8 - Africa and Pan-Africanism in the Thought of Du Bois

Summary

At every point in his career, Du Bois demonstrated a belief in the centrality of the African peoples in world history, and the interdependency of the continent of Africa with the rest of the world. He viewed this centrality and interdependence both in moral and in economic terms. He understood that Africa, no less than Europe, had been defined by and benefited from the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Arabian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. He also realized that Africa, Europe, the Near East, and the New World had mutually defined one another. To this, one must add that Du Bois also perceived the geographic centrality of Africa as both a doorway to and a barrier between the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans. With his sensitivity to both elitist and grass-roots perspectives, Du Bois's insights are indispensable to a comprehension of any worldview that might currently be associated with terms such as “Africanity,” “Afrocentrism,” “Pan-Negroism,” “Pan-Africanism,” or “the black Atlantic.”

Du Bois's earliest scholarly references to Africa made clear a desire to place African peoples at the center of history. These writings were equally imbued with racial romanticism, social scientific awareness, and a sense of political mission. He did not treat the issues of slavery, colonialism, and racism solely as moral issues, but as crucial elements of the global economy. He did not wish to view even such an obviously moral discourse as the African slave trade exclusively as a protest against victimization. Thus in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896), the book of his doctoral dissertation, he perceived the collapse of the slave trade in terms of political economy as well as morality. And thus he introduced the Haitian revolution as a Pan-African event, a milestone in the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.