#27, December 19, 2003
The Heart of the World
This
essay is an early draft of the “Afterword” that I was asked to write for W.E.B.
Du Bois’s The Negro, which the University of Pennsylvania Press wanted to reprint. My draft endeavored to make comparisons
between Du Bois’s work on Africa and that of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
emphasizing a clear preference for the former over the latter. Such an approach was not deemed judicious by
my editor and I was asked to change it.
The results of doing this led to certain improvements in the final text
that would be published in 2001, and refinements of ideas not explored in the
draft. So it was probably salutary
advice. However, I still believe that
the comparison I was making was a useful one and excising it from the paper
represented a loss of sorts. The
publisher also neglected to use my title, which was a little aggravating. For these reasons I decided to return to the
original and reproduce a version of it below.
It is a curious commentary on modern prejudice that
most of this splendid history of civilization and uplift is unknown to-day, and
men confidently assert that Negroes have no history.
– W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro, p. 61.
For some people, when you say ‘Timbuktu’ it is like the end of the
world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are
right at the heart of the world.
–
Ali Farka Toure, “Talking Timbuktu”
On
the cusp of a new century the preeminent African American intellectual of his
day set about reassessing Africa and the relationship of African Americans’
with the continent of their ancestors.
Undertaking a ten-month trip through Africa followed by the arduous task
of “distill[ing] into a general discourse the extensive scholarship of hundreds
of excellent historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists,” he endeavored to
open the eyes of black and white America to the complexity and richness of
African history and the continent’s many civilizations.[1] What Henry Louis Gates, Jr. undertook in his
1999 PBS series, Wonders of the African
World, in many ways resembled the earlier efforts of W.E.B. Du Bois who
published his Home University Library of Modern Knowledge edition of The Negro
in 1915. Lifting the veil from
African history, a veil that had enabled Europeans to exploit African resources
and deny that Africans had a meaningful history comparable to their own, Du
Bois had synthesized the most recent historical and anthropological scholarship
in the most thorough and accessible account of Africa and the African Diaspora
till then written
Drawing
out the similarities and differences between Gates’s and Du Bois’s projects can
help reacquaint us with the latter’s formidable contribution in The Negro, something that has become
necessary recently. While the
significance of Du Bois’s text was readily apparent at the time it was
published, especially among African and African American intellectuals, and
remained so during the 1970s, when newly-independent African states had not yet
begun to falter and Du Bois’s work was still fresh in the minds of many
scholars, the book is remembered less well today.[2] Now, scholars and students are more likely to
be familiar with other writings by Du Bois, like The Philadelphia Negro (which is considered a foundational text in
sociology), The Souls of Black Folk
(which cemented Du Bois’s reputation in opposition to Booker T. Washington and
provided a way of reevaluating black culture), and, to a lesser extent, Black Reconstruction in America (which
has inspired leading historians of American Reconstruction).[3] In his acclaimed biography of Du Bois, David
Levering Lewis does describe The Negro
as a “pioneering synthesis of the latest scholarship brilliantly beamed through
a revisionist lens,” but overall he is somewhat dismissive of the work.[4] Devoting no more than a couple of paragraphs
to an examination of the text, Lewis notes Du Bois’s conformity to some of the
racial and elitist assumptions of his period.
He writes:
In what was the first general history yet written in
English on the subject, Du Bois casually informed readers that “in disposition
the Negro is among the most lovable of men,” that there could be “no doubt of
the Negro’s deep and delicate sense of beauty in form, color, and sound,” or
that “Haiti’s peasantry is “the happiest and most contented peasantry in the
world.”[5]
For
Lewis, Du Bois was here clearly endorsing racial stereotypes and romanticizing
the condition of peasants in Haiti, though, given Du Bois’s extensive study of the
conditions of the South’s peasants it is hard to imagine that he really
intended to suggest that Haitian peasants were living in a paradise.[6] Lewis does note somewhat cryptically but (one
presumes) positively:
Greatly indebted to Boas, von Luschan, Alexander F.
Chamberlain, Robert H. Lowie, Jacques Loeb, and other social and physical
scientists (all extensively quoted), the pages of The Negro were littered with fallacious concepts exploded by Du
Bois – estimates of black African technological backwardness in the Neolithic
Age, Aryan and Hamatic foundations of ancient civilizations, color-based
presumptions of inferiority prior to the Industrial Revolution in northern
Europe, absence of high culture and complex political structures in precolonial
Africa, and so on. [7]
In
sum, for Lewis the book’s influence is seen in the flourishing of Afrocentric
scholarship: “The Negro was a large
building block in an Afrocentric historiography,” which, he writes, “achieved
its credibility through the writings of scholars such as Basil Davidson, Martin
Bernal, and Cheikh Anta Diop.”[8] As just noted, however, its “credibility” had
been established long before these scholars’ contributions. Moreover, to label the work Afrocentric in
this way leaves the misleading impression that it uncritically enshrines a
category of race, or conforms to a perspective that Kwame Anthony Appiah mocks
as “Egyptianist”, when the impetus of the book was, in my view, precisely in
the opposite direction.[9] It is it is time, once again
therefore, to take a closer look at The Negro. But to get a better sense of this
path-breaking study’s importance, the
degree to which it was ahead of its time and its enduring significance, let us
return to our comparison with the most recent attempt to popularize African
history in the United States.
The
similarities between Wonders of the
African World and The Negro arise
in part from the fact that Gates has set himself the task of fulfilling Du
Bois’s project. Nowhere perhaps is this
clearer than in the publication of Africana,
which the two editors, Appiah and Gates, proclaim as the fruition of Du Bois’s
life-long dream.[10] Appiah and Gates strive in this volume to
provide “a sense of the wide diversity of peoples, cultures, and traditions
that we know about Africa in historical times, a feel for the environment in
which that history was lived, and a broad outline of the contributions of
people of African descent, especially in the Americas, but, more generally,
around the world.”[11] Similar objectives had shaped Du Bois’s work
on the Encyclopedia Africana, which
began when the European “Scramble for Africa” was still at its height
and terminated in the wake of successful movements for African independence
with the Du Bois’s death on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963.[12]
Both
Wonders of the African World and The Negro surfaced at times that can be
considered turning points in African history.
In the aftermath of the fall of Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War
animosities, which frequently became hot in Africa, considerable change has
occurred throughout the continent. The end of the Cold War further generated
the assumption that a new global economy had emerged, with Africa as one of the newer sites
in the process of globalization. This is
epitomized in Wonders by a
conversation Gates has with some young boys who were guiding him up to the
Tissisat falls. They spoke splendid
English, Gates notes:
I asked one of them if he had ever had malaria. “No,” he replied, “but my brother did. My older brother now lives abroad in Australia. He faxed s a list of all the different
medicines that my younger brother could take to cure it.”…
“You
have a fax machine?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes,
of course,” he responded calmly. “Our entire village does.”[13]
Although
one aspect of this transformation has been political instability arising from
changing regimes, it has also been a time of possibility and opportunity all
across Africa, beginning with Nelson Mandela’s triumph in South Africa, through
recent attempts to end corruption in places like Nigeria (which Gates rightly
refused to visit in protest against the military dictatorship of Soni
Abacha). Such possibilities are
accompanied by moral imperatives to engage with African nations to ensure that
the kinds of horrors like those witnessed in Somalia and Rwanda, which often have their
roots in poverty, do not occur again.
Gates’s intellectual journey, therefore, provides a fitting
accompaniment to the visits of President Clinton to several African countries,
the first such trips by a sitting American President to the continent.
At
the time Du Bois was writing The Negro
change in Africa also seemed to be dawning. The
“Scramble” had ended and the process of beginning to transform the colonial
regimes that had emerged was underway.
Reforms following revelations about the barbarity of the colonial regime
in the Congo (which, as Adam Hochschild has made clear, provide the backdrop to
events in Mobutu’s Zaire[14]) seemed to suggest that
widespread abhorrence to injustice and cruelty might lead to change, not just
in regimes like the Belgian Congo, but in colonies where rulers did not want to
be tainted by association with the atrocities inflicted on the Congolese
peoples. While Du Bois’s optimism was
not yet anti-colonial in nature (he did not predict the rise of nationalist
movements in this book), it was nonetheless moving towards a Pan-Africanism
shaped by a belief that changes were going to occur in Africa (especially given that the colonial rulers
had extended themselves too far in the World War and were becoming increasingly
dependent on assistance from their colonial subjects).[15]
Lastly, both authors seem to
share a sensibility derived from their location as scholars living in the United States, a sensibility that in Du Bois’s day would have been
labeled Progressive. Both Du Bois and
Gates believe in the benefits of western civilization and both write at a time
when a belief in progress prevails. For
Gates there is a sense that the world is becoming smaller, so much so that it
has now become necessary for him to provide an answer to his daughter’s
question (asked when he made an earlier visit to Africa) about what it was that
she and the people they observed outside the train car in which they traveled
might possibly have in common.[16] And, while it is important to remember the
“tragedy” alongside the “romance” of Africa (to borrow from the opening lines
of The Negro), the overall feeling
left by Wonders is that the new
constructive engagement brought about by globalization will eventually elevate
Africa to a status alongside other civilizations. For Du Bois, the horrors of globalization
(the slave trade and imperialism) still scarred Africa,
but some progress for “the Negro” had occurred nonetheless and a process of
uplift would likely follow.
The differences between the
two texts, however, may be more significant than their similarities. Indeed, while The Negro was intended to lay the foundation for an Encyclopedia Africana, it was also very
much an opening salvo against the American academy for its neglect of Africa
and African Americans, one that would be followed by other assaults on the
ivory tower.[17] Later work on Africa
would endeavor to flesh out Du Bois’s critique, strengthened by his Marxian
analysis of what he called the “propaganda of history,” and culminating in the
transfer of the encyclopedia project from New York to Ghana at the end of the scholar’s life.[18] And, while Du Bois had reached the same
academic heights as Gates, he would mostly work outside the academy. He would hold only a temporary position at
the University of Pennsylvania, when he was hired to undertake research that would
result in the publication of The
Philadelphia Negro, and would be offered a long-term one only at Atlanta University, which enabled him to produce the widely respected Atlanta University sociological studies.[19] But none of the major universities of the
country would offer Du Bois a position commensurate to the Harvard Ph.D. that
he had earned and his Berlin graduate training which, but for limited financial
support, he would have completed.[20] He remained an outsider, forced to launch his
assault on the academy from his position as editor of The Crisis.
Gates meanwhile is clearly
part of an academic mainstream, a former Cambridge University postgraduate student, embraced by Yale and Duke,
before establishing at Harvard University the most influential African American Studies Program
in the country. Indeed, Gates’s location
highlights both how much the academy has become more inclusive since Du Bois’s
day (in part owing to the recognition of the earlier scholar-activist’s
achievements) and the growing political divisions that now exist within the
black community. A television series
recording a trip to Africa by the Afrocentrist Asante, for example, would have
been a very different enterprise from Gates’s, with a different sensibility and
altogether different funding sources.[21] When Gates meets Louis Farrakhan in Ethiopia, the fractured nature of African American politics is
made abundantly clear.[22] One might argue, it is true, that had The Negro been written by Marcus Garvey
it too would be a different text. But Du
Bois was writing this before Garvey had arrived in the United States (in some ways making the point about the degree of
uniformity among African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth
century). In addition, the work was
written in a way likely to smooth over potential political conflicts about Africa. Any African American politician or
intellectual at the time, from Alexander Crummell to Booker T. Washington and
Carter G. Woodson, would have endorsed Du Bois’s text.
Thus, while we have noted
some similarities between Gates and Du Bois in their location and sensibility
with regard to Africa and Africans, there are differences here also. Du Bois retained an academic distance
throughout The Negro. For better or worse, he endeavored to read
the archive of materials already assembled on the subject to represent African history
anew. Dealing with and emerging out of
an academic and political culture that valued highly the notion of objectivity
and which believed in paying homage to the recognized authorities, he needed to
challenge mainstream beliefs using an archive that was already firmly in
place. Though Du Bois had previously
shown (in The Souls of Black Folk)
the value of speaking as a representative of a people, highlighting the problem
of race through his own personal experience, in The Negro he eschewed such an approach (while clearly identifying
emotionally with the project). Here he
seemed to suggest that this study could have been written by anyone acquainted
with the evidence who aspired to objectivity – in other words, who was not
blinded by color prejudice.[23]
Gates, by contrast, perhaps
owing in part to the medium of television helping to shape his project, puts
together a latter-day Souls of Black Folk. He is there in person marching through the
terrain and history of Africa. It is his reaction,
now as an American, now as an African American, that is the story. He looks
askance at a world with which he is unfamiliar, looking for a heritage that he
can call his own, even, somewhat ironically, almost scolding the descendents of
people involved in the slave trade for their ancestors’ moral transgressions.[24] While Du Bois sees the scars of the slave
trade visited on the Africans, Gates seems to wear his scars and wants his own
victim-hood to be acknowledged. Dressed
in a Harvard University tee-shirt while addressing people living in relative
poverty, his attempt to acknowledge his own location in the story distances him
from any complicity, either as himself a potential descendent of a slave
trader, or as a citizen of a country that has spent years subordinating a
continent to the needs of a global power struggle with the Soviet Union. Further, while Du Bois’s distanced manner
leads to an expansive perspective of Africa, seen through diasporas, trade, and
imperialism, which necessarily pulls him into the fray, Gates’ engagement
leaves his own world at some distance, uninterrogated, giving himself the
status of tourist, and his viewing public that of sympathetic (if at times
bewildered) onlookers. Du Bois, then, pulls the reader into the vortex of world
history that is Africa writ large; Gates shrinks Africa down to a place that “we”
need to appreciate more fully if we are to integrate it into our new global
economy. That the new economy is an
extension of slavery and the slave trade is acknowledged in Du Bois’s work; in
Gates these human tragedies or holocausts must be remembered lest we become
overly absorbed in the scramble once again for African commodities. Gates’s fear is that history may be forgotten;
Du Bois’s hope is that history may yet be understood.
his particular Du Bois The
Negroattempt [25]Hin Souls in
In a conscious
sense of unity among colored races there is to-day only a growing
interest. There is slowly arising not
only a curiously strong brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world, but
the common cause of the darker races against the intolerable assumptions and
insults of Europeans has already found expression. Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in
colored men. The future will, in all
reasonable probability, be what colored men make it. In order for this colored world to come into
its heritage, must the earth again be drenched in the blood of fighting,
snarling human beasts, or will Reason and Good Will prevail? That such may be true, the character of the
Negro race is the best and greatest hope; for in its normal condition it is at
once the strongest and gentlest of the races of men: “Semper novi quid ex Africa.”[242]
This
Latin phrase (literally “Always something new from Africa”) is in direct
contrast to the contemporary beliefs that Africa was a stagnating dark
continent; it is Africa, the land of migration and newness, that provides Du
Bois with his beacon of light for the future.
Such a hope for “unity among colored peoples” animated his endeavors at
the Pan-African Conference in Paris in 1919 and remained with
Du Bois throughout the 1920s (as is evident in his 1927 novel, The Dark Princess).[26]
That
said, the war which was at one level bringing to the fore the contradictions of
a European civilization founded on slavery, colonialism and their creation, the
color line, was in many ways blurring the vision that he had glimpsed at the
end of this work, and was beginning the process of cutting African Americans
off from their international alliances.
The kind of alienation from Africa among African Americans
that Gates describes at the outset of Wonders,
and which is most noticeable in the work of Richard Wright, was in many ways a
product of the post-World War One period.[27] There were a few African Americans, like Du
Bois and Paul Robeson, who managed to forge a “black Atlantic” milieu that encompassed Africa; and there were times, like
the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, that would mobilize
African Americans to embrace African concerns.[28] Nevertheless, African American sentiments
towards Africa were becoming increasingly conflicted, as the United States became first increasingly
isolationist and then the dominant world power.
Lastly,
a key difference between The Negro
and Wonders of the African World
derives from what their authors’ chose for their subjects. Both authors, as noted, wanted to increase
awareness of Africa’s history, and this meant trying to discover, as Gates
writes, “who, indeed, ‘the African people’ were and what, in fact they had
contributed to civilization.”[29] But, as their titles suggest, one chose
examining the people themselves as the best way to achieve this goal, while the
other chose places or sites. It may be
that this is merely a matter of convenience in Gates’s case. The African world is immense, many times
larger than the United States, and he believes he needs
some way of breaking it down for the reader.
It turned out that “the items” on Gates’s list of “wonders”
“conveniently, mercifully, clustered,” so that he “could encompass most of them
in six journeys.”[30] But, while both the
television series and the published volume attest to the splendid results that
might follow from this undertaking, the kind of history that usually emerges
from such an approach is problematic. It
is one that will tend to be static, converting places of struggle and sites of
contestation, into “wonders” and cultural artifacts, semper antiqui quid. Getting
from such a past to the present, reigniting the sense of relevance of this
history for the American, except via the Middle Passage, will be made more not
less difficult by this approach. Such a
work will either tend to reduce the history of Africa to the significance of that
Middle Passage (in the same way that the history of slavery can be reduced
erroneously to the story of the Amistad), or it will make it a celebration of
the glorious civilizations of the past.
In either case, the process of silencing (as Michel-Rolph Trouillot
would describe it) of large chunks of African history will not go uncontested.[31] Certainly the standard European historical
trope about Africa, that it is merely the victim of world historical forces provided by Europe, would provincialize the
continent once again.[32] In addition, the very absence of these lost
civilizations will severely test their power to pass muster against more recent
ones. Perhaps, if we have seen the Soviet
empire disappear, then we can understand, with Gibbon, that these things rise
and fall. But, for many Americans, the
collapse of that other empire only seems to have validated their own.
Looking
directly at the wonder that is The Negro
may make this point clearer still. Du
Bois’s work is a social history of sorts, perhaps an early ethno-history. He is casting his gaze on people in Africa. He certainly notes all the empires that wax
and wane, but he is most interested in the people as they move around the
continent, migrants all. Indeed, while
commentators have overlooked this, migration is of prime importance to this
volume, defining the different peoples in all the various sections of Africa. We learn of the wandering
herdsmen on the Senegal River in early times who then “changed to a Negro or dark
mulatto people and lived scattered in small communities between the Atlantic and Darfur.”(p. 60) We find out that in coastal West Africa, “Movement and migration is
evident along this coast in ancient and modern times.” Du Bois continues:
The
Yoruba-Benin-Dahomey peoples were among the earliest arrivals, with their
remarkable art and industry, which places them in some lines of technique
abreast with the modern world. Behind
them came the Mossi from the north, and many other peoples in recent days have
filtered through, like the Limba and Temni of Sierra Leone and the
Agni-Ashanti, who moved from Borgu some two thousand years ago to the Gold and
Ivory Coasts.
We have already noted in the main
the history of black men along the wonderful Niger and seen how, pushing up
from the Gulf of Guinea, a powerful wedge of ancient culture held back Islam
for a thousand years, now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every inch of
retreat….(p. 63)
Meanwhile
in the Great
Lakes
region there was “endless movement and migration both in ancient and modern
days,” which makes the region “very difficult to understand.”(p. 80) Also we learn that “the first clearly defined
movement of modern times,” the migration of the Bantu from central to southern
Africa, began “at least a thousand years before Christ.”(p. 80) And it is not just people who move. Trade routes circulate ideas, customs, and commodities
around the continent and beyond its boundaries.
It is this focus on migration (a major preoccupation of 1990s ethnic
studies programs) that gives Du Bois’s book its current feel, and which also
enables it to speak to so many areas of historical scholarship about Africa and
the world that have developed since. The current rage to internationalize
American History, for example, clearly has long roots, and one could hardly do
better than take The Negro as a guide
for such an enterprise.[33]
This
perspective has important implications.
First, it helps to explain Du Bois’s belief that “the character of the
Negro race is the best and greatest hope,” and his sense that the race has an
important role to play in the emergence of a world order that is based on
humanitarian principles. Africa has been connected to such
transformations in the past, in the shaping of Egyptian and Greek
civilizations, as a font of world religions, and providing the labor that would
make possible the emergence industrial capitalism. Its people had spread across the globe, and
in all sections of it still felt the sting arising from racial prejudice, the
kind of alienation that Marx saw as the basis of a revolutionary consciousness.[34]
Second,
notions of race to which Du Bois had subscribed earlier in his career were
clearly brought into question by his discussion of migration. If people are migrating they are also
becoming “mongrelized” (to borrow from Ann Douglas[35]) and we have to question a
classificatory system that defines them as if they were immobile. In his earlier writings on race, like “The
Conservation of Races,” Du Bois had tended to romanticize the category of race.[36] According to Appiah, Du Bois attempted to
assail racism by developing an alternative category of race in which racial
characteristics were not seen as being related to biological or intrinsic moral
differences, but were socio-historical in nature – in other words, they were
socially constructed. Yet, having taken
form they developed histories and cultures and these gave races meaning. Thus Du Bois had written, ‘the history of the
world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of
races.’[37] In this history, according to Appiah ‘races
have a “message” for humanity,’ and each one differed. One was not better than another; it was
merely different. In short, Du Bois had
wanted to take a concept of race that was constructed along a vertical,
hierarchical axis (one race is better than another) and give it a horizontal
reading.[38]
In The Negro, however, Du Bois seemed to rely
more heavily on the idea of race as a social construction, and, through his
attention to migration, he came pretty close to throwing out a racial
classification system altogether. For
example, he quotes Ratzel: “There is only one species of man. The variations are numerous, but do not go
deep. “ He then continues:
To this we may
add the word of the Secretary of the First Races Congress [Spiller]: “We are,
then, under the necessity of concluding that an impartial investigator would be
inclined to look upon the various important peoples of the world as to all
intents and purposes essentially equal in intellect, enterprise, morality and
physique.[39]
Then, after
extolling the virtues of African culture, Du Bois informs his reader:
All this does not
mean that the African Negro is not human with the all-too-well-known foibles of
humanity. Primitive life among them is,
after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Germans or Chinese, but it is
not more so, and the more we study the Negro the more we realize that we are
dealing with a normal human stock which under reasonable conditions has
developed and will develop in the same lines as other men.(p. 138)
Such
cultural relativism obviously reflects the views then gaining currency in the
work of Spiller and Boas, among others.
But it also is not far removed from Appiah’s own view that race cannot
stand up to philosophical scrutiny, and that of a scholar like Paul Gilroy, who
founds hopes for a new humanism, global and cosmopolitan, on the renunciation
of race.[40]
But
Du Bois’s analysis takes a different turn in the ensuing passages. He asks why it is, if the African Negro
shares this common humanity with others, that “misinformation and contempt is
widespread concerning Africa and its people.” One reason for this, he says, lies in the
connotation of the term “Negro” and its changing definition in different
contexts. There is the North American
definition, with which Du Bois is all too familiar, that “a Negro may be
seven-eighths white, since the term refers to any person of Negro
descent.” While this has led to
widespread discrimination, it has, according to Du Bois, at least allowed for
“the Negroes” to be recognized for being “among the leaders of civilization in
every age of the world’s history.” “In
sharp contrast to this usage,” Du Bois continues “the term ‘Negro’ in Africa
has been more and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last
century, declared that the great mass of the black and brown people of Africa
were not Negroes at all, and that the ‘real’ Negro dwells in a small space
between the Niger and Senegal.”(pp. 138-9).
In this way the achievements of people, who in America would be classified
“Negro,” are attributed to other people.
And then Du Bois comments wryly, in a fashion that might bring a gleam
into the eye of the contemporary postcolonial critic: “In this restricted sense
the Negro has no history, culture or ability, for the simple fact that such
human beings as have history and evidence culture and ability are not Negroes!”(p.
139)
Many
things can be said about this comment, beyond the simplistic and erroneous
reading that frequently accompanies it – that Du Bois here conforms to a belief
that the real Negroes contribute nothing unless they have received some infusion
from without. Bearing in mind all the
migration that Du Bois describes in this volume, he is suggesting that the
American classification is the one that he would want used for Africa. In the process he ties African Americans more
closely to their African heritage, not because they can be traced through
direct lineage to a particular people or area in Africa, but because they, like
Africans, are products of different peoples coming together through historical
processes. The narrow definition is
inappropriate, not just because scholars motivated by prejudice have deployed
it, but also because it is simply ahistorical.
As such, there is an air of the subaltern to Du Bois’s Negro. The category of Negro becomes quite unstable
(in both positive and negative ways), taking on a dual function of representing
both the contributor to great civilizations, and one who has no history.[41] And here Du Bois stumbled once again upon the
need for the political activism to accompany his work as scholar. For it is not enough to highlight
contributions that a people have made to history, when those can be denied, or
silenced, merely by altering the system of classification.[42]
With
the category of race problematized and Africa, the continent of migration,
established as the font of newness (and so also modernity), Du Bois is in a
position to develop other theories that will either be picked up and developed
by later scholars, or will lie dormant (like one of Gates’s wonders) waiting to
be unearthed and seen anew.[43] Take for example Du Bois’s comment, that in
order to locate the origin of modern color prejudice it is necessary to look
not to “physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts.” And the historic facts that will need to be
examined are “modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.” Such a comment
presages Eric Williams’s profound contribution to the study of slavery
scholarship in Capitalism and Slavery,
as well as that of Edmund Morgan in American
Slavery, American Freedom.[44] Echoes of The
Negro are found elsewhere in historical scholarship. Du Bois’s view of slavery, described in his
chapter on the American Negro prefigures both paternalistic perspectives and
the materialist view that the system was part of the capitalist mode of
production. On black contributions to
the Civil War and to emancipation historians have yet to acknowledge all that
Du Bois delineated. In his discussion of
Reconstruction Du Bois preempts much later historiography, including his own Black Reconstruction in America. His
identification of segregation as an issue of class rather than race was almost
forty years ahead of C. Vann Woodward‘s similar thesis.
But,
perhaps still more noteworthy is the underdevelopment thesis, later associated
with Walter Rodney.[45] What Du Bois sees undermining the continent
of Africa’s ability to generate its
own newness is the intervention of the slave trade. As such, Du Bois describes a continent that
is moving from developed to underdeveloped, not vice versa. For example, he writes:
In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In
place of the Yoruban culture, with its city democracy, its elevated religious
ideas, its finely organized industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that changed the character of the
west coast from this to the orgies of war and blood sacrifice which we read of
later in these lands?
There can be but one answer:
the slave trade. Not simply the sale of
men, but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized
ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all
other industries, encourage war, and all the cruelest passions of war, and
concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from the ancient
Mediterranean lines of trade.(pp. 67-8)
“It
was the slave trade,” he continues, “that turned the balance and set these
lands backwards.” And, from the middle
of the 15th century until it was terminated in the last half of the
19th, “the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the coast
morally, socially, and physically.”(p. 68)
While it would be rash not to attribute this idea directly to Du Bois’s
own contemplation, it is interesting to speculate whether he was influenced in
this direction by his interaction with scholars of India and the British Empire
at the Universal Races Congress, who were very much conversant in the ideas
associated with drain theory, the idea that the coming of the British Empire,
and especially the growth of the Manchester cotton industry (built on the
product of African slave labor), had led to the deindustrialization of the
Indian subcontinent.[46]
The Negro, then, is compelling on
many levels, as history, anthropology, social commentary, as an elegy on the
condition of migrancy. But maybe it is
Du Bois’s appreciation of the process of globalization that will make people
look again at this text, and see it as if for the first time. Intellectually and historically prescient, Du
Bois assumed globalization as a matter of course, so that his definition of the
color line in The Negro linked all
colonized peoples, not just people of African descent. With the resolution of the Cold War and the
ascendancy of the global market, bringing new and old color lines into sharp
relief, Du Bois’s sweeping vision of Africans and the diaspora seems more
relevant now than at any time in the past hundred years.
[1] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wonders of the African World (NY: Knopf, 1999), p. ix.
[2] George Shepperson (NY: Oxford University
Press, 1970), pp. vii-xxv, and Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson,
1975), pp. 5-23, discussed the contemporary reaction to this work. See especially the influence of The Negro on Professor William Hansberry
in Shepperson, p. xxi. Their
introductions and the influence they attributed to The Negro, highlight the work’s enduring appeal at least into the
1970s.
[3] For the influence of The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997 [1899]), see Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois, Race and the City: The
Philadelphia Negro and its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998). The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1903]), with its
concept of the double consciousness, is perhaps the most cited of Du Bois’s
works. See Adolph Reed, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Political
Tradition (NY: ) for a discussion of this concept and its pervasiveness in
African American political discourse.
The influence of Black
Reconstruction in America (NY: Atheneum, 1979 [1935]) is most evident in
the work of Eric Foner; see Nothing But
Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983), pp.5-6. For
further discussion of these, see Robert Gregg, “Giant Steps,” in Katz and
Sugrue, W.E.B. Du Bois, Race and the City,
pp. 77-99.
[4] David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (NY:
Henry Holt & Co., 1993), p. 462.
[5] The comment from Du Bois
about Haiti is found on p. 178.
[6] His solidarity with Haiti would be notable later in
1915 when Woodrow Wilson invaded the island.
This occurred in spite of the fact that, to Du Bois’s eye at least,
conditions for Haitian peasants were better than those suffered by African Americans
in the South. Haiti, Du Bois noted, “is more
civilized than Texas;” “Hayti,” The Crisis, 10 (Oct. 1915), p. 291.
[7] Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 462. He relies heavily here on the introduction
written by Herbert Aptheker, who recorded these influences in his introduction
to The Negro. This introduction, one of many Aptheker wrote
for the series of Du Bois’s works published by Kraus-Thomson, notes the
contemporary opinions about the book and is very positive overall, but does not
really examine in great detail the contribution that the work had made. Perhaps, since it was published within five
years after the Oxford edition (which included
George Shepperson’s thorough and compelling overview of the book’s importance),
Aptheker did not feel the need to fully delineate all the work’s contributions. Had Lewis examined Shepperson’s commentary
more closely, I believe he would have devoted more space to The Negro. Note especially the biographical point
Shepperson makes on p. xxii: “Students of Pan-Africanism have sometimes felt
there is a gap, a loss of interest by Du Bois in Pan-Africanism, between his
participation as Secretary of the first Pan-African Conference in London in
1900 and his calling of the 1919 Pan-African Congress in Paris which is often
credited with setting in motion the modern movement for Pan-Africanism. In The
Negro, however, is to be seen the development of Du Bois’s attitudes
towards the thought of Pan-Africanism in the period between 1900 and 1919.”
[8] Ibid. The works cited by
Lewis include: Basil Davidson, Black
Mother; Africa (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961); Martin Bernal, Black Athena The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987,
1991), two volumes; and, Cheka Anta Diop, Civilization
and Barbarism (NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1986). There are ways of fleshing out this influence
on Afrocentric scholarship that might cast it in a more favorable light.
Shepperson does this in his intriguing discussion of the connections between Du
Bois and Melville J. Herskovits. The
latter seems to have gained his ideas in The
Myth of the Negro Past () from works by Du Bois besides The Negro, however, so the influence of
this book on that scholarship is indirect.
Du Bois’s later works, which Herskovits used liberally, were all built
around the ideas first fully developed in The
Negro. See Shepperson,
“Introduction,” p. xix.
[9] Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
[10] Appiah and Gates, Encyclopedia Africana (NY: Basic Civitas
Books, 1999). See the cover material,
the introduction and the frontispiece portrait of Du Bois.
[12] See Encyclopedia of 194…
[13] Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 82.
[14] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (NY: Houghton Mifflin,
1999), pp. 302-4.
[15] Du Bois made this argument
on several occasions in the pages of The
Crisis.
[16] Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 5.
[17] At the time that he was
publishing The Negro he was also in
the process of writing “The African Roots of the War” at Atlantic Monthly, which as its title suggests attributed the causes
of World War One to European imperialism; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 504. The Negro needs to be seen in the larger
context of Du Bois’s response to this war, something that Lewis fails to do, in
spite of the fact that the last words of The
Negro, “Semper novi quid ex Africa,” are used as the text for ‘The African Roots.”
[18] “The Propaganda of
History,” was the concluding chapter of Black
Reconstruction in America, pp. 713-26; see Gregg, “Giant Steps,” pp.
[19] Du Bois undertook the
Atlanta University Studies between 1897 and 1912; see, Shepperson,
“Introduction,” pp. xx-xxi.
[20] Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, pp. 145.
[21] For a discussion of these
political divisions, see Reed, Jr., W.E.B.
Du Bois and the American Political Tradition.
[22] Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 107, though his commentary in the
PBS documentary was more explicit about this.
[23] In this regard, The Negro bears more resemblance to his
earlier studies, The Suppression of the
African Slave-Trade to the United
States of America, 1638-1870 (NY: Schocken Books, 1969 []) and The Philadelphia Negro, than either The Souls of Black Folk or John Brown (). See Gregg, “Giant Steps,” pp.
[24] Gates, Wonders of the African World, pp. 189 & 196
[25] George Shepperson refers to
Vincent Harding’s reading of The Negro,
which highlighted the book’s messianic quality; “Introduction,” p. xxi.
[26] Du Bois, Dark Princess (Millwood, NY:
Kraus-Thomson, 1974 [1928]).
[27] Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 12.
[28] See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983);
and also Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” to C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (NY:
Charles H. Kerr, 1995).
[29] Gates, Wonders of the African World, p. 16.
[31] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production
of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
[32] Dipesh Chakrabarty, uses
the term provincializing to interrogate the lens through which South Asian
history has been observed. Gates’ work
maintains Africa as the province, while Du Bois’s work in many ways succeeds in
provincializing Euro-America.
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
[33] See Shepperson,
“Introduction,” pp. xv-xvi; Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1993). See the special issues of the Journal of American History devoted to
“Internationalizing American History” 1999.
[34] A close parallel to Du
Bois’s “Negro” as migrant (explained further below) is Randolph Bourne’s notion
of a “Trans-National America;” see, War
and the Intellectuals (NY: Harper & Row, 1964). Also writing during World War I, Bourne saw
the possibility for a humanitarian and peaceful society lying in the
fulfillment of the United States as a multi-cultural and
multi-ethnic society.
[35] Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel New York
[36] Du Bois, “The Conservation
of Races,” American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, no. 2 (1897).
[37]. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture
(NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 28. See Robert Gregg, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in
Comparative History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp.
88-95.
[38]. So, Appiah notes, while
the attempt to highlight certain ‘race abilities’ might lead to a more
equitable estimation of the different contributions of the races, ‘it might
just as easily,’ according to Appiah, ‘lead to chauvinism or total
incomprehension;’ ibid., p. 94.
[39] Spiller inter –racial
problems p.35.
[40] Appiah, In My Father’s House, p. 45; Paul
Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political
Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap, 2000).
[41] Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern
Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” in American
Historical Review (December 1994), pp. 1475-90; see also Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London:
Routledge Press, 1994), pp. 254-6.
[42] It is not clear, however,
the degree to which Du Bois here appreciated that some of his own concepts, like
“the talented tenth,” might have contributed in the past to the process of
excluding those who did not fit within his system, thereby attributing to them
the narrow definition of “Negro,” or people without history. See Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
[43] Aptheker’s “Introduction,”
p. 17, highlights a number of the theories relating to American slavery that he
himself would develop, along with those of Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery. Shepperson’s introduction is more expansive
in this regard.
[44] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre
Deutsch, 1964 [1944]); Edmund S. Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom (NY: Norton, 1975).
[45] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington: Howard University Press, 1974).
[46] See Gokhale’s address at
the Congress, which, while not directly mentioning the drain theory is
influenced by it.