NEEDED: FACT CHECKERS.

Africana
The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience
Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
Basic Civitas Books, $89.95, 2,095 pp.

Encarta Africana 2000
Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
Microsoft Corporation, $69.95,
2 CD-Roms

To settle a holiday dispute about the ethnicity of Saint Luke, we did what thousands of people in a hurry have done before us-we turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But unlike most encyclopedia users, we did not haul down a thick volume from an upper shelf. Instead, we clicked onto the Britannica web site and entered "St. Luke" into the "Find" slot. This instantly called up a typically elegant, traditional Britannica entry laying out the known facts about Luke and summarizing the various debates about his true identity and ideas.

The Britannica is the standard against which the new African encyclopedia, Africana, measures itself-in part because it was the standard set by the man who first dreamed of putting together such an encyclopedia, sociologist W. E. B. DuBois. As one of this country's most prominent black intellectuals, DuBois had tried unsuccessfully for some fifty-five years to publish a black equivalent of the Britannica.

Now it is here. Does it measure up to DuBois's aspirations?

Like Britannica, Africana can be read in a handsome printed edition or in a computerized edition. Nearly everyone who picks up the printed Africana will want to wish it well. Beautifully produced on good stock with lavish photographs and maps, Africana asks to be given the pride of place once given to the Britannica in middle-class living rooms. It seeks to become the primary reference on African or African-American matters.

Granting an encyclopedia such status requires trust: Trust by the reader that the encyclopedia is thorough, meticulous, well researched, and- since the editors must make innumerable judgments-fair. Africana does not yet meet these standards.

Take the entry on "The Black Church," an immensely important subject by anyone's criteria. It begins well enough, noting that the black church is a simplified way of referring to the more than sixty-five thousand Christian churches with a predominance of African-American members and black clerical leadership. After a brief discussion of Islamic and African religious influences, the entry turns to "White Protestantism and Slavery." Most readers will want to know here-and in all Africana's religious discussions-how these devout Southern whites reconciled their beliefs with slavery. Yet instead of either good description or sensitive analysis, Africana offers a stunning characterization of white Protestants through the Second Awakening that ended in 1830. Despite converting many slaves, the entry asserts, "for most whites, Christianity was largely viewed as an instrument of social control, to produce 'obedient and docile' slaves."

Really? This is how most whites viewed their religion? What Gallup Poll showed this? Surely such a sentence demands a citation. Has some recent but still obscure scholar delved into nineteenth-century accounts and come to this startling conclusion? Not a word. This sentence and the hundreds of others like it reflect at best a sorry lack of editing. Africana apparently had no editor demanding "Source?" in the margins of submitted manuscripts.

Worse, such sentences reflect a lack of substantive-rather than mere procedural-interest in the subject. Thus the Methodist church, for example, is discussed in dozens of entries without any mention of its strong substantive attraction for slaves: Methodists believe in a direct relationship between the individual and God. No minister, no priest, no human authority intervenes. This is one reason Methodism rather than, say, Episcopalianism, became the dominant black church.

However, Africana reserves its most serious disdain for Catholicism. The entry on the Catholic church in Latin America and the Caribbean begins by saying that the "church's complicity in slavery, its Euro-centric cosmology, and its bouts of inquisitorial zeal have rendered it an uninviting space for Afro-Latin identity." Uninviting? Is the general impression of Latin America as primarily Catholic just wrong? Is it a remnant of an earlier ignorant age of favorable press for Catholics? What, then, are the numbers on this uninviting state? How many Afro- Latin Catholics? Protestants? Other? Not a word.

Instead, Africana warns in its conclusion that "Throughout the hemisphere Catholicism and its parent, the Catholic church, are held in fairly low regard by black movement activists committed to building a strong sense of Afro-Latin identity and antiracist sentiment." Few people pick up an encyclopedia to discover what activists think- especially unnamed, uncited activists. Most readers expect an encyclopedia to give the judgment of scholars-a group largely missing in action here.

Speaking of activists, where is liberation theology? Not in the Catholic section. Perhaps in the Protestant section? I find nothing, however, about liberation theology in the parallel entry on the Protestant church in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Still, I have a moment of hope that numbers at least will be forthcoming. Pentecostalism, Africana says, "is the fastest growing, most popular form of religiosity in Latin America and the Caribbean today, accounting for up to 85 percent of all Protestants." This is only partially helpful, of course, since there is no mention of what percentage of the population is Protestant. But wait. We are assured that Pentecostalism "has grown at breakneck speed since the 1950s, and now can boast more than 20 million faithful in Brazil and half a million in Jamaica." This sentence tells us nothing about the rate of increase- it gives no original base-nor does it provide national population figures from which to gauge the percentage of Pentecostals in either country. Without anchoring statistics, these numbers are meaningless. It may well be true-as the New York Times has reported repeatedly-that Protestantism is beating out Catholicism in Latin countries. But without numbers, Africana's sloppy presentation shows only the writer's wishful thinking-wishful thinking that should have been queried by an attentive editor.

Perhaps these entries on religion reflect what the editors regard as a fulfillment of DuBois's intentions-the encyclopedia as bulwark, Enlightenment-style, against superstition, myth, and the false solace of religious faith. Fair enough. Then let's look at the entry for Judaism, a religion from whose secularized ranks came some of the most important activists in the American civil rights movement.

But there is no entry on Judaism or American Jews.

Time to try the Encarta Africana, the on-line version that will permit a search of the entire text. The Encarta yields surprises. It has an entry on liberation theology, written by Harvard professor Harvey Cox, who is listed nowhere in the print edition either as contributor or advisor. His is a tempered discussion, reminiscent of what one would expect in the Britannica. He begins by saying liberation theology is a "theological and religious movement that revolutionized the role of the church by advocating its alignment with the oppressed in society." He goes on to discuss its many influences-and its equivalent controversies.

And there is indeed an entry on Judaism, by writer Julius Lester, an African-American who converted to Judaism. This slightly bizarre, even mean-spirited entry, has only one sentence on the social relations between blacks and Jews: "During the first half of the twentieth century, African-Americans and Jews worked together to help create the civil rights movement."

Part of what one seeks from an encyclopedia are reliability and good judgment. Surely the thousands of Jewish activists who protested and litigated for decades deserve more than this lone sentence. But at least it is an entry.

The Encarta does not state that it will correct errors or omissions in the printed edition, but such is the promise of technology. The expensive, bulky book will not be revised for years. The CD-Roms can be revised immediately and repeatedly. Herein lies hope. Even the Britannica required multiple editions before scholars pronounced it brilliant.

Julia Vitullo-Martin edited Breaking Away: The Future of Cities (Twentieth Century Fund Press).