being sprayed by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. Users can also see and hear performances by jazz great Dizzy Gillespie or watch Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home-run record in 1974.

How does Dr. Gates feel about the result? "I'm ecstatic," he says. "And I'm ecstatic about the fact that it exists. That's the most important thing. In a way, this has been the project of the century for black people. Du Bois had the idea 90 years ago, and he tried--several other people tried. There have been all these attempts to get this comprehensive encyclopedia of the African diaspora published, and no one's been able to do it, so the fact that it exists at all is quite amazing."

It is indeed. Looking to fulfill Du Bois' dream, Dr. Gates first approached the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica in 1979 with the idea of producing a black encyclopedia but was turned down. Sixteen years later, he took his proposal around to various New York publishing houses but was turned down again. Finally in 1997, Microsoft agreed to produce a multimedia version. Ironically, the delay has proved beneficial.

"So many aspects of black expressive culture can be displayed and represented so much more effectively with this technology than in print form," says Dr. Gates. "Even though it has been frustrating for 90 years, the technology and the culture were made for each other. One of my favorite clips is the film footage of Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson dancing. How do you tell somebody about that? Now they can see it."