Blackout shows Rudy has the Power trumpeted the Daily News

“Blackout shows Rudy has the Power”, trumpeted the Daily News.But then, he needed the break. On Thursday, when the First Lady should have occupied the city’s front pages with the start of her corny “listening tour” upstate, instead they belonged to him. He is being cast as the probable Republican opponent against Hillary Rodham Clinton in a US Senate race in New York next year. Temperatures exceeding 100oF had frazzled cables and plunged Washington Heights into darkness. Over 200,000 residents were without light and air- conditioning and there was Rudy at a command post on W190th St, overseeing the emergency response and threatening to file suit against the electricity company.
The heat wave was a Godsend for the mayor. Like on Tuesday night, when the lights went out across a swathe of Manhattan. Identify the crisis of the day in the seething jungle of a metropolis – there is always one unfolding somewhere, a murdered cop, a fire – and you can be sure the mayor will be there.

(Only reporters come below protesters in his hierarchy of the human species.) But do not despair. Want to see Rudy Giuliani in the flesh? Good luck. He has famously erected police barricades around the entrance to New York’s City Hall – those pesky protesters were getting to close to his throne – and he is as reluctant as ever to sit for interviews. Then he obligingly paraphrases it for me into more printable form: “They’re saying: Hume? Kant? Jefferson? Hegel? Yo’ Momma! In yo’ face!”`Into Africa’, a six-part series, starts tonight at 8.10pm on BBC2. They’ve done it, with three months to spare.Indirectly all Gates’ work is the fruit of his Cambridge PhD research on the attitude of European Enlightenment thinkers to African authors: “One of the motifs of my thesis is the claim: “There is no culture, no civilisation in Africa” – Hume said it in 1754, Kant said it in 1764, Jefferson said it in 1785, Hegel said it in 1790, right? So both the series and the encyclopedia are saying…” – and Professor Gates says it bluntly, with an accompanying hand-gesture of the kind Jacob Bronowski definitely didn’t use. More personally, it goes back to the night when “Skip” sat in an Indian restaurant in Cambridge (England) with Wole Soyinka and Anthony Appiah and vowed they would make DuBois’s vision concrete by the end of the 20th century. Isn’t that great?”In America, the screening of the Africa films and the publication of the accompanying volume, both in October, will coincide with the release of another work that Gates has been dreaming of for decades: Incarta Africana, an encyclopedia in book and on CD-rom of every aspect of Africa and the African diaspora, from Bessie Smith singing the St Louis Blues to “Skip” Gates being a presenter for the BBC: “It’s a black Brittanica.” In global terms, the idea for such an encyclopedia goes back exactly 90 years, to a resolution by the great black scholar WEB DuBois in 1909.

We met a man who was a protector of this library that had been owned by 12 families in Timbuktu, passed down from generation to generation since 1600… 50,000 volumes! Uncatalogued! Written by black men, in Arabic, between the 14th and 17th centuries! I got a grant from the Mellon Foundation, and [now] we’re cataloguing them.. It’s the mind of the black world, hidden away. Most places he visited really were new to him, and at least one encounter was a revelation: “In Timbuktu, there’s this great university, one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1391, which had 25,000 students and scholars. One programme also confronts the painful fact of African complicity in the slave trade: a reality that isn’t going to win HLG Jnr many friends in Afro-centric circles.On the whole, though, Into Africa registers Gates’s unfeigned delight and surprise at his discoveries. But if Into Africa will act as a useful introduction for the neophyte, it also serves to correct some of the more fantastical ideas about the continent held by a few of HLGJnr’s countrymen: “So many African-Americans spend their first night in Africa in tears,” he reflects, and reminds me of the story about the Back-to-Africa enthusiasts who came to Ghana in the early Sixties, gleefully pitched their US passports into the Atlantic and then, a few weeks later, could be seen desperately trying to find them again. But the overall intention is enlightenment: “Let’s face it, when you think of Africa, what comes to mind? Poverty, famine, war, disease…