Thomas L Blair
Du Bois and the Century of
African liberation
The man – his mind, philosophy and morals
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Du Bois and the century of African liberation
Thomas L. Blair
ISBN 978-1-908480-29-3
First published 2014 in the Editions Blair E-book Series
©Thomas L Blair All rights reserved.
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The author Thomas L Blair is a cyberscholar and edits
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DU BOIS AND THE CENTURY OF
AFRICAN LIBERATION
Thomas L.V.Blair
Increasingly Du Bois is seen by observers as having had at the beginning of the century
an extremely prophetic view of the black man in the twentieth century. His role as the
active father of Pan-Africanism and his poetic intuition of the value of black experience
and black tradition give him a position to centrality in any consideration of the origins of
negritude. Whether Du Bois would have found himself at any moment capable of
acquiescing in prevailing concepts of African personality is debatable. His mind was not
highly amendable to what he might consider mysticism; he remained a child of the
positivism which dominated European thought in his youth. Nevertheless his concept of
the political unity of Africans and of the fraternity of black people everywhere rested, of
necessity, on a foundation more pervasive than that of mere anti-west-ernism.
The life and work of the Lat Dr.W.E.B DuBois, the 95 year- old American Negro
sociologist and philosopher born in the ebb and flow of the Emancipation Proclamation
and the Berlin Conference, span the Century of African Liberation.
The philosophy and actions of this monumental and control versial leader of panAfricanist thought are etched on a vast canvas of historical events fro slavery to the
Negro march on Washington, from capitalism to socialism, from colonization to
revolutionary independence and from partitioning and the Diaspora to African unity and
redemption.
When DuBois was born, thousands of years of African history had been thrust into
oblivion and 400 years of slavery had washed its residue on the shores of the Americas
and the island of the seas. Africans were isolated by powerful economy and political
forces and assimilated new cultures and languages yet they shared a common African
heritage and a common crucible of despair and discrimination. In the lifetime of Dr.
DuBois, Feb.23rd. 1868-Aug. 27th. 1963, new networks o sentiment and of cultural and
political interaction developed and bund Africans at home and abroad together in a
renascent African World.
Today the African world is composed of the 200 million peoples of Africa and the 50
million Afro-Western people of the Diaspora I the United States of America, the West
Indies and central and South America. The aspirations of the peoples of the African
world intertwine across space and time; their common quests and actions in the last 100
years have affected, and profoundly altered, the structure of economic, political and
human relations. The progress of the African peoples from slavery to freedom is reflected
in the thought and deeds of William Edward Burghardt DuBois.
DuBois was born in America and emerged fro his northern upbringing in a bleak white
New England town and from his early college years among Negroes in the south as a
trained Observer of black-white relations. With passion and understanding the young
DuBois dissected the economic relationships between the plantation system and slavery;
his Harvard University thesis, The suppression of the Slave Trade (1899), became the
naugural volume in the Harvard Historical Series. As a teacher in America’s rural
backlands he observed, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that slavery gave way to
serfdom and the emancipated Negro remained in political and economic bondage.
The plight of Negro rural workers who fled before the whiplash of inequality and
agricultural change into the asphalt jungles of northern industrial cities was portrayed by
DuBois I his sociological study of The Philadelphia Negro (1896).
It was a tie of hardship, of misery and the “Lowdown dirty blues”; a time when the
strange and bitter fruit of Negro life was the rope and the faggot. It was a long dark night
when the Promised Land of Black Christianity seemed far away and the poverty-stricken
Negro beat his plow-share into gospel songs and red hot jazz.
DubBois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in
1910 and fro twenty-four years as the editor of their journal, The Crisis, he protested
American racial and economic oppression with a vigour that echoes down the folkways
of Negro History. No area of experience of the African peoples escaped his attention;
with his pen dipped in the rich soil of Negro life he wrote great hymns to freedom. He
placed theory in the left-hand of the far-flung African peoples and action in their righthand and led them into battle for human rights and independence.
In the difficult years between the Berlin Conference and World War. I. DuBois opposed
the advance of alien into Africa, Asia and Latin America. He viewed that war was a
bloody collision between industrial rivals for the spoils of the earth and the distribution of
the colonies. And in the wake of this rivalry he saw a swelling “color line” drawn
between human beings.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem the color line”, wrote DuBois in
Souls of Black Folk (1903). It is common plight of the non-whites of the world under the
rule of the “white master race”. He examined contemporary theories of this black man’s
inferiority and conclude that “one voice of science, religion, and practical politics one in
denying the God-appointed existence of super-races of races naturally and inevitably and
eternally inferior” Declaration to the world, presidential address by Dr. DuBois at the 2nd
Pan-African Congress, London). The roots of the color line are economic and not racial
and the main division in the world is not between “civilized Europeans” and “pagans” but
between “exploiters and toilers”.
Colonialism as a system of politics, economics and race relations rests uneasily on the
heads of freedom-loving people said DuBois. “Democracy must be made to encircle the
early failing this the armed and indignant protests of the despised and raped peoples”
would inevitably follow. Carefully be explained to his detractors who called him a
“racialist” that the militants regrouping and identification of coloured people and
workers-which are called today “wars of national liberation”-are not racial; at the core
they are the expression of a common urge of subject peoples to regain control of their
own land, dignity, labour and freedom.
To those democrats who claimed that World War I was “the war to end all wars”, DuBois
replied that a war between European powers for spheres of influence and markets could
never be “a war to end all wars” if, as a result, the coloured peoples still remained in
bondage. “Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even in the souls of those who cry
peace the despising and robbing of darker peoples? If European hugs this delusion, then
this is not the end of world war- it is but the beginning!”, he said in Darkwater (1920).
DuBois was Minister Plenipotentiary from America to Liberia in 1923 and a consultant
on African Affairs at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations. He lived through the
great moments in the internationalization of world peace and human rights: Versailles,
the League of Nations, the Atlantic Charter Moscow and Teheran, Dumbarton Oaks,
Yalta and San Francisco. Yet, he believed that no Western State or group of States no
matter how well-meaning, should hold the destiny of Africa in its hand. It is for Africa
and the colonized peoples themselves to forget their own freedom and shape their own
destiny.
This belief, which crystallized at the Versailles Peace Conference, led DuBois to
conclude that it was the best interest of Africans and peoples of African descent to
organize themselves into a common brotherhood. The common goals of Negro freedom
movements would ricochet in a common pattern of Pan-African unity and progress; in
time, the lines that divide would become one circle which enfolds.
The result, said the “Father of Pan-Africanism” would be a free Africa, fulcrum of the
African world, and a prelude to the “centralization of effort into a common, united
continent”.
The Pan-African Congress, a collective movement for African freedom, was the
instrument for expressing these ideas and hopes. At Versailles, where the victorious
Allies gathered to re-shape the world, DuBois led the first international gathering of
African peoples for the defense of their rights to self-determination. The Congress of
1919 declared the unity of all African peoples; they resolved that “Africa is for the
Africans” and demanded that all expropriated lands and resources be returned to Africans.
Tirelessly from 1919 to 1945 DuBois organized five Pan-African Congresses; he
collaborated with many young African and Afro-Western political leaders-Nkrumah,
Azikiwe, Padmore, Kenyatta. Kotane, Wallace-Johnson – and was the spiritual force
behind the First All-African Peoples’ Conference, Accra 1958.
The Manifesto of the Third Congress (1923) held in London and Lisbon still has
relevance today:
“In fine, we ask in al the world that black folk be treated as men. We can see no other
road to peace and progress. What more paradoxical figure today confronts the world than
the head of a great South African State striving blindly to build peace and goodwill in
Europe by standing on the necks and hearts of million of black Africans?
“Africans demand: a voice in their own governments; the right of access to land and its
resources trial by juries by their peers under established process of law; free elementary
education for all and higher training for selected talent; the development of Africa for the
benefit of Africans and not merely for the profit of Europeans; the abolition of war, but
failing this, and as long as white folk bear arms against black folk, the right of black to
bear arms in their own defense; the organization of commerce and industry so as to make
the main objects of capital and labour the welfare of the many rather than enriching the
few”.
The pursuit of his Pan-African ideal brought DuBois in contact with peoples from all
parts of the colonial world, and he envisaged the eventual unity of the African, Asian and
Latin American anti-colonial movements. “African freedom is linked with the freedom of
all non-white toilers”, wrote DuBois in 1928. “Its achievement will take 25 years of
preparation planning and intensive struggle. Finally, The Great Central Committee of the
Yellow, Brown and Black will meet….. In 1952, the Dark World goes free-whether in
Peace and fostering friendship with all men, or in Blood and Storm- it is for them, the
Pale Masters of today, to say”. The events of the last two decades attest to the accuracy of
these predictions. DuBois lived to see the emergence of new African and Asian states and
to advise the First Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference. Was the Bandung Conference in
1955 the fateful meeting of the Great Central Committee?
The intellectual superiority of Dr. DuBois among the giants of western philosophy and
social science is unparalleled. He studied at Heidelberg and was the first Negro to take a
doctorate in philosophy at Harvard. He held a unique place in American letters; he
created the “Negro Renaissance” Of the 1920’s and gave birth to the movements of the
“New Negro”. With his African contemporaries he injected the “presence Africaine” into
western Science, politics arts and culture. He was a fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, single-handedly influenced the re-writing of the
Nation’s textbooks and placed the neglected history of the African peoples into schools
and universities. In International scientific circles his books –Color and Democracy,
Black Re-construction, The Gift of Black Folk, In Battle for Peace and The World and
Africa- were applauded. He travelled and lectured extensively in Europe and Asia and
was honoured for his contributions to international peace.
Tragically, the work of Dr.DuBois did not attain widespread popular recognition and
acceptance in white America; he was continually handicapped by racial prejudice and
condemned for his advanced political views. “Sometimes I southern libraries”, he used to
recall, “the authorities kept certain books and documents under lock and key lest
perchance I might find some small fact, overlooked by them, which might reveal a
glorious chapter in the history of our race”.
In the climate of his times, DuBois was America’s most controversial Negro. In 1957 he
was refused a passport to attend the Ghana Independence celebrations which symbolized
His life-long efforts for African freedom. Finally, at the age of 93 he left Ameerica in
1961 to return to Africa, the land of his ancestors. In Accra, at the invitation of President
Nkrumah, DuBois took out Ghanaian citizenship and with his wife, Shirley Graham, and
his colleague, Dr. Alphaeus Hunton, he began to compile his monumental 32-volume
epic, the Encyclopedia Africana.
Sensing that the end was near, he presided over the regrouping of the intellectual forces
to African and Afro-American freedom and progress. He edited Freedomways, a
quarterly review “where the struggle to secure the rights of Afro-Americans and to bring
about the end of colonialism is joined”, and influenced a new generation of writers, like
Julian Mayfield and James Baldwin. In December 1962, while recuperating from a heart
attack, he defied his medical advisers and delivered an impassionate lecture to 200
scholars at the 1st. International Congress of Africanists I n Accra, which he inspired.
In the course of this work, Dr. DuBois died on August 27, 1963, aged 95 years, shortly
after the unification of Independent African States at Addis Ababa and on the eve of the
Negro March on Washington for jobs and Freedom. He was buried on the shores of
Ghana, in the shadow of the ancient Danish Slave-factory, Christianborg Castle,
sprinkled with ocean mist and draped in the colours of his newly-adopted country.
In the soil of Africa the body of DuBois joins that of two other Afro-Western
philosopher-militants who were born in the Diaspora but are buried in Africa: the
psychiatrist and masquisard Dr. Frantz Fanon of Martinique and Algeria who died on the
eve of Algerian Independence, and George Padmore of the West Indies and Ghana, a
political scientist and long-time advisor to President Nkrumah. These three form
examples of the unity of all peoples of African descent.
The death of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois illuminates five fundamental aspects of the Century of
African Liberation:
1) the re-discovery and re-unification of a common African heritage;
2) a vigorous continental and world-wide struggle against racial discrimination and
colonial rule;
3) the creation of new social scientific and aesthetic principles arising out of the
African experience and their contribution to world culture;
4) the search for new political and economic structures and the dream of a United
States of Africa evolving along the path of its own dynamic possibilities;
5) the historic complementary role of the Afro-Western peoples of the Diaspora
engaged with their brothers in the reconstruction of the African Image, personality
and material conditions of life.
6) DuBois died glimpsing far-off dreams and ideas. What aspects of African culture
will survive and grow? How will renascent
Africa, the giant awakened,
contribute to world culture and move mankind a stage nearer self-perfection? In
the future world, free of the colour lined and economic privilege, what will human
society be like 500 or 1000 years from now? Where are the new philosophersmilitants who will chart the to-morrow of African history? And, of AfroAmerican history he pondered that the Negro is becoming more American; what
will he gain and what will he lose, and what is America to become in this process?