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Acknowledgments
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 15 August 2023, pp ix-xii
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W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
- Scrambling for a New Africa
- Taharka Adé
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- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 15 August 2023
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W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the leading figures of Pan-African thought and activism in the twentieth century. As a sociologist, Du Bois wrote much about the historical and social circumstances of African Americans while often acknowledging the African historical background of much of African American, or Negro, culture. In 1946 Du Bois published The World and Africa, which was a culmination of previous attempts at penning a narrative of African history beginning with his 1915 publication The Negro, in which he included the social-historical experience of African Americans within the continuity of African history. This book delivers for the first time a comprehensive Afrocentric investigation and critique of Du Bois's writings on African history. It argues that while Du Bois presented at the time a strong critique of the Eurocentric construction of African history, many of Du Bois's descriptions and arguments about African people and history were likewise flawed with interpretations that projected the cultural subjectivities of Europe. Further, while Du Bois rightfully presents the historical relationship between African Americans and Africa as a justification for Pan-African activism, this book contends that Du Bois's failure to center African culture instead of race leads to superficial justifications for Pan-African unity.
2 - Du Bois on African History and Classical Antecedents
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 15 August 2023, pp 47-74
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Summary
Du Bois and Africa
The fields of social science and humanities in the Western world developed with inherent biases about the hierarchical nature of civilizations, cultures, languages and customs. Du Bois, though he was trained by the West, appears to have some appreciation of this fact as he writes The World and Africa. However, there are a number of things that Africologists recognize today as Agency Reduction Formations that Du Bois did not have the theoretical foundation necessary to pinpoint as such. Nevertheless, his insight on the reduction of African agency was still profound. Recall, he once stated of an increasingly colonized Africa, “By the end of the nineteenth century the degradation of Africa was as complete as organized human means could make it.”
It is apparent that Du Bois understood that Europe, through power and force, had positioned itself as the superior culture between itself and Africa. Du Bois would state, “A system at first conscious and then unconscious of lying about history and distorting it to the disadvantage of the Negroids became so widespread that the history of Africa ceased to be taught,” and that “every effort was made in archaeology, history, and biography, in biology, psychology, and sociology, to prove the all but universal assumption that the color line had a scientific basis.” This “color line” would be famously voiced by Du Bois as the primary issue of the twentieth century. Many attribute the notion of the “color line” to arguments for social justice measures intended to bring about equal treatment and socioeconomic conditions among those of African and European descent.
However, Du Bois may have meant something a bit more than social justice. I argue that in this text, The World and Africa, Du Bois, despite his aforementioned ideological shortcomings, is actually advocating for cultural justice. Du Bois argues, and I agree, that the European world has distorted the facts of history in order to misattribute upon itself all notions of human technological advancement and intellectual heritage. As Du Bois put it, “Without the winking of an eye, printing, gunpowder, the smelting of iron, the beginnings of social organization, not to mention political life and democracy, were attributed exclusively to the white race and to Nordic Europe.”
This eurocentric masquerade has done its job at standardizing ways of knowing under a type of false universalism.
3 - Du Bois and the Formation of Contemporary African History
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 15 August 2023, pp 75-106
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Summary
Du Bois and the Conundrum of White Scholarship
In the preceding chapters on Africa's classical antecedents, Kemet and Kush, Du Bois was highly critical of the way the Western academy has presented the racial question in regard to the people of the Nile Valley. However, in the chapters in which Du Bois surveys what we may call the generators of contemporary African civilization, his critique is much less about the question of their race but instead the ways in which the West has attempted to reduce the agency of African groups based on their race. But before delving back into Du Bois’ historical survey, I find it proper here to address the issues facing Du Bois on his path toward both writing this history and the shaping of his perspective along the way.
Du Bois borrows significantly from certain European scholars to write his histories on African people. But perhaps this would not be his choice if he had a better choice to make. For example, he leaves a footnote in his chapter on Kush explaining, “For the history of Ethiopia I have leaned heavily on [miscellaneous] material furnished me by Professor Leo Hansberry of Howard University.” In the foreword he expressed “regret that [Hansberry] has not published more of his work.” He also regrets that he could not use the works of Frank Snowden and that “classical journals in America have hitherto declined to publish his paper because it favored the Negro too much […] I tried to get Dr. Snowden to let me see his manuscript, but he refused.”
Both Hansberry and Snowden were African American historians whose scholarship Du Bois apparently trusted and perhaps wished for their work to make up the bulk of chapters IV, V, and VI in The World and Africa, covering the peopling of Africa, and the histories of Kemet and Kush, respectively. Interestingly, Du Bois does not at all mention Carter G. Woodson, whose works at the time could have contributed greatly to a number of chapters in the text. Perhaps this was due to their personal differences which occurred a decade before the book was published. This incident shall soon be covered but first we digress to Du Bois’ conundrum with white scholars.
5 - “Pan-Africa”
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp 123-138
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Summary
My great-grandfather was carried away in chains from the Gulf of Guinea. I have returned that my dust shall mingle with the dust of my fathers.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Coining “Afrocentric”
What I have offered in this analysis is a clearer lens for examining Du Bois’ scholarship, particularly as it pertains to notions of cultural-political centeredness. As aforementioned, The World and Africa is an important text when considering the time in which it was written and the issues that it raises. However, Du Bois’ scholarship was often seriously limited by Eurocentric ideals of civilization and progress. In his early year, such shortcomings were clearly displayed in the lexicon he chose to describe African people and their social, political and economic conditions. Further, he was not able to produce within the text a cultural-historical matrix and, without such, his arguments for political unity became somewhat superficial. To base an argument for unity purely based on the circumstances of a common oppressor limits the range of agency for African people.
To be sure, it is certain that unity in the face of shared oppression can occur between even the most antithetical of groups. However, Du Bois, to the best of his ability, penned a history of the African world. He intended to use this history as the basis of his argument for what it meant historically to be an African person and how African people have contributed to world history. Thus, Du Bois was acknowledging some notion of a composite African ontology comprised of various historical and contemporary African groups. His analysis displayed some understanding of historical cross-cultural relationships within the African continent, particularly as it related to his discussion of the Bantu migration. Du Bois would attempt in the last chapter, and in several works following this text, to use this historical argument of the achievement and character of the composite African identity in order to argue for Pan-African unity.
This argument involves a useful cultural composite illustration that is no different from the historical-cultural connections, and modern sociopolitical unity, Du Bois mentions in the earlier chapters of The World and Africa regarding Europeans. Nevertheless, Du Bois failed to capitalize on the cultural argument regarding African people and instead focused more so on arguments which could valorize Africa to the Western world. This effectively weakened his contention that African people should seek to “save” Africa.
4 - Locating Du Bois
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp 107-122
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Summary
Du Bois’ Andromeda Complex
The year was 1911; W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk had apparently found itself on the international scene and drew a response from J. E. Casley Hayford, one of coastal Africa's most prominent theorists of Ethiopianism—a social-cultural movement that was partly religious and centered Ethiopia as the redeemer of the African race. Hayford wrote in his manifesto, Ethiopia Unbound, a critical response to Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, and regarded the theory as “one of the most pathetic passages in the history of human thought.” Du Bois perceived “a world which wields him no true self-consciousness […] this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American and Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” This thinking apparently sat in sharp contrast with Hayford's self-conscious Ethiopianism. Hayford's retort was piercing:
It is apparent that Mr. Du Bois writes from an American standpoint, surrounded by an American atmosphere. And, of course, it is not his fault, for he knows of no other. To be born an African in America, in that great commonwealth of dollars and the merciless aggrandizement of the individual, where the weak must look out for himself, and the cry of the innocent appeals not to whom who rides triumphantly to fortune, is to be entangled in conditions which give no room for the assertion of the highest manhood. African manhood demands that the Ethiopian should seek not his opportunity, or ask for elbow room, from the white man, but that he should create the one or the other for himself. (emphasis mine).
Hayford's critique of Du Bois at this time differs very little from Carter G. Woodson's indictment decades later in which he proclaimed that, ostensibly unlike Du Bois, he didn't “accept the gifts of the Greeks.” This, of course, was in response to Du Bois’ position that he must make use of the money, and, subsequently, the opinions that came from with that money, being offered by whites in order to create the Encyclopedia of the Negro. To be fair, Du Bois too was quite critical about the project and viewed the whites who headed it as “the enemy.”
1 - The Situation
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- Anthem Press
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- 28 February 2024
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- 15 August 2023, pp 15-46
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Summary
Africa is, of course, my fatherland. Yet neither my father nor my father's father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it. My mother's folk were closer and yet their direct connection, in culture and race, became tenuous; still, my tie to Africa is strong.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois explains in his posthumously published autobiography that many non-African people in his day thought that all African Americans regarded Africa as their motherland. However, Du Bois makes it clear that they were mistaken. Due to the effects of enslavement and colonialism, many of the descendants of the millions of kidnapped Africans in the Americas had turned their backs on their heritage. “This was true in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when there actually were, in the United States, Negroes who either remembered Africa or inherited memories from their fathers or grandfathers,” explained Du Bois before continuing that “among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent.” Du Bois would also highlight a growing perception of identity among his generation. He explains that resentment arose whenever someone would suggest “that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans.”
Du Bois would however conclude that African Americans, or Negros, as described in his day, are indeed African people. In 1945, he would leave Atlanta and return to New York to become the director of Special Research for the NAACP. He took the post to better concentrate his study toward the history of colonized people in general, and the history of African people specifically. The result of which produced the book, The World and Africa. Within the book, Du Bois begins by critiquing Europe as the “pattern of human culture” which has left the world in ruin. He then presents an historical account of African people which includes the classical examples of Kemet and Nubia, the history of Bantu migration, the Sudanic Empires, as well as histories of Western, West-Central and Southern African societies.
Frontmatter
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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References
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp 143-150
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Contents
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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Preface
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- By Taharka Adé
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp xiii-xx
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This work has in so many ways been a personal journey for me as years before the inception of this volume I began a journey of intellectual self-discovery in which the life and work of Du Bois remained a central muse. So intertwined with my personal story, I ask the reader to indulge me as I break from the traditional means of penning a preface and walk you through portions of that journey as I find it necessary in understanding the soul of this work before you.
The 2009–2010 academic year presented interesting turning points in my life. I was a student at Alabama State University at the time, majoring in history and performing disastrously. Many who supervised my novice scholarship expressed that while I was naturally gifted in history and philosophy—a trait I inherited from my grandfather who taught history for over thirty years—I was unfortunately very undisciplined. However, in the fall of 2009, a chance meeting with Dr. Stephen Redmond, the newly installed director of Alabama State University's branch of the Wesley Foundation, set off a series of events that put me on the right course. Redmond had just moved three doors down from me in the same apartment complex. He was a recent graduate of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, receiving the degree Master of Divinity.
I, much like Du Bois throughout his life, had begun to question the historicity of biblical events as well as the historical effects of African people's adoption of this culturally foreign religious faith. However, I was neither informed enough nor intellectually mature enough to provide any serious cultural-historical assessment of the Hebrew religion that could serve to ease my growing discontent with Christian dogma. On the night of our meeting, Redmond was quite welcoming and conceded to my inquiries though, unbeknownst to me at the time, did so in the tradition of a good scholar of biblical apologetics. He would in later years inform me that this was a ruse to shield his own theological standings while at the same time discovering for himself my intellectual potential.
With a slight smirk and wide-eyed gaze, he questioned me on my own thinking about the world, particularly the state of African people within it. This turn in discourse was refreshing, and I began to offer my humble thoughts.
Index
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp 151-157
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Conclusion
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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- 15 August 2023, pp 139-142
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This book set out to provide a critical Afrocentric analysis of Du Bois and his career-long engagement with Africa. It largely accounts for Du Bois’ Eurocentric shortcomings and appraises his more Afrocentric positions. Performing this analysis required a fundamental reevaluation of his works under the lens of a number of mechanisms of analysis informed by the Afrocentric paradigm. I contextualized the experiences that shaped Du Bois’ thinking about Africa throughout his life as well as provided commentary on influential events that shaped Du Bois’ philosophy as early as his college years as well as experiences that continued to shape his opinions through the end of his life. Though I engaged with a number of Du Bois’ writings that spanned the breadth of his career, the principal scholarship of Du Bois subject to review was his book The World and Africa.
In this study I have highlighted Du Bois’ Eurocentric approaches to history in regard to African people. The significance of confronting these Eurocentric assertions is the fact that Du Bois is more or less considered the most influential African American intellectual of the twentieth century. Thus, my aim was to provide an analysis that is useful in illustrating the Eurocentric entrapments in regard to Africa and African people that have plagued even our most brilliant intellectuals. With that said, I have also demonstrated that Du Bois underwent an evolution of thought throughout his life which by his twilight years began to reveal early foundations for Afrocentric thought. I have argued that Du Bois’ analysis of African history, and subsequent promotion of Pan-African unity, is limited by his primary use of the racial paradigm juxtaposed to utilizing a cultural paradigm—though he does make some ancillary mention of culture. As such, in The World and Africa, Du Bois often makes superficial and sometimes erroneous claims about what constitutes African identity. However, Du Bois himself in some ways has expressed his discontent with the racial paradigm, and though perhaps he himself wasn't aware, was on the verge of a revolutionary new philosophy in the form of what he describes as Pan-Africa. Du Bois’ speech at the All-African People's Conference in Ghana charged Africans with the mission of unifying culturally.
Introduction
- Taharka Adé, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- W. E. B. Du Bois' Africa
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In the late 1940s, the African world was in utter turmoil. Many factors led up to this condition, and most, if not all, stemmed from the adverse effects of the history of European encroachment and colonialism. The European trade of enslaved Africans brought not only cultural instability and foreign ideological immoralities to the African continent but drained it of both valuable human and natural resources. The Portuguese, specifically, ruined the ancient Indian Ocean trade network, while simultaneously opening up the Kongo Kingdom in modern-day Angola to the trade of human bondage that would ensure that over a quarter of Africans taken to the so-called Americas came from its shores.
Further, the ending of the trade by the very same European powers brought even more economic havoc to major kingdoms and territories that had incautiously grown dependent on its resources. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Africa began to be ravaged by colonial forces. Ancient cities like Benin were burned to the ground by the British, the French would subjugate the last of Dahomey's brave warriors, and the mighty Oyo empire under the rule of Adeyemi Alowolodu came completely under the vassal-ship of Britain's Victoria. The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference carved up the African continent and separated people into colonial territories without regard for cultural and political affiliation.
The twentieth century continued this trend. Masses of African people were affected by two large-scale European wars, usually referred to under the misnomers World War I and World War II, in which millions of Africans found themselves to be little more than cannon fodder. Two decades before the second war, a pandemic known as the Spanish Flu infected over a third of the world's population, as well as killing millions of African people on the continent. In the United States, African Americans were far more likely to die from the disease than whites.
A decade before the second war there was a worldwide economic crisis, retroactively referred to as the Great Depression, which greatly affected African peasant farmers and miners, still under the thumb of European trading companies. It is also reported that during the Great Depression, African Americans, already no strangers to hardship, were under such economic duress that nearly 40 percent of the African American population could not support themselves without government assistance.