W. E. B. Du Bois’ Africa: Scrambling for a New Africa

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the leading figures of Pan-African thought and activism in the twentieth century. As a sociologist, Du Bois wrote much about the historical and social circumstances of African Americans while often acknowledging the African historical background driving much of African American, or Negro, culture. In 1946, Du Bois published The World and Africa, which was a culmination of previous attempts at penning a narrative of African history beginning with his 1915 publication The Negro, in which he included the social-historical experience of African Americans within the continuity of African history. This book delivers for the first time a comprehensive Afrocentric investigation and critique of Du Bois’s writings on African history. The book argues that while Du Bois presented at the time a strong critique of the Eurocentric construction of African history, many of Du Bois’s descriptions and arguments about African people and history were likewise flawed with interpretations that projected the cultural subjectivities of Europe. Further, while Du Bois rightfully presents the historical relationship between African Americans and Africa as a justification for Pan-African activism, this book contends that Du Bois’s failure to center African culture instead of race leads to superficial justifications for Pan-African unity. Due to the history of slavery and colonialism, African Americans and other African diasporic people face unique challenges regarding identity. This book posits that the reconstruction of an African cultural-historical matrix would have served Du Bois in better ways than the use of the racial paradigm. Therefore, Adé offers his own African World Antecedent Methodology (AWAM) as a tool for scholars to assist in piecing together the African cultural-historical matrix of diasporic African people. There are three approaches in the AWAM methodology: Kanna (sameness), Fanna (similarity), and Naani (uniqueness), which applied together functions in providing a framework for reconstructing the past lifeways of African people transgenerationally and transcontinentally, as well as reaffirming the cosmological rationale for various aspects of African cultural continuity and cultural unity extant among the African diaspora.

Taharka Adé is an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at San Diego State University. Dr. Adé is an Africologist who primarily investigates the African antecedents of various cultural phenomena among African Americans ranging from language, religion, the arts, corporeal aesthetics, and motif.