Irele. What is Africa To Me?

Souls

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois

"What is Africa to Me?"

Africa in the Black Diaspora Imagination

F. Abioia Ireie

Paysan, frappe le sol de la dabaDans le sol il y a unc hale qiie la Jiyllabe de revenL-mcnt ne denoue pas

—AimeCesaire, "A TAfrique."'

[Peasant, strike the eanh with your dabaIn the earth, there is a haste thai the syllable of event cannot unravel]

I t is an established tact that the African connection has been a major source of distressfor Black people in the African Diaspora. The appiieation of a whole series of epithets

that devalue the continent, in a structure ofnegative representations of its peoples and itscultures, has functioned to demoralize them to such an extent that even where this did notlead to outright rejection of Africa—in the effort to separate oneself "in body. mind, andspirit from all that suggested Africa." as the narrator in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye(1970) puts the matter (167)—at the very least, it generated within the Black Americanconsciousness a profound and disquieting ambivalence toward the ancestral continent, asentiment compounded of anxiety as to the precise nature and implications ofthe connec-tion with Africa that every African American has had to work through for himself orherself, in order to arrive at some form of self-recognition, if not of self-acceptance.

The evolution, Proteus-like, of W.E,B Du Bois from Harvard-trained American scholarto Pan-African nationalist who found a final resting place on African soil bears all thetraces of this searing process. For no individual has embodied so completely and sodramatically as Du Bois the drama of consciousness and will involved in the historic andexistential dialectic between the Black Diaspora and the African homeland. Du Bois hasbeen the object of so many studies, and of so much controversy, that a review of his workmight be thought superfluous.- However, the special relevance of his work to our thememakes it inevitable to review him once more, in the bope of capturing the mighty flow ofhis thought, as it gathered up several currents in its strenuous confrontation with theproblems of self-apprehension involved in the black situation in America.

Souls 7 (3 4): 26 46, 2005 / Copyright i 2005 The Trustees of Columbia Universityin Ihe City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI:1U,1080/10999940500265417

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois * 27

Cornel West has suggested that a key component of his thought was the germ theory ofrace and culture, derived (ironically, as he says) from Albert Bushnel! Hart, who was DuBois's Icachcr at Harvard: ironically because, as West observes. Hart used this theory "tosupport Teutonic/Anglo Saxon superiority" (West, "The Four Traditions of Response."2000: 111). But it seems to nic pertinent to draw attention to the even more profoundinllucnce ofcontinental European thotighl on Du Bois, as a consequence of the two yearshe spent in Germany, for it was this experience thai was to provide a foundation ofideasand give concrete direction to his activities as the father of Pan-Africanism. It seems safeto observe that his Gennan sojourn was chiefly notable for the permanent itnprint ttponhis mind of the classic texts of German nationalism. The nexus between Johatin GottliebFichte's exaltation of the national spirit in his "Addresses to the Gennan Nation" and theliterature and general culture of German romanticism in which Du Bois became steepedclearly contributed to the retlective turn of his powerful mind. Nor can it be doubted thata major source of his political culture derives from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,whose preoccupation with the "organic society"- -what he called "the community of ex-isteticc"—led to the formulation, in his Philosophy of Righl. of the rational necessity ofthe State, valorized by him as the highest stage of a historical process that is also theenactment of the logic of universal reason (Hegel. 1967).

But it was especially the influence of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who, in two semi-nal works. Ffagtnents on Recent German literature (1767) and Reflections on the Phi-losophy of the History of Mankind {M'^A), emphasized the originality of national cul-Uires. as evidenced hy language (and especially its expressive manifestations in poetry)and folklore (in particular music), which seems to have run the deepest in the formationof Du Bois'sintellectual temper. The very title of Du Bois's best-known work. The Soulsof Black Folk, with its literal rendering in English of the German term Volksgeist. pro-vides an immediate pointer lo this influence.

The Gennan experience thus fornis the background to Du Bois's celebration of Blackfolk culture, arising from his subsequent encounter with the rural South, where, alongsidethe deprivation and misery of its Black population thai aroused his compassion, he wasstruck by the distinctive character and expressive quality of their African inheritance.This conjunction of influences and factors lies behind Du Bois's cultural nationalismwhich led him, as Kwamc Appiah has remarked, "to arlicttlate a racial tradition of blackletters as a natural expression of the Herderian view of the nation as identified above allelse with its 'poesy'" (Appiah. 1990: 284).'This aesthetic dimension of the Black collec-tive circumstance Du Bois first discovered in the spirituals.

But if The Souls of Black Folk reflects in a general way the deep traces upon hisintellectual frame and sensibility of the German influences evoked here, it bore testi-niotiy to an even more precise stage of Du Bois's spiritual and intellectual adventure, tbatis, his early recognition of the African inheritance as a constitutive and enlivening ele-ment of Southern Black life. It is significant in this respect to note the shift of interest andattention and the corresponditig change of tone as Du Bois moved from a dispassionateconsideration of the urban Negro of the North to a preoccupation with the rural masses ofthe South, a transition that is reflected in the striking difference between the scholarlyapproach of The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899—a massive work of urban soci-ology that anticipates in its methodology the investigative research of the Chicago schoolrepresetited by Ezra Park and his disciples—and the tone of passionate engagement thatruns through The Souls of Black Folk, published just four years later. The distinctiveformsof life that he observed in the rural South displayed to him a visage of Africa thatcould be associated wilh a collective memory anchored in social practice and culturaltraditions. The strange beauty of the spirituals gave aesthetic dimension to this associa-tion of a people with a soil, a particular space, and beyond, with a continent. This vast

28 • Souls Summer/Fall 2005

hititeriand of awareness that lay behind and ratified Du Bois's enunciation of a deeplyrooted collective expression of the Black American gave to the work a symbolic dimen-sion that lifted it well above its documentary character. As Arnold Rampersad has ob-served, •'The greatness of The Souls of Black Folk as a document of black Americanculture lies in its creation of profound and enduring myths about the life of the people"(Rampersad, 1990: 88-89).

We tiiight speak then ofa prior discovery of Africa by Du Bois even in the Blackheartland of America, It was above all this encounter, and the intimation of Africa itprovided, that kindled in Du Bois the belief in an immemorial soul of the people, so thathe came fully to embrace the race-centered conception of history that was the drivingforce of nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it is in his celebrated essay "The Con-servation of Races" that this conception is most clearly enunciated:

What, theti. is a race? It is a vast family of hutnati beings, generally of commoti bloodand latigtiage, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both vol-untarily and involuntarily striving together for the accoraplishtnent of certain moreor less vividly conceived ideals of life. (Du Bois in Sutidquist, 1996; 817}

This was the definition of race, formulated in the tenns of nineteenth-century organicconceptions of the nation with which Du Bois functioned throughout his long career. It isa conception thai has come under a cloud in our day, thanks to its misuse in Nazism, Butits transformation into an aggressive and murderous racistn by the Nazis should not makeus forget that in its origins, as derived from Herder, it was in fact a potent liberating force.By stressing ethnic and racial idiosyncracies, by drawing attention to observable differ-ences that gave a distinctive stamp to their forms of expression, the Herderian idea ofrace as a primary determinant of national groups sought to give recognition to marginalizedcommunities, to endow them with a new nobility that enabled the emergence atnong themof capacities long suppressed. It was a conception that served not merely to celebrate, butalso to emancipate.''

It was, however, a conception that involved Du Bois in a profound dilemma inherentin his lifelong quest for a national identity outside of and beyond the American frame ofreference. For although the African idea he derived from his encounter with the Blackfolk culture of the rural South was not altogether an abstract one, there was no Africannation based on a common language that set^ed as the expressive bond of the racialcomtnunity. Du Bois was thus left with race—"cotnmon blood," as he put it in his es-say—as the fundamental category of self-definition and collective awareness. It is thisthat has led Hazel Carby to observe: ""Du Bois did not contest the claim that black peopleshould be viewed as race. On the contrary, his intellectual strategy was to utilize theconcept of race and to transform it into a means of political unification" (Carby, 1998:27). Assessments of Dti Bois's thought and career have generally run along this line.Thus, commenting upon his initiative in organizing the 1919 Pan-African congress. Mar-tin Steins observes: "Hoping to revive the spirit of the crusades against slavery and theslave trade, Du Bois drew attention to a world wide black problem:, he wanted the colo-nial powers to recognize their responsibilities to ensure the advancement of the blackrace as a whole.. . ." (in Gerard, 1986: 355; italics in the original).

These observations underscore a significant fact about Du Bois's thought and career,but require serious qualification, for it was not without some circumspection that DuBois adopted the political conception of race that has come to be associated with him. Hewas well aware that, from the scientiftc point of view, race was a highly unreliable cat-egory of human classification. Indeed, to judge from his many pronouncements on thesubject of race as a biological fact, he would certainly have agreed with everything Kwame

Criticai Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois * 29

Appiah (1992) had to say on the same subject in the early chapters of his book In MyFather's House. What is more, Du Bois recognized that, even in its application as asociological category, the concept of race was a highly probictnatic one (Dusk of Dawn,pp. xxx-xxx; The World and Africa: 115-116). This must surely explain Appiah's per-plexity at what appears to be Du Bois's obstinate and wrong-headed clinging to the ideaof race. But the simple explanation why Du Bois could not abandon the idea altogether isthat it was forced on him by the circumstances of life in America, within which race hada significance that one simply eould not get around. For Du Bois was perfectly aware thathe was dealing w ith race as what we now temi a "social construction," with the effect onhis life and consciousness that he sums up thus: "The fact of racial distinction based oncolor was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined if (653). In the circum-stances, DuBois did not merely bow to the implicationsof race as a determination of hissituation, but confronted its social dimensions and consequences in an active working otitof his individual destiny. This is the impulse that underlies what Tommy Lott has calledDu Bois's "pragmatic essentialism""(Lott. in BetTiasconi. 2001: 66-71).

The irony of Du Bois's situation, then, is that he had to embrace the concept of race inorder to combat racism in Ameriea. a gesture that recalls Sartre's description of Negritudeas "ami racist racism" ("Black Otpheus" in Bemasconi, 2001: 137). Sartre's phrase re-quires however to be carefully glossed, so that the term "racism'' is understood here notas an aggressive disposition towards a racial antagonist designated in ati irrational andarbitrary manner, but rather as a pathetic and even tragic consciousness of one's originarysituation, a recognition of its over-determination that had to be overcome through a mo-bilization of consciousness. In other words, Du Bois's racial consciousness was com-pelled as an existential and moral imperative, enlisted as an active force of individual andcollective self-fashioning.

Thus, as Du Bois explores the question further in Dusk of Dawn, the concept of racetakes him beyond the confines of America, to touch upon questions of origins and iden-tity, toembrace that other question posed in the opening lines of Countee Cullen's poem•"Heritage." To the question "What is Africa to Me?" Du Bois responds by enunciatingthe racial/genetic and historieal/ethnic grounds for the conscious alignment of his affec-tions with Africa. Appiah quotes extensively from the passage in Dusk of Dawn thatcontains Du Bois's response and proceeds to subject it to close analysis, in order todemonstrate what appears to him the logical weakness of its propositions.

Appiah's objections require to be rnet, in order to clarify the human import of DuBois's African affiliations. When Du Bois claims Africa as his fatherland, although heavows that neither his father nor his father's father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning,Appiahexclaims. "What use is such a fatherland?" (1992: 71), But this skeptical rejoin-der ignores another crucial section of Du Bois's statement, which needs to be invoked:

On this vast continent were bom and lived a large portion of my direct ancestorsgoing back a thousand years. The mark of their heritage is upon me in color and hair.Theseareobviousthings. but of little meaning in themselves; only important as theystand for real and more subtle differences from other men. Whether they do or not, 1do not know nor does science know today, . . , But one thing is sure and that is thelact thai since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descen-dants have had a common history, have suffered a common disaster and have onelong memory. . . . (Dusk of Dawn. 116-11 7)

The passage occurs in a chapter entitled "The Concept of Race" in which Du Bois re-traces his ancestry on both sides ofthe racial divide. What the passage as indeed thewhole chapter indicates is that Africa answers first of all his quest for origins, for arootedness in eommunity that is also a rooledness in time, one that undergirds his sense

30 « Souls Summer/Faii 2005

of selfhood as a fell wholeness. It is this convergence of social experience and personalcircumstance, combined with the intellectual influences we have evoked in the shapingof Du Bois's thought as given an early articulation in The Souls of Black Folk, that ArnoldRampersad has summed up in this observation: "The diminution of the myth of freedom.the elevation of the power of slavery, allows us to establish a continuum of African andAfro-American psychology. Times change and the nature and amount of data change, butthe black mind remains more or less constant, for Du Bois sees It as irrevocably linked toitsAfrican origins" (Rampersad, 1989: 119).

But there is another sense in which the affiliation to Africa by Du Bois has meaning,insofar at it entails a process of self-fashioning. As the subtitle indicates ("an essay to-ward an autobiography of a race concept"). Dusk of Dawn is an apologia pro vita sua. awork in whicb. in the manner of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Francis Cardinal Newman,Du Bois recounts his spiritual adventure and thus provides a justification for the choicesthat went into the making of his individual life. Given his existential situation, we oughtto grant that, from an ethical and philosophical point of view, Du Bois was bound to anirreproachable act of will, one that entailed the freedom to choose his identity, in theevent, he chose to be African in the manner he describes in the follow ing passage:

My African racial feeling was then purely a matter of later learning and reaction; myrecoil from the assumptions of the whites: my experience in the south at Fisk. But itwas nonetheless real and a large determinant of my lilc and character. [ felt myselfAfrican by "race" and by that token was African and an integral member of the groupof dark Americans who were called Negroes. (115)

We might ask whether T.S. Eliot had better reasons for remaking himself as a High ChurchEnglishman—bowler hat, rolled umbrella and all—than Du Bois had for reconnectlonwith the ancestral home. The point of course is that Du Bois sought to resolve the di-lemma of the double consciousness he so famously gave voice to in The Souls of BlackFolk and that runs as a theme through all his work by making a choice that accorded withhis deepest human interests and dispositions. If he could not be fully American, then hewould be African, in the sense of representing what one might call "the universal Negro,"the singular embodiment of this figure in its world historical circumstance.

But of course Du Bois did not leave the matter there. For if the circumstances of theAmerican experience imposed a racial perspective on his thought that his own intelli-gence could not fully embrace, he sought nonetheless to enlarge and legitimize this per-spective by an appeal to a more integrative principle of collective awareness and expres-sion. This was supplied by the notion of culture and the ethical imperative it entailed. DuBois very early on conceived of a Black communal life, including the religious, as aseparate and distinctive realm of experience within the general context of American lifeand institutions. He would have protested against Appiah's description of this legacy as a"residue"; for him, it had a coherence and vitality all its own. Du Bois was thus led, likemany cultural nationalists, to a conflation ofraee with culture as a basis for politicalparticipation. The point is that the racial exclusion of Blacks from American democracycompelled Du Bois into a reactive racial nationalism, the contradictory pulls of whichcould not, however, be comfortably resolved, as is apparent even iti this confident andlyrical statement of its informing principle:

We are Americans, not only hy birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals,our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At thatpoint, we are Negroes, members of a vasi bistorie race tbat from the very dawn ofcreation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatberland. Weare tbe first fruits of this new nation, the barbinger of that black tomorrow whicb is


yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today. We are that people whosesubtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only Americanfairy tales, its only touch of pathos and hutnor amid its mad money-getting plutoc-racy, (mvVmg.v, 1996.822)

It will he noticed that Du Bois proceeds here to a deliberate reversal of Hegel's infa-mous characterization of Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy ofHistoty, transform-ing its negative thrust by reinterpreting it in terms associated with Herder's valorizationof folk culture, in order to enforce his statement of Black people's claim to cultural au-tonomy. There was no possibility of extending this claim to the political realm, for he wasaware that there could be no question ofa separate existence of Black people on Ameri-can soii.^

The invocation ofa shared cultural inheritance derived from Africa originates with amovement of conscious reconnection with the folk that became central to Du Bois'sthought. The literary dimension of this gesture has been highlighted by Houston Bakerwho. cotiimenting on the inllucnce of Du Bois in the emergence of the Harlem Renais-sance, has remarked that Du Bois promoted the movement for "transcribing the valuesand achievements of an oral, folk experience into the cultured and written forms" (Baker,in AsantcandAbarry, 1996: 201). However. Du Bois accorded equal impottance to thoseaspects of cultural achievement in Black history that went beyond the common folk. This"high culture" was associated with Egypt, not merely in its monumental aspect, but alsoas expression of temporal depth—or, if one prefers, ofa longue duree—with a quasimetaphysical resonance that goes beyond the cultural connotations the term assumes forFcrnand Braudcl and his colleagues of tbe French Annales school, Egypt, reclaimed forAfrica, reflected and represented the itnmemorial state of the Black race.

This theme constitutes the burden of Du Bois's classic work. The Negro, first pub-lished in 1915 and later expanded into The World and.•iffiea. Both arc w orks of historicaland cultural rehabilitation, an undertakitig upon which Du Bois brings to bear a formi-dable grasp of historical, archaeological, and ethnological infonnation. Apart frotn alively narrative and expository style, they display an astonishing range of scholarshipintended to hold up the argument for an African past of great achievement. Thus, Du Boistnakes ample use of diverse authorities, with the obvious aim of establishing his testi-mony on a solid foundation of fact, in order to demonstrate that the African past in hisreconstruction is not a mere figment of his Black imagination, but a verifiable historicalreality^

With Du Bois. this re-appropriation of the African inheritance issued from a reconver-sion of the Diaspora consciousness that enabled a ftilsome atid uticotiditional identifica-tion with the tnother continent:

Africa is a beautiful land; not merely eomely and pleasant, but haunted with swampand jungle, stemly bcatitiful in its loveliness of terror, its depth of gloom, and full-ness or color; its heaven tearing peaks, its sliver of endless sand, the might, width andbreadth of Its rivers, depth of its lakes, and height of its hot. blue heaven. There aremyriads of living things, the voice of storm, the kiss of pestilence and pain, the oldand ever new. new and incredibly ancient, (85)

An ecological vision—an environmental imagination, if one prefers—tinged by a cer-tain neo-Darwinism, with its acceptance of nature in all its variousness and all its moodsand circumstances, underlies this depiction ofa universe of African historical being,projected as the primordial theater ofa new African endeavor in history, in a re-affirma-tion of the African will to life.'

hi ail this, the folk continued to haunt Du Bois's imagination. The equivalence that he


established between race, culture, and nation, and its association with history, defined theindividual as essentially a representative ot the species. As he says, "the history of theworld is the history, not of individuals but of groups, not of nations, but of races ("TheConservation ofRaces"). The refinement of the individual mind was therefore meaning-less without reference to the full body of life and expression represented by the folk, theauthentic bearer of a racial memory transmitted through the common culture. This line ofreasoning, as Paul Gilroy has suggested, represented for Du Bois more than an incidentalaspect of his intellectual development: the culture of the folk, as he understood it. came toassume more than a purely aesthetic significance, but took on rather a crucial politicalimplication, insofar as the folk could also be considered, in the especial light ofRousseau'smyth of the social contract and the popular will, as the fundamental component of thesocial body and therefore as the ultimate source of political legitimacy (Gilroy, 1993:111-145). In this view, the national community received an essential grounding and ulti-mately its validation in the common culture massively and concretely embodied by the folk.

Du Bois's understanding of the compact with the folk was not, however, merely intel-lectual or theoretical, but also, and more importantly, moral and ideological, proceedingfrom a deep compassion for the disinherited folk, and from a passion for social justice.As Manning Marable has observed, his refusal of oppression and his egalitarian faithdetermined an emphatic socialist orientation ofhis thinking {Marable. 1986). In this con-nection, it is imperative to stress that his socialism inclined more towards an Englishtradition that derives from the utopianism of William Morris than towards the Bolshevikkind. The totalitarian system could not accord with his temperament, despite his debt tothe anti-imperialism of Lenin, and his vaunted admiration tor the Soviet Union.

His socialist faith gives meaning to his political activism in the global context. It iseasy to understand from this perspective how Du Bois"s cultural nationalism in the Ameri-can context flowed directly into the global anti-imperialism within which his Pan-Africanism was framed. To understand this progression clearly, we need to recall thecircumstances that led to the holding of the 1919 congress in Paris, motivated by theoutrage felt by Black nationalists everywhere at the Versailles settlement, in which theapplication of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination to the peoples of Europe wasdenied to the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. The Pan-Africanism that Du Boisbegan actively to promote from this point onwards can be interpreted as simply the cham-pioning of the national idea projected upon Africa, considered as the geo-political spherefor the expression of the collective will of the black race. Pan-Africanism, then, becamein cfTect for Du Bois a defense of the weak and vulnerable peoples of the non-westernworld, in particular Africa, against the rapacity of the European races and the Westernpowers.' Thus, by placing the colonial problem in its maximal racial perspective andinternational setting, Du Bois was to pave the way for political independence and thebeginning of national development in Africa. This outcome authorizes the view that,perhaps more than any other single individual, Du Bois had a direct hand in shaping thedestiny of the African continent.

Beyond the practical result of his activities, measured in terms of Black and Africanemancipation, Du Bois stood for a political and social ideal that we associate with mo-dernity as a legacy of the Enlightenment. For Du Bois can be considered doubly theproduct of the Enlightenment, first in his historical status as an American, citizen of anation founded on its principles, and secondly, and much more meaningfully, in his per-sonal adherence to its leading propositions. Despite its conflicting currents, which laidopen the way to the ideological devaluation of his race, Du Bois clung to the emancipatoryhope the Enlightenment ideal held aloft for all peoples whose humanity had been vio-lated by the historical ascendance of the European races." His ultimate aspiration was toenable black people to enter fully into the inheritance of the Enlightenment, for him a


marking phase not merely of western development but of universal history, consisting inthe promise it held for the maximization of life chances for humanity at large.'" As KwakuKorang has noted, the ultimate significance of Du Bois derives from a reasoned progres-sion in his work beyond the Ethiopianism of Blyden (Korang. 2001): of his integration ofthe affective element in what Wilson Jeremiah Moses has called "the religious histori-cism"ofearlier interpretations of Black experience (Moses, 1996; 12) into a frameworkof ideas within which Black nationalism could be validated in terms both of a universalethical ideal and a secular, modernizing consciousness.

The prophetic role that Du Bois felt to have devolved upon him, and which he affectedin his literary style, was assumed and dramatically acted out in the public arena by MarcusGarvey." Garvey has so often been presented as the very antithesis of Du Bois that thecommon purpose that unites them tends to be lost to view; for despite the wide differ-ences in background and in the methods adopted by each man to the race issue, they wereboth moved by the vision of the deliverance of Black people from the toils of history.'-Garvey was the inheritor of a longstanding cmigrationist tradition, going back to suchfigures as Prince Hall. Paul Cuffee. John Shaw, Samuel Cornish, and John Russwonn(Redkey, 1969; Clarke. 1974). Into this tradition, Garvey infused a new passion andimparted a peculiar dynamism that was founded upon a strongly articulated African sen-timent stemming from his Caribbean background, into whose fabric the enacted memo-ries of the ancestral continent were intimately woven. It is of immediate interest in thisconnection to note that the "ethiopianism" to which Blyden gave extended formulation inthe nineteenth century had remained in Garvey's time a widely diffused element of popu-lar feeling in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. (Shepperson, 1968; Scott, 1978).It is thus significant that, apart from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Garveyacknowledged the influence of Blyden. whom he described as "one of our historians andchroniclers who has done so much to retrieve the lost prestige of our race" (quoted inBlyden, Black Spokesman, ed. Hollis Lynch, 1978: xxxiv).''

Garvey's African sentiment could only have been strengthened by the cultural affini-ties with his native Jamaica that he divined in the Black populace with which he cameinto contact upon his arrival in the United States; it was thus inevitable that Africa cameto function as the directing idea of the racial and ethnic solidarity he came so forcefully toembody. This is apparent from his speech to the Second International Convention ofNegroes in 1921. entitled "The Resurrection of the Negro":

We have been camouflaged into believing that we were made free by Abraham Lin-coln. That we were made free by Victoria of England, but up to now we are stillslaves, we are industrial slaves, we are social slaves, we are political slaves, and theNew Negro desires freedom that has no boundary, no limit. We desire a freedom thatwill lift us to the common standard of all men, whether they be white men of Europe,or yellow men of Asia, therefore in our desire to lift ourselves to that standard weshall stop at nothing until there is a free and redeemed Afriea. (Garvey in Dahbourandishay, 1945:304).

The immediate connection that Garvey establishes between freedom for Blacks inAmerica and the redemption of Africa links him with Du Bois and with all the DiasporaBlacksof every age and condition whose thought and imagination have since the begin-ning of their American sojourn turned to Africa. The nexus between the emergence ofmodern civilization and the historical experience of the race determined that this re-demption was conceived as much in practical terms as it was given expression in a mys-tical register. Garvey's especial sensitivity to the Black situation ensured that both ele-ments of the Black titopia—pragmatic and millenary—would profoundly mark his think-ing and his style of action. Here, we might surmise that it is not only the influence of


Du Bois met !Sina Gotner while at Wilberforce and they were married in 1896. Their firstchild, Burf^hardt, died as an infant in Atlanta from a typhoid epidemic. Special Collections andArclijws, W.h.B. Du !i(>i.\ Library. University iif Massachusetts Aiiihcrsi.

Booker 1. Washington that is at work, but also a peasant sense derived from his back-ground. It is not for nothing that the organization he founded to further his activities wascalled the "Universal Negro Improvement Association." a name that signals a preoccupa-tion ofa very practical order, further demonstrated in his move to incorporate a shippingcotnpany. the Black Star Line, in order to consolidate his emigration schemes and ensurea total independence of action. The sheer scale of Garvey's project for the return toAfrica could not but evoke the Biblical story of Exodus, which thus came to function asa form of sacred reference, imparting to his movement a fervent messianism that reso-nates in his last message to his followers from his prison in Atlanta:

When I am dead, wrap the mantle of the Red, Black and Green around me, for in thenew life, I shall rise with God's grace and blessing to lead millions tip the heights ofirititnph with the colors ihat you know. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm.look for me all around you, for with God's grace, I shall eome and bring with mecountless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies, andthe millions in Atrica to aid you in the fight for Liberty. Freedom and Life, (Phih.so-phy and Opinions. 239)

The affirmative tone of this message, underlined by a symbolism that its author countedupon to exercise an itnmediate appeal for its target audience, derives from a force ofvision that Garvey never abandoned even during the most discouraging moments of hiscareer.


Garveyism can be considered the culmination of tbe "Back to Africa" movement,bringing to a dramatic climax the process of elaboration of a Utopia generated within theembattled consciousness of a people at odds with history. Garvey gave strong articula-tion to the African-American sense of an age-long exile, marked by ceaseless tribula-tions. The aspiration for a form of historic respite arising from this condition came todetermine a dream of deliverance centered on the image of Africa. It is to this aspiration,in which the thematic and affective link between Diaspora condition and the Utopianimpulse emerges clearly, that Gar\'ey gave expression in the Biblical register with hisaudience had been made familiar by the civilization within which it was enclosed:

Our desire is fora place in the world, not to disturb the tranquilily ol" other men. butto lay down our burden and rest our weary backs and feet by the banks of tbe Nigerand sing songs and chant our hymns to the God of Ethiopia, (quoted by Barrett.1997:77)

Any assessment of Garvey must take into account the stringent character of the situa-tion with which he was confronted, the intensity of the hostility he encountered on allsides, and the numerous material difficulties he faced, factors which did not prevent theenormous impact his movement made upon Black communities around the world. Clearly,his message struck a chord among these people whose sense of desperation he articulatedso powerfully. The slogan that he invented, "Africa for the Africans—those at home andabroad," ensured that his movement was in full touch with a universal Black nationalismthat came into ascendance in the years between the two world wars. It certainly had aspecial resonance for the various African nationalist movements that sprang up duringthe period in various parts of the world. The most remarkable African disciple of Garveyremains of course Kwame Nkrumah, who drew as much inspiration from him as from DuBois with whom, as is well known, Nkrumah collaborated closely during the decisivestage of the Pan-African movement marked by the historic Manchester conference(Bakpetu-Thompson, 1969; Birmingham, 199S).'

The worldwide impact of Garvey's movement can be imputed to the fact that it gavevibrant expression to a popular sentiment that, in the nature of things, could not be said tobe compatible with a properly intellectual mode of reflection. Moreover, the performativeand expansive character of his movement gave it an almost ritual significance, whosesymbolism has endured, conveyed at the present time through the three colors (black,red, and green) of the Rastafarian movement (Barretl, 1997). All this seems to suggestsan unreflective and irrational impulse running through his activities. The truculent atti-tude he often displayed in his confrontation with white racism, leading him to deal withrepresentatives of the Ku Klux Klan. has been interpreted by Gilroy as a form of malevo-lence, the expression of a Black racism that bore a symmetrical relation to its whiteequivalent, and anticipated in its attitudes and its style the aggressive fascism promotedby Mussolini in Italy and demonstrated with deadly results by German Nazism led byHitler (Gilroy, 2000,231-37). But to suggest such a connection is to disregard the well-documenled declarations in which, on several occasions, Garvey denounced Hitler andMussolini for their racism, anti-Semitism, and their colonial ambitions in Africa.' Buteven while recognizing the pathologies that, given the circumstances, could not but markGarvey's movement, I believe that we can discern today in his speeches and addresses ahigh seriousness that must have imparted to them a ring both of a deep passion and ofutter conviction. In short, Garvey's utopianism, bound up w ith his dream of Africa, w asnot without sincerity and moral appeal, nor indeed an intellectual foundation and there-fore, its measure of truth.

It is probable that today, Du Bois and Garvey would be designated "public inteltectu-

36 * Souls Summer/Fall 2005

als.""' In the particular case of Du Bois, a scrupulous scholarship served to deliver asocial message, which was held steadily in view as its primary objective. He provided themodel for the many Black intellectuals, often professional academics, whose preoccupa-tion with Africa was reflected in their scholarship and their writings. We must begin withCarter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, along withits journal, the Journal of Negro Histoiy. helped to establish Africa as an area of schol-arly interest. That publication, along with the journal Phylon. published at SpeilmanCollege, paved the way for the establishment of African Studies as an academic disci-pline, and its validation of an African past of achievement that antedates the experienceof slavery. As Carter Woodson says, in his review of Melville Herskovits's The Myth ofthe Negro Past, "The race has a past and it did not begin on the cotton and sugar planta-tions of America" (Woodson. 1942; 111-118). His book. The Negro in Our History,published in 1922. is a demonstration of this thesis, for the first three chapters are de-voted to what, in the sixth edition. Carter Woodson himself calls "the African background."Beyond its polemical objective, the book represents an effort to reconstruct the African-American experience in its full historical perspective by restoring to it the African dimen-sion. Even more, this reconstruction was conceived as a total grasp of the racial experi-ence, the creation of a new historical consciousness enabling Blacks everywhere to achievea positive form of self-knowledge (Lee. 1958;Goggin, 1993).

Among the social scientists for whom Africa has been a central reference of academicwork, the names of St. Clair Drake. Martin Kilson, Eliott Skinner, and Manning Marablecome immediately to mind (Harrison and Harrison, 1999). All this work provides thescholarly foundation and intellectual pedigree for what has come to be known variouslyas "Black Studies," "Afro-American Studies." "Africana Studies," etc.. which emergedfrom the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement. We must also note the clTort of integra-tion of these disciplines by Ron Karenga, and Molefi Asante"s (1987) theorization invarious works, beginning with r/ie/t/rocert/r/c/flfefl, of their interrogation of the African-American situation, leading to what may be interpreted as a new postulation of Negritudeadapted to the post-Civil Rights situation in the United States (Harrison and Harrison,1999; Aldridge and Young, 2000).

In al! these scholarly efforts, the African idea intervenes as a mediating principle ofAfrican-American self-knowledge. This is especially evident in the area of literary criti-cism. Already, in the mid 1960s, the publication of Mercer Cook and Stephen Henderson'sThe Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States (! 969) established in an overtcritical gesture the thematic link between African and African-American literatures. Withthe concept of the Black Aesthetic associated with Addison Gayle, the historical refer-ence provides a base fora distinctive expression that is charged with the full weight of acommon experience. But it is especially in the work of the postmodern critics that weencounter the most emphatic acknowledgement of the African connection. Thus, forHouston Baker, the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance carried with it the "sound andspace of an African ancestral past" (Baker. 1987: 195). Henry Louis Gates for his partprovides, in the long theoretical Introduction to his book The Signifyin' Monkey (1988)the sociological framework of an African imagination to which the cultural history of theAfrican American has given a new complexion and resonance.

These studies I have evoked map out in their various ways the conceptual landscapeof the African-American intellectual tradition. It is of interest at this time to note that theacademic and scholarly recovery of this tradition of African-American reflection nowenables an exploration in philosophical terms of the existential framework and innerdensity of African American experience, as witnessed by the work of such scholars asCornel West, Lewis Gordon, Lucius Outlaw, and Charles Mills (see Pittman. 1997;Headley,200i).''


But it is to the imaginative works that we must go in order to grasp the full press andworking out of the African sentiment in the Black Diaspora consciousness. It is here thatthe deep afTectivity that tinderlies this theme receives a focused and complex expression.This begins to emerge in the way the spirituals deploy a subversive Africanism under theguise of Christian orthodoxy. The same observation applies to Phillis Wheatley's mannerof "signifyin"" on the thetne of Christian conversion in her well-known poem, "On BeingBrought from Africa to America,"'^ Africa assumes a more immediate significatice inpoems by African writers in the succeeding centuries. While it is hailed in more or lessconventional terms by Frances [larper in her poem "'Ethiopia" (412) and by Paul LawrenceDunbar in his "'Ode to Ethiopia" (886-887), it acquires an aggressive edge in GwendolynBennett's "Heritage"; here, the African image subtends the theme of racial grievanceprojected in a frankly anti-Christian/anti western stance;

I want to hear the chantingAround a heathen fireor a strange black race. (1227-28)

With Claude McKay's sonnet "Africa" (985), we begin to approach a deeper sounding ofthe African theme In the Black Diaspora itnagination. in this sonnet, Africa is presentedreverentially, as the mother continent, albeit as one whose generative powers are spent.The tone receives a spiritual resonance in "Outcast" { 987), in which McKay espouses anancestralistii we have witnessed in Du Bois by giving expression to a longing for thatland "whence my fathers came," in reaction against bondage in West, The poem has aspecial interest in the way the myth of Guinea reappears in what one might describe as asurreptitious form: "My soul would sing forgotten jungle sotigs/l would go back to dark-ness and to peace," Here, the image of darkness functions not merely as a conventionalreference to the mystic shroud of death, but also, and tnore importantly, to designate anoriginal source of being to which the Black poet's soul reverts: in other words, Africa.

This brings us to the classic statement of the African theme in African-American lit-erature, with all the ambivalence that surrounds the theme: Countee Cullen's "Heritage,"(1997: 1311-1314), with its celebrated opening line, "What is Africa to me?" We mustftrst note that the poetn is actually a religious poetn. a work of Christian tiicditation, onethat is enacted in dramatic terms suggestive ofa "dark night of the soul." The poet'smeditation progresses towards the self-dedication that he annotmces about halfway throughthe work:

I belong to Jesus ChristPreacher of humilityHeathen gods are naught to me

These lines suggest that the spiritual progression as presented in the poem culminates ina rejection of Africa associated with "Heathen gods." But the general movement of thepoem renders this rejection problematic, to say the least, for we observe that the poet'sgesture is preceded by an exploration of his African antecedents that is announced in theopening lines on a strongly articulated note of celebration:

What is Africa to me?Copper sun or scarlet seaJungle star or jungle traekStrong bronzed men, or regal blackWomen from whose loins I sprangWhen the birds of Eden sang?

38 * Souls Summer/Fall 2005

It may be thought that the primal images that carry forward the poet's mediation in thesucceeding lines are meant to represent the untamed landscape of the ancestral continent,but they serve rather to dramatize the maelstrom of the poet's emotions, divided as he isbetween his racial and ethnic feeling on one hand, and his Christian affiliations on theother. It soon becomes clear that the quest for deliverance in religious terms as delineatedin the poem rests on a feeble orthodoxy, for the poet seems unable to make an unequivo-cal claim to the Christian heritage. The opening lines, with the refrain that accompaniesit, evinces such evocative power that the conventional religiosity of the poet's dedicationbecomes unavailing against the powerful undercurrent of feeling the African theme gen-erates:

One three centuries removedFrom the scenes his fathers loved.Spicy grove, cinnamon tree.What is Atriea to me?

In their very expressiveness, these lines establish the dominant emotional key of thepoem, a key upon which the African sentiment is rung in such resonant terms that theChristian devotional theme becomes ultimately subdued.

When we turn to Langston Hughes, we encounter a handling of the African theme thatspans a wider range of sentiment and vision. In "Afro-American FragETient" {CollectedPoems, 129), Africa is experienced as the enigma lodged within the deep recesses of theblack racial consciousness:

So long, so far away, is Africa'sDark face

It is important to note that the phrase "Dark face" thrown into relief in the text byenjambment, serves to emphasize the obscure appeal of the subject to the poet. Anotherpoem, "Dansc Africaine" (28), exhibits a more vigorous apprehension, with the poetstriving to represent his African nature in sensual terms, as a somatic itnprint upon theself

A night-veiled girlWhirls softly into aCircle of light.Whirls softly . . . slowly

Like a wisp of smoke around the fire—And tbe tom-toms beatAnd tbe tom-toms beat

And the low beating of tbe tom-tomsStirs your blood

The dominant note here is that of a triumphant primitivism, though the poem also atteststo a movement towards a rcconncction with the sources of life, in conformity with theideology and prevailing idiom of a dominant modernism.''' It is to this element that LangstonHughes brings a special refinement in the poem in which he seems to me to have offeredthe most authentic expression of his African sentiment, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

I've known riversI've known rivers aneient as the world and older tban the flow of human blood inhtiman veins.. . .

I've known riversAncient dusky rivers


My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (23)

The primordialism of this poem is projected through the image of the river as symbolicboth of the ceaseless How of time and of the vital energies that the poet divines in themanifested universe to which he relates in explicit racial terms ("ancient dusky rivers").The evocative appeal of the poem is predicated upon an African sentiment, and it was tobe transmitted to Leopold Sedar Senghor. who came to amplify the theme and give it anespecially ample resonance in his poem, "Congo," in order to locate it within a specificuniverse of African apprehension.

The reference to Senghor is a reminder of the powerful influence exerted by the litera-ture of the Harlem Renaissance upon the Black francophone poets of the Caribbean andAfrica, beginning with its direct promotion of the so-called Indigenist movement in Haiti,and culminating in the Negritude movement in Paris (Cobb, 1979; De Jongh, 1990). It isuseful in this connection to point out the Caribbean evocations of Africa that reflect thevisible cultural presence of Africa in the region. We might mention here Jacques Roumain's"Guinea." which connects with the passage in the long poem "Bois d'ebene" ("EbonyWood") in which this presence is acknowledged in anguished terms:

Africa, I have kepi your memory, Africayou are within me

like the thorn in the woundlike the guardian fetishat the center of the village.

(in Kennedy. 1989:25)

Lorna Goodison"s "Guinea Woman" (2000) is an embodiment of a generative principleof the Caribbean people rooted in Africa, while Sinione Scharz-Bart's Fluie et vent surTelumee Miracle {The Bridge of Beyond) restores the narrative strategies of the racialmemory that ensures a sense of origins and endorses a vision of the future. In Praisesongfor the Widow. Paule Marshall (1984) celebrates the enlivening quality of the Africaninheritance in the fmal dance and restoration to the fullness of self of her heroine. WithKamau Brathwaite's Masks, as 1 have tried to show elsewhere (Irele, 2001: 154-167), theAfrican theme is carried further through its enactment of a physical return and reliving ofthe African experience, and it is the force of this immediate reconnection that determinesthe messianic quality of Brathwaite's ancestralism. nowhere so clearly in evidence as inhis "Sun Poem."

It is of special interest in the light of these references to examine the evolution of theCaribbean ancestral sentiment associated with Africa in the work of Derek Walcott. giventhe pronounced ambivalence that seems to have marked its earliest expressions. Begin-ning with "A Far Cry from Africa" {Collected Poems, 1986. 17) in which he situateshimself at the ambigtiotis edge of the racial divide ("How can I turn from Africa andlive?"), Walcott makes constant reference in his poetry and plays to the African compo-nent of his mixed racial and cultural ancestry. In these references, Africa, as image andidea, is often presented in a thematic and textual counterpoint to his western historicaland cultural legacy:

And 1. whose ancestors were slave and Roman,have seen both sides of the imperial foam.

40 * Souls Summer/Faii 2005

Walcott's racial concerns come together in Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), anexpressionist representation of the conflicts and obsessions that inhabit the Afro-Carib-bean mind, projected through allegorical characters drawn from the folk tradition. Dreamon Monkey Mountain thus presents itself as a parable of Caribbean experience, a playthat highlights the social and moral odds against which the descendants of African slavesstruggle in order to create what the West Indian scholar Orlando Patterson calls "a con-scious cotnmunity of tnemory." Walcott's treatment of the African theme in the play seemsat ftrst sight to be conditioned by the intertextua! framework suggested by Eugene O'Neill'sThe Emperor Jones and Jean Genet's Les Negres. The formal relationship of Walcott'splay to these works determines its thematic development and atnbiguous tone of the play.forthc symbolism and dramatic progression in Walcott's play may be said to culminate inan emphatic repudiation of Africa. It seetns to me however that this is a gesture that isdeterrnined primarily by Walcott's preoccupation with the specific Caribbean predica-ment as this relates to the experience of the principal character, Makak, the need he felt toadvance a reconciliation of the Caribbean subject with the immediate environment, witha given and defined landscape of existence and endeavor. At the end of the play. Makakrecovers a certain integrity of himself as Felix Ikibaln. an integrity defined by his spe-cific Caribbean identity and its creative possibilities:

Lord, I have been washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the ocean. The branches ofmy fingers, the roots of my feet, eould grip nothing, but now, god, they have tbundground, , . . Other men will come, other prophets will come, and they will be stoned,and mocked, and betrayed, but now this old hermit is going back home, back to thebeginning. To the green beginning of this world, (326),

But the African image is not banished for all that from the poet's mind, for Walcottseems to have felt a compulsion to return to this image as it inhabits the Caribbean con-sciousness, a theme that he finally confronts in one of the most memorable sequences inhis long poem Ometvs (1990). the scene in Book Three of the poem in which his heroAehille meets Afolabe, his African forbear. This meeting occurs in the second of twoepisodes that recount a descent, first into history, then into what may be called the racialUnconscious, enacted in a dream sequence in which Aehille crosses the bridge of metnorythat spans the years of the original separation from the ancestral homeland and the am-biguous present of Caribbean existence. The flow of the Congo River down which hejourneys is thus backward, toward that pristine time of a primal existence and awareness:

Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealthto the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,skipping eetituries. ocean and river, and Time itself. (134)

These lines enact nothing less than an epiphany, leading to a reawakening of con-sciousness in Walcott's protagonist: "And Aehille felt the homesick shame/and pain ofhis Africa." A good part of that pain involves the loss of his name, that is, ultimately, of anindividual grasp of the world: "The deaf sea has changed around every name that yougave/us; trees, men. we yearn for a sound that is missing" (137). it is this lack that theAfrican ancestor attempts to remedy in the dialogue that ensues between him and hisCaribbean descendant:

No tnan loses his shadow except it is in the nighland even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glowof sunrise, he stands on bis own name in that light. (138)

Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois « 41

Walcott affinns in these lines an essential dimension to the self that is manifested atthe noontide of being. This reading is confirmed by the ritual re-insertion of Achille intothe mythic and epic past, in what is presented as both a ceremony of reunion and of ascene of self-recognition;

Achille saw the same dances

That the iniired warriors did wilh their bamboo stickAs they scuttcrcd around him. lifting, dipping their lancesLike divining rods turning the earth to music

the same chac-chac and ra-ra, the drumming the same,and the chant of the sced-eycd prophet to the same

from the blurring ankles. The same, the i ame. (143)

Walcott points us here to the originating impulse of his poem in Caribbean folkways.deriving inspiration and meaning from a new responsiveness on his part to the Africaninheritance.-" For the ceremony of welcome and reintegration acquires its full signifi-cance by locating the poem's protagonist at the symbolic and affective confluence of aremembered past and a living present. In theAfolabeepisode, Walcott works through theambiguity of his earlier stances to a new understanding of the African dimension of hisCaribbean sensibility, of his historical and cultural being.

What the narrator in Omeros calls Achille's "homesick shame and pain of his Africa"hovers in the background of Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998), a work that can be inter-preted as the fictional enactment of the quest for an autonomous sphere of being thatBlack people in the African Diaspora have had to pursue throughout the course of theirAmerican existence. By its very title. Paradise announces itself as an allegory of theBlack condition in America; in this respect, the novel offers an interesting variation onthe Exodus theme. In the first place, deliverance is sought through a movement furtherinland in the continent of exile, rather than movement out. The migration to the West inthe novel recreates the great American phenomenon celebrated by the great historian ofthe American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, except that in this case, it features anattempt to establish a community of pure Blacks—those who had suffered from the"disallowment"—within the wide open spaces of America.''

The African idea seems to play no part therefore in the conception and execution ofthis Utopian enterprise. But the dissolution of the community dramatizes the impossibil-ity of the attainment of the black Utopia in America. This is underscored by the curiousinversion on which the story is built, for the Utopian community of Ruby mirrors theAmerican white society, with all its contradictions, reproduced among its Black inhabit-ants with a special starkness, a fact that operates in the end to defeat the Utopian hopes ofthe founders. It is against this background that we must interpret the African referenceimplicll in the alternative dream of home proposed by Rev Misner;

Can't you even imagine what it musi feel like to have a true home? I don"! meanheaven. I mean a real earthly home . . . your own home, where if you go past yourgreat-grcat-grand parents, past theirs, and Iheirs, past the whole Western history, pastthe beginning to organized knowledge, past pyramids and poisoned arrows, on backto when rain was new; before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought theywere fish, back when God said Good! Good!—there, right there where you knowyour own people were bom and lived and died.... That place. Who was God talkingto if not to my people living in my home? (Paradise, 213)

42 « Souls Summer/Fall 2005

Beyond the personal and social dramas that impel the narrative progression of ToniMorrison's novel, the passage sums up the deep import of the African idea, with its Uto-pian projections, as it has shaped the responses of the Diaspora Black community to itsuncertain condition in America. It articulates in mythic terms the insistent longing forhome, the deep nostalgia for origins, in the fullest sense of the word, for which Africastands as the abiding image in the Black Diaspora consciousness and imagination. Itfacilitated the emergence of an ancestralism that developed into the sense of an integraland original being outside and beyond the historical process—a collective being rootedin the recesses of an African essence—for which, in his tnagnificent poem. Cahicrd'unretour an pays nalal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Aime Cesaire (1996) hasprovided the term "Negritude." For all the ambiguity that the term evokes., this conceptrepresents most clearly the cycle of reciprocities between Diaspora self-re fleet ion andthe new African consciousness in its emergence as a modern phenomenon.

Notes1. In Cadastre, reprinted in La Poesie. 1998. 189.2. For the most comprehensive studies, see the biography in 2 voltimes hy David Levering Lewis, \992

and 2000. and the studies by Arnold Rampersad (1976, rpt. 1990), and Manning Marable (1986). Du Bois isof course central to the various sttidies of Pan-Africanism by the following: Philipc Decracnc (1959), ColinLegum (1962). Vincent Bakpctu-Tlionipson (1969), Ayodele Langley (1973), Emmanuel Geiss (1974), andEsedebe(l9S(), rc\. 1994).

3. Appiairs iemaik oeeurs as part of a general consideration oi'the relationship hetween literature andconcepts of race and naiion thai came to be current vvidi the work of the Romiinlics. The spcciHe processinvolved in Herder's association ot eullure willi iiaiion has heen summeti up hy Vassilis Lamhropoiilos inthese terms; "Herder is a paradigmatic modem figure in that he ttimed his attention to those types of discoursethai had been reeenlly assoeialed with ihe aesthetic, and completed the definition of the project of modernityby aesihelicizing the public as national eiilture" (Lambropoudos. 1993: 70; see also Berlin. 2000).

4. In his uork. Jhc \ecessaiy Nation. Gregory Jusdanis ofters a rc-assessment of nationalism in thispositive light by Invoking its Utopian and translbrmalivc poicnlial. Thus he wrilcs: " Nalionalism highligiusthe capacity of culture to serve as a means for political action and, ultimately, soeial change. C ultural nation-alism enables a people to see itself as separate from others, to pursue a polilieal program of jnslice andaiiloiiomy. and Ui promote a program of modernization. In this sense nationalism is a crealive force, allowingsocial movements to imagine thenrselves as achieving greatness, pursuing self-govemmcnl, and building asociety of citizens'" (Jusdanis, 2001: 11).

5. As the unhappy experience of the Seminole Indians had tnade clear, the prospect of a separate andindependent state of Blacks in America would never have been tolerated by ihe while majority.

6. As Kenneth tioings has remarked, many of the ideas expressed in Du Bois's hook were to prove seminallo the work of later scholars on Alrrican antiquity, such as Cheik .Anta DIop. Basil Davidson, and even MartinRernal (Inlroduction to Du Bois. The \egn>. 2002: 11).

7. The primordialism that informs the mysliqtie cii race in Langston Hughes"'; "The Negro Speaks ofRivers," as indeed the thematic elaboration of the Afriean iheme in tiie poetry oflhe I larleni Renaissance, canbe traced to this source of inspiration in Du Bois.

8. The chapter entitled "Andromeda" in The WorUI and .Africa (22fi-2(iO) gathers up the elements of hisanti-colonialism in an impassioned indiclment oflhe European colonial powers.

9. For a crjtieal re-appraisal of the FnlighleiimeiU from this poini of view, see Sala-Molins (1992).10. Ou Iiois's atiachmenl to the Lnlighlenment ideal runs through all his work and is «ell retlected in his

essay "JelVerson Davis as a Represenlalive ofCivili/alion" (in David Levering Lewis, 1995: 17-20).11. On Garvey. see in parlieular the 1983 biography by Tony Martin.12. William Ackah has observed in this regard: "Interestingly in terms of political philosophies, ihe two

men were ofsimilar mind. DL Bois was a rather eeleetie figure but his desire to see Africa strong and indepen-dent, for blaeks to he economically self-sufficient, in the diaspora and for black etilture to be promotedthrough art and literature to elevate the race resonates throughout his work. Marcus Garvey's journal, theNegm World and the activities of the Universal Negro Improvement Society (UNIA). were dedicated to ad-vancing the cause of black men ant! women all over the world, something that Du Bois certainly had empathywith"" (Ackah, 2001:23).


13, Garvey thus illustrates in a peculiar way the role of anglophone West Indians in the Pan-Negro move-ment, beginning wiih J, J, Thomas (author of/^w(«/at7/r. first published 18S9, rpt 1969 ), Sylvester Williams(convener of the first pan African Congress held in London in 1900 see Mathurin, 1976}; C.L.R, James,perhaps the besl known of them all. and George Padmore, who became a close collaborator of Nkrumah, Aparallel can be drawn tor the Iraneoplione Caribbean with such figures as Anlonin Finnin and Jean Price-Mars, both Haitians (Garret. 1963; Antoine, 19SI; Dash. 19X7). For the early expression of [ilack nationalismin the French colonies of Maninique and Guadeloupe, see Fran^'ois Maiiehuelle (1982).

14, Thus it is thai the independent nation of Ghana adopted (iarvey's Black Star as its emblem, as iheullimate symbol ofthe historic and alTective eonneelion Nkrumah discerned between Africa and its Diasporain the New World, Garvey's impaet on Afriean nationalism in South Africa has been amply lioeumenied byVinson (2001), The extent of Garvey's iiilluence ean be measured further by the aelivities of francophoneAfrican nationalists in Paris in the thirties, in particular the following: KojoTovalou-Houenou, wiih his LigueUniverselle pour la Defense da la Race Noire (See Eniile Zinsou and Ltie Zoiimenou, 2(K)4); Lamine Senghor;md his Comite de Delensc de la Raee Negre, which also published the jotirnal Ln toix de.s Negres; andTiemoko Ciaran Kouyale. who founded Le Cri ilcs \cgrc.s (see .Ayo Langley, 1973: 1979; De Witte, ! 985). Thehold of Garveyism tipon the sentiments of HIacks of all categories in France is evoked by Claude McKay inhis novel Bunjo. whose plot revolves around the lives orBlaek seamen and doekers in Marseilles in the yearsbetween the two world wars,

15, For example, in this statement by Marcus Garvey :

"We are not againsl the Germans in the sense that we dislike them, hut we are against the peculiarambitions of Hitler, just as we are against ihose ofthe madman Mussolini. In a choice between afuture Italian or German F.mpire or British thai is to rule the world, we prefer ihe British Fmpire.Il is more human, more eonsiderate and more liberal all things eonsideied comparatively. TheItaly of today is not the eultured Italy ofthe past. Under Mussolini it is the most barbaric countryin Etirope, and we can also say that the Germany of the past is not the Germany of Hitler. TheGennany of Hitler is intolerant, so that no sensible Negro could prefer either of ihose to the British.Mussolini must be smashed wiih his mad idea of a new Roman Empire, Germany must be pre-venleci from regaining the African colonies. , . ," ("Italy and Germany" The Black Man. .luly-Augnst, l')36: pp. 1), Tlic Jamaican newspaper, I'laiii Talk of August 20, 1938 reported that the""Left Review" of London published the answers of 148 writers and poets of Cireat Brilain onfascism, .^mongthem were Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore. and Miilk Raj.Aiiand,the Indian writer, (1 am grateful to Professor Rupert Lewis ofthe University ofthe West Indies,Mona. Jamaica, tor eommunieating these texts to me).

\b. Indeed, Garvey considered himself an intelleetual in this sense, as testified by ihe lollowing statementfrom ;i speech he delivered at Halifa,\, Nova Seotia. in the Fall of 1937: "1 am a public lecturer, but I amPresiLlej!t-{Jeneral ofthe Universal Negro Improvemeni Association, As a public lecturer I endeavour to helpeducate the ptihiic, particularly of the raee. as I meet the public , , , if ihe public is thoughttui it wil l bebenelltcd by the things I say. I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite objeet of helping thepeople, espeeially those of my race, to know, to understand, to realise themselves" (Quoted as Epigram toRobert Hill and Barbara Bair. eds,, 1987).

17, Although .Africa was never an immediate focus of his work, Alain Loeke occupies a position of emi-nence in the intelleetual formulalion ofthe Black experienee (see Locke. 19S9),

18, Gates and MeKay, eds,. The Norioii A ill ha logy of African American Literaliin: 412, For the poemsLjuoted in this seetion, all page references are to this edilion,

19, For a discussion ofthe reformulation of modernist primitivism by the llarlcm Renaissance, see Norih(1994) and Lemke(199(<),

20, Joseph Farrell (1999) has argued that far from being a Caribbean transposition of Homer's Iliad,Walcott's poem eschews the epic tone and register of its classieal Greek model in order lo emphasize itsgrounding in the folk experience.

21, This episode in Toni Morrison's novel is based on historical fact whieh Redkey has summarized inthese terms: "Nationalist separatism led to the foundation of several all-blaek lowns across the .South, and in1890. a black leader attempted toereatean all black slate in what is now western Oklahoma, Migration withinthe United States, however, was not notably successful for blaek peasants. They v\anted land above all. bulwhites wanted the same kind, and racial prejudice usually assured white predominance. Many blaeks whomoved West became even more unhappy when the change did not improve their status," (15) Redkey pro-vides in Chapter Three of his study fuller details of this westward movement to Oklahoma and the attempt lofound a Black State, as well as its collapse, leading to a disillusionment with America and a renewed urge foremigralion to Africa . what he ealls an •"African fever" (100 IT and passim).


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