That’s how my love affair with Africa began. I memorized the names of the new countries and the names of their leaders — Patrice Lumumba and Moïse Tshombe, Léopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah — and exotic-sounding city names: Dar es Salaam and Mogadishu, Dakar and Kinshasa. Then we read an incredible story, perhaps from Reader’s Digest, about a boy who walked across the Equator. I wanted to cross the Equator, too.

So many of the students of my generation at Yale were introduced to African art and culture through a wildly popular course taught by the eminent art historian Robert Farris Thompson. Studying these things within the womb of the black cultural nationalism of the late ’60s and early ’70s made the appeal — the lure — of Africa irresistible, as Du Bois might say. So, when opportunity knocked, I answered the door.

The door that opened Africa to me was an exceptionally imaginative gap-year program at Yale. It sent 12 students to work (not study) in a developing country between sophomore and junior years. I ended up working in an Anglican mission hospital in a village called Kilimatinde, in the middle of Tanzania, about 340 miles from Dar es Salaam, with a population of about 6,000 today — far smaller than when I arrived there in August 1970. Several months later, I would hitchhike across the Equator with a recent Harvard graduate named Lawrence Biddle Weeks, ending up in Kinshasa before flying to Lagos, then on to Accra, to visit Du Bois’s grave. Two years later, I would find myself in the Cambridge University classroom of the great Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, slowly but inevitably falling in love with the idea that I might become a professor of African studies.

African history is replete with riveting stories that refute centuries of stereotypes about black people and that show our shared humanity: Our common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve, 200,000 years ago; the out-migration of our anatomically modern Homo sapien great-grandparents 50,000 to 80,000 years ago; the still-magical Nile River kingdom of Egypt and its rival Kush around 3,000 B.C.; and Emperor Menelik II’s heroic stand on the plains of Adwa on March 1, 1896, when, blessed by a replica of the ark of the covenant, he soundly defeated an Italian army.

African history is an encounter with “kings and queens and bishops, too,” as the song says, including a black queen of Meroe who defeated the Romans in 24 B.C., then confiscated and buried a statue of Augustus Caesar before her throne so that her subjects could gleefully walk on his head. The third nation in the world to convert to Christianity was Ethiopia, in A.D. 350. How many of us know that the Sahara was a trading highway or that the ruler of Great Zimbabwe, in the late Middle Ages, dined off porcelain plates made in China?

Africa — contrary to myths of isolation and stagnation — has been embedded in the world and the world embedded in Africa. There was nothing empty or blank about it except the willful forgetting by the Western world, after the onset of the slave trade, of Africa’s long and fascinating history.

Though not very likely, I like to think that Jane Gates’s grandmother would have passed down even one of these many riveting stories, and eventually it would have been passed down to me. Our challenge today is to ensure that more and more stories like these become a central part of the school curriculum, as well as the stuff of documentaries and the mythologies of Hollywood, so that they will never be lost again.