PBS SERIES’ VOICE CLEAR, ELOQUENT

Do we learn the most from listening to our own voice?

Some people apparently think so. They’re the ones shrilly protesting “The Africans” as being anti-West and anti-American. Their target is a nine-part PBS series that speaks with a voice that is clear, eloquent and--to many Western ears--dissident.

Should we listen? Of course we should. Can we take it? Of course we can.

Premiering Tuesday on the Public Broadcasting Service, “The Africans” is a co-production of WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., and the British Broadcasting Corp. It has already aired in England. (It will be seen at 8 p.m. on Channel 50, at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15 and at 10 p.m. on Channel 24.)

“The Africans” is an exciting television masterpiece that uses stunning documentary techniques to present the views of its host and writer, Ali A. Mazrui, a Kenya-born black African who teaches at the University of Michigan and the University of Jos in Nigeria. It’s Mazrui’s personal, insider’s essay, his blunt memo to the West, without dissent.

Made with extraordinary craft, the weekly hours are sometimes angering, often enthralling and always fascinating and challenging. This is one of those rare, wonderful times when TV is worth talking--and arguing--about.

What an Africa week for PBS, and what timing, following by a few days the Senate’s override of President Reagan’s veto of sanctions against South Africa.

Besides “The Africans,” a jolting one-hour program titled “Witness to Apartheid” arrives at 10 tonight on Channels 28 and 50, appearing to document police murder and torture of black children in South Africa. And at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Channel 28 comes “World Without Walls,” an African memoir of enigmatic British aviator Beryl Markham, who lived most of her life in Kenya.

“The Africans,” “Witness to Apartheid” and “World Without Walls” view Africa from different perspectives but, in varying degrees, share a theme of white exploitation.

When it comes to “The Africans,” that theme is apparently arsenic to Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which helped fund the $3.5-million series and then pettily had its name dropped from the credits. You know how that goes: If you don’t agree with it, then it ain’t no good.

“The Africans” also has been attacked by those truer-and-bluer-than-thou Americans from Accuracy in Media and the National Conservative Foundation.

Cheney has been the toughest critic, though, withholding $50,000 in promised publicity money for the series and charging that it “frequently degenerates into anti-Western diatribe” and “extols the virtues of Moammar Kadafi.”

Whether she’s right or wrong isn’t the point.

In fact, there is a strong anti-Western tone threading the nine hours. Unlike some critics of “The Africans,” Mazrui is unable to see the positive side of the black slave trade-- tsk tsk --and the blessings of white supremacist colonialism and arrogant imposition of one culture on another. This man is obviously narrow-minded.

Although the 2 1/2-minute Kadafi portion of the ninth hour hardly “extols the virtues” of the Libyan leader, it is uncomfortably admiring and one-sided. To show alleged Libyan casualties of American bombing without also showing victims of alleged Kadafi terrorism is dishonest.

And some viewers may pale at hearing Mazrui label Anwar Sadat a “collaborator” after describing the Egyptian leader’s peacemaking with Israel and subsequent murder by Islam fundamentalists.

But what of it? We’re supposed to debate ideas in this country, not squelch them. This series--almost all of it absolutely superb--is Mazrui’s testimony and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Some of it reflects a point of view seldom given a wide public forum, and most of it would seem above criticism by even the most xenophobic, ethnocentric American.

In fact, opposition to “The Africans” only proves Mazrui’s point about Western cultural arrogance.

The controversy over the series is especially chilling for PBS, which tiptoes through mine fields while heavily depending on public/government funding. The NEH move feeds the Big Brother-like action of three U.S. senators and 52 representatives who recently demanded a content analysis of PBS programs. Instead, how about a content analysis of their brains?

In airing “The Africans,” PBS is saying no to NEH and yes to Americans who want to be challenged and not treated as brain dead.

The series is grandly staged. It’s exquisitely photographed, scored and written, with Mazrui’s pointed narrative, like the continent itself, at once embracing the richness of the past and the language of the present: “Ethiopia has often been the fountain of literacy, and literacy is the memory bank of culture.”

He defines Africa’s indigenous, Islamic and Western “triple heritage” and traces the course of these often-clashing forces to the present. Enormous contrasts are evident, such as the rhythms of native drums blending into the rhythms of computers.

The first program screams out against European colonialism. His gentle voice often belies bitter words.

During the third hour, on the co-existence of traditional African religions with Islam and Christianity, he asks: “If God wanted to communicate with black Africans, why would he send white missionaries?” And he wonders if “Jesus and Moses will be vanquished by Marx or whether all three Semites will be vanquished by the rhythms of ancestral Africa.”

And in the fourth hour, titled “Tools of Exploitation,” he asserts:

“Something has gone wrong--tragically wrong--in the partnership between Western technology and African resources. And yet the digging continues--dig, dig, dig. Is it for wealth or is it for the collective burial of a people?”

Mazrui seems to resent that part of Africa that has succumbed to Westernism, seeing high-rising skylines as mere facades hiding reality. “In what continent am I, Africa or Europe?” he asks.

While developing Africa in exchange for Western technology, Europeans also trafficked in human commerce. The fourth hour dwells largely on slavery, a practice that Westerners did not introduce in Africa, Mazrui acknowledges, but did lift to a new “scale of callousness.”

Gold, God--for the natives--and glory were the motivations of Europeans in Africa, Mazrui says, and all were manifested in racism. Mazrui rides one of the old trains that carried Europeans in and African resources out and notes a tattered sign saying: “No Dogs or Natives Allowed.”

“The foreigners come, they take and they depart,” he says.

The final hour of “The Africans” will be seen as the most provocative, as Mazrui also hammers at America’s historical racism and predicts a “final racial conflict” in South Africa that will produce “a black republic with convincing nuclear credentials.”

Africa’s nonwhites have spent the 20th Century mostly as pawns, according to Mazrui. But in the coming century, he believes, the “dust of history” will finally settle.

English-born Beryl Markham, who died in August at age 83, was a product of Africa’s colonial past. She arrived in Kenya as a young girl, becoming a farmer, horse trainer, aviator and Garbo-esque figure rumored to have broken up Isak Dinesen’s love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton. Markham achieved brief literary glory with her memoir, “West With the Night.”

Wednesday’s graceful PBS account of Markham’s life, with Diana Quick speaking her words, is somewhat faint and distant, black Africa through white eyes. Yet they are the perceptive eyes of a woman who was mildly condemning of white dominance over black Africans.

There is nothing graceful, faint, distant or mild about tonight’s PBC documentary “Witness to Apartheid,” though. It’s rough and ugly.

What it doesn’t do is show black violence against blacks. What it does do--powerfully and more importantly--is record the white Pretoria regime’s brutalizing of black youth.

“It’s a wonder they still regard me as a leader,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “I have delivered absolutely nothing. I’ve said to them, ‘Let’s try and see whether we can change the system peacefully,’ and I’ve not delivered the goods.”

The “system” is torturing and killing children, according to this anguished and shocking hour filmed in 1985 by former NBC News producer Sharon Sopher. Police and soldiers “shoot to kill” children, charges a doctor who has examined the multiple gunshot wounds of youths killed by authorities in black townships.

An undertaker describes the wounds of 34 children he says he buried. Sopher says that the undertaker was arrested after the interview.

The most profound and moving testimony comes from the family of a youth gunned down on his school playground. “You are only safe when you are dead,” the father says. “I think apartheid will end when they kill all the children.”

“Witness to Apartheid” concludes by listing scores of children said to have been killed by South African authorities. As the names scroll by, you arbitrarily select one--”David Madingwane, 11, shot by police in Soweto in 1976”--and wonder who he was, what he would have become and why the police felt he had to die.