Manthia Diawara brought his myriad perspectives to the Maryland Institute, College of Art this week, perspectives forged in a life of contrasts.

This is specialist in film and literature is at home in the bistros of Paris and lofts of SoHo. But his first schooling came at age 13 in a West Africa that was taking the first unsteady steps of independence.

The second in a series of visiting scholars and authors honoring 20 years of Fred Lazarus' presidency of the institute, Diawara, 46, a professor of comparative literature at New York University, gave a lecture last night after spending two days with students, talking, criticizing, looking, absorbing.

"I really think I am learning more from these students than they are learning [from] me," Diawara said yesterday after leading a class discussion. "They are very intelligent, very curious, very mature. I am impressed at how they are able to take a theme from one field and show how it works in another field. Something that might be in a novel, they can express in painting or sculpture or video."

Affable and unpretentious, Diawara arrived in Baltimore straight from the African film festival held every two years in Burkina Faso. He was full of thoughts about the films he had seen there, and in the African theaters of his youth where he grew up watching Tarzan films.

"He was a white man who killed a lot of black people," Diawara told a class. "But we all wanted to be Tarzan. But he was the biggest and the fastest, so of course we wanted to be him."

Coming to terms with such memories is a new-found theme for Diawara, whose 1996 trip to find the Africa of his youth is chronicled in his recent book "In Search of Africa."

"I think I went back because of the Afro-centrists," he said, referring to scholars who view Africa as something of the earth mother of civilization. "The Africa they were talking about did not jibe with my Africa.

"But I also went back because of myself. I wanted to integrate some of my perceptions of

Africa."

It is a melange of perceptions -- a ruthless dictator who is a personal hero, a colonial oppressor who offered the promise of modernity.

Diawara structures his book around the search for a older friend he had not seen since leaving Guinea. Interspersed are critical considerations of commentators on African culture. The book ends with a defense of hip-hop.

Diawara left Guinea when Sekou Toure, the man who brought the country its independence from France, expelled all non-natives. Diawara's family was from Mali.

"He was a terrible man," Diawara said of Toure. "But I still considered him a hero. I had to find out why."

The reason is that Toure gave Diawara the key to what would become his life -- education. Diawara said he grew up in a tribe that believed in working, not schooling, but Toure decreed universal education. At 13, Diawara started school. "I was so much taller than the other students," he said. "But I caught up."

Diawara continued his schooling in neighboring Mali, and, like many African intellectuals from French colonies, went to Paris. In 1974, he came to the United States, where he studied at American University in Washington. He received a doctorate from Indiana University, writing his dissertation on African films.

"It was the first one on the subject ever written," he said. "Now there are whole departments about such things."

Diawara taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania before going to NYU. He has published widely on literature, film and art.

In his lecture, Diawara talked of stereotypes, how they are often appropriated by the people being stereotyped, then protected and preserved as part of tradition.

He finds such images in the "blaxploitation" films of the 1960s -- "Shaft" and its followers. When those reached Africa, he and his friends had found their black Tarzan. They dressed in the hippest Superfly outfits they could find.

In his trip to Guinea, Diawara was looking for the personal hero of his youth, a friend named Sidney Laye. He found him, carving traditional African masks that he sold in the capital city, Conakry.

Diawara sees irony here: Independence brought the promise of modernity, but the brightest of his friends ended up in the most traditional of occupations. He rejects the view of the Afro-centrists who, he says, want to keep Africa mired in such traditions. "Africans should be allowed to put their traditions in a museum like every other culture and join the modern world," he said. "We want to participate in the discourse of the world like all other nations."

But he also rejects the view of those he calls Afro-pessimists who see the continent doomed to violent upheaval.

Pub Date: 3/10/99