W. E. B. Du Bois’s universal history in Black Folk Then and Now (1939)

Abstract

In the preface to Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race, W. E. B. Du Bois describes his transformative encounter with Franz Boas in 1906. The anthropologist had come to speak at Atlanta University, the Black university where Du Bois served on the faculty. As Du Bois recalled, Boas had ‘said to a graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of the black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard’.¹ Du Bois was probably exaggerating his astonishment for dramatic effect: it is unlikely that he had ‘never heard’ of sub-Saharan African history prior to Boas’s lecture.² With this scene, however, Du Bois presents himself as the victim, or at least the dupe, of an account of history that he aims to correct in Black Folk Then and Now. Published in 1939, more than thirty years after Boas’s lecture at Atlanta University, the book offers a sweeping history of Africa and the African diaspora that begins in antiquity, turns to the development of slavery and colonialism, and concludes with the rise of Pan-African movements. Du Bois draws on African history to probe the concept of race, an effort of obvious intellectual and political import in the wake of the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s.³

Black Folk Then and Now is one iteration of a project that occupied Du Bois for much of his long life as a scholar, political activist, and one of the foremost public intellectuals of his day. In 1909, he called for the publication of an Encyclopedia Africana which would present a comprehensive history of Africa and the African diaspora.⁴ The encyclopaedia was never completed, but Du Bois published several books that were oriented towards similar goals. The first, The Negro, appeared in 1915. Black Folk Then and Now is a significantly expanded and re-organized version of the 1915 volume. He returned to this material with The World and Africa, published in 1947.⁵ From among Du Bois’s works of African history, I focus on Black Folk Then and Now because he frames this text specifically as a response to his discovery of the failures of his education. The concept of history as a means of individual and collective education is central to Du Bois’s historical writings, as it was to the ancient historians, especially writers of ‘universal histories’ like Diodorus Siculus, the first-century BCE Greek historian from whose work he drew.

Wilson Moses observes that Du Bois ‘could be a spirited advocate of Pan-Africanism, while insisting that African peoples were members of a world community centered in universal values’: his histories of Africa reflect this approach.⁶ In The Negro, Du Bois set his historical project up against ‘those…who would write universal history and leave out Africa’. He enlists contemporary German scholars to his side of the debate: ‘how, asks Ratzel, can one leave out the land of Egypt and Carthage? and Frobenius declares that in future Africa must more and more be regarded as an integral part of the great movement of world history’.⁷ By invoking ‘universal’ and ‘world’ history, Du Bois alluded to German philosophers Kant and Hegel as well as to debates in the German academy (in which he had studied in the 1890s) about the aims of scholarship, of education, and of the institution of the university.⁸ His idea of ‘universal history’, however, also builds on African American historical writing from the same period, which in turn made use of ancient Greek and Roman accounts of Africa.⁹ Nineteenth-century African American historians and Greco-Roman historians both belong to a tradition of historiography in which the study of the past serves the goal of moral improvement. The moral function of history writing is especially closely connected to works of ‘universal history’ in antiquity, because the comprehensiveness of these works allowed them to offer the greatest possible variety of instructive examples to serve the widest possible readership.¹⁰ The body of ancient literature that scholars typically identify as ‘universal history’ aimed (1) to cover the whole of the known world, from the earliest times to the writer’s own period, or (2) to offer a temporally comprehensive but spatially limited account.¹¹ Diodorus Siculus, a Greek from the Roman province of Sicily, composed the only ancient work of universal history of which any substantial part survives today. His Bibliotheke, which he probably began in the 50s BCE and completed in the 30s BCE, comprised forty books, of which fifteen survive; we also have substantial fragments of other books.¹² In addition to offering the best extant exemplar of universal history from antiquity, Diodorus is one of Du Bois’s main sources for his history of ancient Africa in Black Folk Then and Now. Du Bois cites Diodorus almost as many times as he cites Herodotus, whose work is considered a precedent for later universal historians in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.¹³

In his programmatic preface to the Bibliotheke, Diodorus declares that ‘it is fitting that all men should ever accord great gratitude to those writers who have composed universal histories (koinas historias), since they have aspired to help by their individual labors human society as a whole’ (1.1.1).¹⁴ Diodorus boasts that he is one of the few historians who has attempted ‘to record the events connected with all peoples’ (koinas praxeis) from the beginning of time (1.3.2). Even as he claims that Greeks, because of their ‘power of speech’, are ‘superior to the barbarians’ (1.2.5–6), he emphasizes the shortcomings of histories that ‘have passed over the deeds of barbarian peoples’ (1.3.2). He regards history as ‘the guardian of the high achievements of illustrious men, the witness which testifies to the evil deeds of the wicked, and the benefactor of the entire human race’ (tou koinou genous tōn anthrōpōn) (1.2.2). Readers of history are ‘able to use the ignorant mistakes of others as warning examples for the correction of error, and…to imitate the successes which have been achieved in the past’ (1.1.4). History, in Diodorus’ assessment, ‘is ever to be seen urging men to justice, denouncing those who are evil, lauding the good, laying up, in a word, for its readers a mighty store of experience’ (1.2.8). Du Bois does not cite this preface in Black Folk Then and Now, but the early chapters of the book demonstrate that he was familiar with the first books of the Bibliotheke, which include Diodorus’ accounts of Egypt and Ethiopia. Diodorus’ attention to the moral improvement made possible via the study of history, moreover, would have been familiar to Du Bois from his engagement with historiography more generally: Diodorus’ moral project for history is typical of a ‘regime’ of history writing, standard from Greco-Roman antiquity into the nineteenth century, which saw ‘history as a storehouse of exempla offering a guide to life’.¹⁵ African American writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote histories of Africans and the African diaspora that participated in this moralizing tradition.¹⁶ These writers looked to history as ‘a means of identifying moral truths and activities that could be a guide to life’, and wrote ‘collective biographies’ of Black people for moral aims: the collective biography was preferable to accounts of individual lives because ‘critical mass allowed one to better identify paths of moral action, but also to diagnose the state of society as a whole’.¹⁷ Diodorus and nineteenth-century African American historians shared a philosophy of history that linked study of the past to moral improvement and that saw comprehensiveness as an asset for moral education. Scholarship on Du Bois’s narratives of African antiquity typically focuses on debates over ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Afrocentric’ concepts of history, but I read Black Folk Then and Now in the context of the moral and educational projects articulated within both Greco-Roman and African American historiography.¹⁸

Black Folk Then and Now claims space for African American historiography (not least Du Bois’s own work) within ancient traditions of ‘universal history’. Direct engagement with, or even clear citation of, African American scholars who preceded him is inconsistent in Du Bois’s historical writing, but he was clearly familiar with this body of literature. His discussions of the ties between ancient Egypt and central African cultures suggest that he became increasingly persuaded by Pan-African thought over the first half of the twentieth century.¹⁹ His early writings show deep engagement with ‘Ethiopianism’, a tradition that ‘the English-speaking black or African person’ drew on in order ‘to view his past enslavement and present cultural dependency in terms of the broader history of civilization…it expresses the belief that the tragic racial experience has profound historical value…[and] has endowed the African with moral superiority’.²⁰ In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois refers to David Walker’s Appeal (1830): Walker used Biblical and Greco-Roman history to vindicate Black people and to condemn the crime of slavery, and he argued for the importance of education to resist oppression.²¹ The same chapter of Souls names William Wells Brown as one of the Black writers representative of ‘a new period of self-assertion and self-development’. Brown was author of The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863), an account of Black contributions to world history.²² One unidentified manuscript page among Du Bois’s papers, tentatively dated to 1936, includes an extended quotation from The Black Man. Du Bois specifically appeals here to ‘the Negro student…to vision the glory or plight of his race three quarters of a century from now’, and points to the role of education in racial progress, ‘to say nothing about a further contribution by the American Negro to the cause of human welfare at large’. That is, Du Bois’s concern is both the welfare of his own community and of the human community more broadly. He closes with a declaration from Brown:

As the Greeks, and Romans, and Jews drew knowledge from the Egyptians, three thousand years ago, add [sic] Europeans received it from the Romans, so must the blacks of the land rise in the same way. As one man learns from another, so nation learns from nation. Civilization is handed from one people to another, its great fountain and source being God our father.²³

Brown’s account of the transmission of knowledge through history shows marked resonances with ancient tropes concerning the purpose of history, such as those Diodorus includes in the preface to Book 1 of his Bibliotheke.²⁴ The particular value of history, in Diodorus’ assessment, is that it ‘extends over the whole inhabited world’ and ‘possesses in time, which brings ruin upon all things else, a custodian which ensures its perpetual transmission to posterity’ (1.2.5). While Brown identifies ‘God our father’ as the ‘great fountain and source’ of ‘Civilization’, Diodorus claims this role for history, and especially for works of universal history: it is from these texts that ‘every man will be able readily to take what is of use for his special purpose, drawing as it were from a great fountain’ (1.3.8). Black Folk Then and Now is a step in a long series of efforts, undertaken by Greeks, Romans, and African Americans (among others), to create a ‘universal history’ and to realize the educational and moral advantages it promises.

In what follows, I begin with Du Bois’s theory of history, how to write it and why it is valuable; I then discuss the parallels between his thinking and Diodorus’ programmatic preface, which is representative of a philosophy of history that was broadly influential from antiquity through the nineteenth century. Next, I argue that Du Bois’s history of Africa reflects Diodorus’ conventional views of the composition and objectives of universal history, most importantly the synthesis of different narratives, the treatment of distinct peoples as part of a unified community, and the educational and moral aims of this approach. I then look at how universal history maps on to Du Bois’s thinking about race and the bonds within and between distinct human communities. I conclude with his treatment of slavery as a universal bond between peoples, including but not limited to the African diaspora. Universal history helps Du Bois to tell the story of a distinct human community while insisting on the unity of all peoples. In Black Folk Then and Now, studying the history of a single community inevitably requires the study of all human beings.

Universal history and moral education

Du Bois declares that, with Black Folk Then and Now, he wants to counter ‘a certain irritating silence. Few today are interested in Negro history because they feel the matter already settled: the Negro has no history’.²⁵ He was keenly aware of Hegel’s assertion, in the Philosophy of History, that Africa ‘is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit’, and of the broad influence of this view on academic study.²⁶ He anticipates distinct types of readers for his book: he notes that ‘millions of black and brown folk today, not to speak of most educated whites, have no conception of any role that black folk have played in history, or any hope in the past for present aspiration, or any apparent justification in equal rights and opportunity for Negroes as average human beings’.²⁷ These two audiences may start from a similar place of ignorance, but the stakes of historical education differ for white and Black readers: the first group stands potentially to lose claims to privileged status through education, while the second may gain. Du Bois writes for the ‘black and brown folk’ who deserve and require knowledge of their place in history, yet he also aims to appeal to and persuade sceptical readers: he declares, ‘the Negro has long been the clown of history; the football of anthropology; and the slave of industry. I am trying to show here why these attitudes can no longer be maintained’.²⁸ These two goals are not necessarily mutually supportive: by attempting to convince ‘educated whites’ of the humanity of Black folk, Du Bois risks treating Europe as the standard against which Africa should be judged.²⁹

Appealing to these different types of readerships, one which Du Bois aims to persuade and the other which he aims to inspire, was a standard problem for writers of African American history prior to the 1960s.³⁰ The challenge of addressing both of these audiences at the same time was one of Du Bois’s concerns in Black Reconstruction in America, his great work of American history which appeared in 1935, only a few years before Black Folk Then and Now. Black Reconstruction demonstrated the essential contributions made by Black Americans to the abolition of slavery and to the effort to establish and advance democracy during Reconstruction. In his note ‘To the Reader’ at the beginning of the book, Du Bois observes that ‘the sudden freeing of [enslaved] black folk in the Nineteenth Century and the attempt, through them, to reconstruct the basis of American democracy’ was a story ‘particularly interesting for students of human culture’. In making this claim, Du Bois treats Black American history as essential to the study of human history, a perspective that he knows is not shared by all of his contemporaries. He goes on to observe that

the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro…is an average and ordinary human being…he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation…he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince…I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience. (emphasis added)³¹

This pronouncement differs from the goal of persuasion that Du Bois would later set for himself in Black Folk Then and Now, and in the last chapter of Black Reconstruction, ‘The Propaganda of History’, he insists that it is in fact necessary to expand the audience that is familiar with and receptive to Black history. After reviewing the standard history textbooks which American students used, he observes that the typical student ‘would in all probability complete his education without any idea of the part which the black race has played in America’. The cause of this failure of education was an effort to reconcile North and South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Du Bois calls it ‘the duty of humanity’ to heal national wounds, but he also asks, ‘are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth? If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action…[is to be used] as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be some standard of ethics in research and interpretation’.³² Du Bois recognizes both the social and moral values that history can serve and the potential dangers of putting the study of history in the service of those values.

Notably, Du Bois is concerned about the potential for ‘partisanship’ among both white and Black historians. Discussing the historiography of Reconstruction, he observes that ‘Negroes have done some excellent work on their own history and defense’ although ‘it suffers…from natural partisanship and a desire to prove a case in the face of a chorus of unfair attacks’. He remarks that ‘as a Negro …I cannot for a moment subscribe to the bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few’; he also insists that ‘as a student of science, I want to be fair, objective, and judicial…[and] to sympathize with human frailties and contradiction’.³³ In surveying the landscape of politics and scholarship in his own period, Du Bois points out that his own partisanship is less structurally significant than that of his opponents. He warns that

we shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race…in propaganda against the Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.³⁴

Du Bois distinguishes in Black Reconstruction between the historian, who must ‘make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief’ and ‘the philosopher and prophet [who] has a chance to interpret these facts’.³⁵ Yet ultimately Du Bois emphasizes the moral mission of the writing and teaching of history.³⁶ He takes seriously the authority and influence of educational institutions: he explains, ‘a teacher sits in academic halls, learned in the traditions of its elms and its elders. He looks into the upturned face of youth and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God’. When a teacher professes racist ideas in the classroom, then ‘flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while the brains of little children smear the hills’.³⁷ Du Bois holds failures of historical education responsible for human conflict and human suffering, and he regards better scholarship and better education as essential to ameliorating or resolving those ills. Du Bois fears that bad history, like accounts of Reconstruction which degrade Black Americans, ‘is helping to range mankind in ranks of mutual hatred and contempt, at the summons of a cheap and false myth’.³⁸ Better histories could work against this trend, building relationships rather than sustaining divisions. History could offer a guide for ‘humanity’, but only to the degree that it ‘[tells] the truth…so far as the truth is ascertainable’.³⁹

In advocating for the study of historical truth to benefit individuals and societies, Du Bois is in accord with ancient conventions captured in the preface to Diodorus’ Bibliotheke. Diodorus calls history ‘the prophetess of truth’ which is able ‘to equip men’s characters for noble living’ (1.2.2). The ‘universal history’ that Diodorus especially valorizes seeks ‘to marshal all men, who, although united one to another by their kinship, are yet separated by space and time, into one and the same orderly body’ (1.1.3). In recording the stories of different peoples, the universal historian produces, or restores, a unified human community. Diodorus returns to the idea of uniting (or reuniting) human beings later in his preface, when he explains the advantages of a universal history for his readers. He insists that ‘if a man should begin with the most ancient times and record to the best of his ability the affairs of the entire world down to his own day…as though they were the affairs of some single city… he would have composed a treatise of the utmost value to those who are studiously inclined’ (1.3.6–7). Diodorus points out that, for the student of history, acquiring numerous books is difficult, and that ‘because the works vary so widely and are so numerous’, it is difficult for the reader to make sense of them: by contrast, ‘the treatise which keeps within the limits of a single narrative and contains a connected account of events facilitates the reading and contains such recovery of the past in a form that is perfectly easy to follow’ (1.3.7–8).⁴⁰ The universal history encourages readers to understand the history of the world as the history of a single community: readers of a universal history will encounter narratives of different peoples and will see them as part of the same work.⁴¹ Diodorus, moreover, imagines a broad (Greek-speaking) readership for his book: the young and the old, private citizens, leaders, and soldiers (1.1.5).⁴² Even a reader who consults the Bibliotheke only to find ‘what is of use for his own special purpose’ (1.3.7) will see, and have the opportunity to learn from, other stories that were not what he was first intending to look for. Like Diodorus’ universal history, the narrative of ancient Africa in Black Folk Then and Now serves the related goals of ease of learning and of moral education for different audiences. ‘Most educated whites’ who read Black Folk Then and Now should see evidence that reveals, and goes some way towards addressing, the ignorance of African histories that their education has left them with, and they will also learn to see these histories, as Du Bois does, as part of their own history as human beings. ‘Millions of black and brown folk’ will learn the kinds of stories that Du Bois claims he did not hear until well into adulthood, and they will discover the connections between these stories of Africa and accounts of antiquity that are more familiar to readers educated as Du Bois was.

Antiquity according to Du Bois

In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois places Africa within the boundaries of the ancient world that his readers can encounter, and may have already encountered, in standard Greek and Latin sources. He presents literature from Greece and Rome as part of a catalogue of sources available for ancient Ethiopia:

Our knowledge of the history of Ethiopia comes from Ethiopian documents and from Egyptian, Assyrian and Hebrew sources. The Egyptian records of Ethiopian history are preserved on their monuments and in manuscripts. The Ethiopian records are preserved mainly on sandstone steles, and inscriptions on monuments. All those which have been recovered date from the eighth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. There are many Greek and Roman accounts.⁴³

As examples of the ‘many Greek and Roman accounts’ that survive, he names Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy, Cassius Dio, Callisthenes, and Josephus; he also notes that ‘fragments of still other writers, writing in the classical age, are often referred to’. This passage encompasses an array of evidence from widely different periods, societies, and media and situates Greek and Roman texts among Egyptian and Ethiopian documents, monuments, and inscriptions. The Greek and Latin texts, as Du Bois describes them, have no special authority: they are only one kind of evidence for the world to which he aims to introduce his audience. These sources, however, may be familiar to readers whose historical studies have been informed by ‘a certain irritating silence’ about Africa. A reader consulting this passage will gain a sense of the range of sources from which we can find evidence for Black folk in the ancient world and thus of the relationships between Black folk and other communities in the past. Just as Diodorus sought to assemble as many historical accounts as possible in order to make the study of history easier for his readers, Du Bois, too, assembles the ancient sources to make African antiquity more accessible to his audience.

Reflecting on his efforts to present a historical narrative of Africa, Du Bois admits in Black Folk Then and Now that ‘this is not a work of exact scholarship…The kernel of this work is, I believe, a body of fairly well-ascertained truth; but there are also areas here of conjecture and even of guesswork which under other circumstances I should have hesitated to publish’.⁴⁴ Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes the challenges of studying ancient Africa, as when he concludes the first chapter with an unabashedly fantastical series of pronouncements (he copied this paragraph from the introduction to his earlier work, The Negro):

Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. Its very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence. It is the “Ethiopia” of the Greek, the “Kush and “Punt” of the Egyptian, and the Arabian “Land of the Blacks”. To modern Europe it is the “Dark Continent” and “Land of Contrasts”; in literature it is the seat of the Sphinx and the lotus eaters, the home of the dwarfs, gnomes, and pixies, and the refuge of the gods; in commerce it is the slave mart and the source of ivory, ebony, rubber, gold, and diamonds. What other continent can rival in interest this Ancient of Days?⁴⁵

Du Bois deploys tropes familiar from representations of Africa as the exotic Other.⁴⁶ In Simon Gikandi’s reading, Du Bois’s romanticizing accounts of Africa reflect his understanding of the relationship between the continent and his African American readers, for whom ‘Africa…remained a realm of experience that was intangible and fragmentary…it needed to be made visible’.⁴⁷ In this description of ancient Africa, Du Bois seeks to draw his readers into an encounter with an unknown world, but (although Du Bois does not consistently flag this distinction) it is not truly an ‘unknown world’, but one that is unknown specifically to those who had an education like his own.

To correct the limits of his historical education (at least as he describes it), Du Bois offers a collective biography of ancient Africans, as did nineteenth-century African American histories with which he was familiar. He synthesizes a series of accounts of Africa from different Greek and Latin sources, bringing them together so that his readers can easily consult them and appreciate their connections to each other. He paraphrases Herodotus on Ethiopia: ‘there is gold there, elephants, ebony, and the men are tall, handsome and long-lived’. He informs us that the Iliad, ‘the very dawn of Greek literature’, describes the Olympian gods feasting among ‘“the blameless Ethiopians”’, and that the Odyssey ‘represents Poseidon as doing the same upon his own account’. He points out that ‘Black Memnon, King of Ethiopia, was one of Homer’s Heroes’, and he quotes the description of the herald Eurybates in full (adapted from the translation of Alexander Pope): ‘“Of visage solemn, sad but sable hue,/ short, wooly curls o’erfleeced his bending head”’.⁴⁸ He observes that ‘in the mythology of ancient Greece many Negroes play parts—Memnon, Eurybates, Cephus, Cassiopeia and Andromeda’, and cites Pliny on Memnon’s rule of Ethiopia during the period of the Trojan War.⁴⁹

From the historians, Du Bois picks out the names of Ethiopian kings and queens, as in Pliny’s report of the Candaces who ruled Ethiopia.⁵⁰ He also finds details about their exploits: ‘Diodorus says that Shabaka [an 8th century king of Ethiopia and Egypt] “went beyond all his predecessors in his worship of the Gods and his kindness to his subjects”. Herodotus says that he abolished capital punishment in Egypt’.⁵¹ Du Bois even tries to find the voices of ancient Ethiopians in Greek texts. He quotes Diodorus’ account of the Ethiopians’ own narrative of history: ‘“The Ethiopians conceived themselves”, says Diodorus Siculus (Lib. III), “to be of greater antiquity than any other nation…They supposed themselves to be the inventors of worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every religious practice”’.⁵² Citing Diodorus, he notes that hieroglyphics were used by all ancient Ethiopian writers (in contrast to the Egyptians, where it was limited to the priests), thus emphasizing the records that they made for themselves.⁵³ The fourth-century queen Candace speaks to Du Bois’s readers through an anecdote from Pseudo-Callisthenes, a story that is ‘fabulous perhaps but showing her fame: [she] will not let [Alexander the Great] enter Ethiopia and says he is not to scorn her people because they are black, for they are whiter in soul than his white folk. She sent him gold, maidens, parrots, sphinxes, and a crown of emeralds and pearls’.⁵⁴ Du Bois uses Greek and Latin texts not just to offer insights into ancient Africa, but to inform his readers that Black folk are part of a familiar literary record of the Greek and Roman world. He thus corrects the ancient history most accessible via mainstream education in the USA, just as he had corrected mainstream American history education in Black Reconstruction.

Du Bois follows Diodorus’ model of universal history by creating a synthesis of anecdotes and references from different ancient historians in Black Folk Then and Now. His approach brings Africa to the forefront of his readers’ encounter with Greek and Roman texts, and sets, or resets, the terms of engagement for his audience with his sources. These sources are more comprehensive than his readers might have realized, in that they include peoples his readers might not think of alongside ancient Greece and Rome. Whether or not his audience is already familiar with Greek and Roman literature, his book makes African history part of a unified whole with other ancient histories. As readers learn to attend to the world of Black folk in antiquity, they ultimately learn to see Africa as a place held in common by different human histories.

Africa and human histories

Universal history, which unites different narratives into a whole and educates readers through diverse examples from the past, accords with Du Bois’s commitment to studying Black history as part of human history. One important advantage of universal history is that it makes it possible to record the stories of individual communities while demonstrating that these communities are related to one other. Both of these efforts were crucial to Du Bois’s analysis of what constitutes a ‘race’ and whether and how human beings can be divided into races, and these questions appear repeatedly in Du Bois’s work.⁵⁵ At the beginning of the first chapter of Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois declares that ‘it is generally recognized today that no scientific definition of race is possible…Especially is it difficult to say how far race is determined by a group of inherited characteristics and how far by environment or amalgamation’.⁵⁶ His focus, he explains, is

the history of the darker part of the human family, which is separated from the rest of mankind by no absolute physical line and no definite mental characteristics, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a series of social groups more or less distinct in history, appearance, and in cultural gift and accomplishment.⁵⁷

This passage recalls the definition Du Bois offers in one of his early speeches, ‘The Conservation of Races’, which he presented at a meeting of the American Negro Academy in 1897.⁵⁸ In this address, Du Bois asks,

What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.⁵⁹

Du Bois insists that a ‘race’ is defined only ‘generally’ by ‘common blood’, and that its members must ‘always’ have a ‘common history, traditions, and impulses’; he repeatedly emphasizes the significance of history in ‘Conservation’, claiming that races ‘perhaps transcend scientific definition’ but ‘are clearly defined to the eye of the historian and sociologist’, and that ‘the history of the world is the history…of races’.⁶⁰

In a seminal but controversial essay, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that Du Bois’s definition of race in ‘Conservation’ is not historical but biological.⁶¹ Appiah’s concern is that ‘sharing a common group history cannot be a criterion for being members of the same group, for we would have to be able to identify the group in order to identify its history’.⁶² When Du Bois claims that there are ‘eight distinctly differentiated races, in the sense in which history tells us the word must be used’, he identifies eight groups and the places from which they originate or where they live.⁶³ Du Bois’s division of peoples, Appiah points out, suggests that ‘your history is, in part, the history of people who lived in the same place…people are members of the same race if they share features in virtue of being descended largely from people of the same region’.⁶⁴ Philosophers of race, however, have argued that Appiah over-simplifies Du Bois’s account of race in ‘Conservation’.⁶⁵ Chike Jeffers takes the distinctive approach of using the historical narrative in ‘Conservation’ to explicate Du Bois’s ideas of race.⁶⁶ In ‘Conservation’, Du Bois characterizes the sweep of human history as a process of ‘differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and…integration of physical differences’. Human beings originally lived in ‘nomadic tribes of closely related individuals’. This early moment ‘represents the maximum of physical differences’ between groups of human beings, but also the least diversity of ways of life: each family of nomads looks very different from the others, but they are all nomads. When these families of nomads ‘came together to form cities’, then ‘the physical differences lessened’ because different families intermarried; at the same time there was ‘an increase of the spiritual and social differences between cities. This city became husbandmen; this, merchants; another warriors; and so on’.⁶⁷ As Jeffers argues, regardless of the plausibility of Du Bois’s narrative, his ‘logic of historical development’ is provocative: the ‘process of integration’ of different tribes, and eventually of different cities, simultaneously reduced ‘the number of physical types’ and increased ‘the number of ways of life and thought’.⁶⁸

Du Bois’s picture of human history depends on both ‘physical homogenization’ and ‘social unification’, while at the same time preserving (and demanding) space for ‘humanity’s growth in cultural heterogeneity’.⁶⁹ Yet, as Jeffers points out, Du Bois’s account of the transition from the ‘age of nomads’ to that of the union of different families into cities, nations, and races is puzzling because of ‘its lack of specificity about time and place. When and where did these things happen?’.⁷⁰ We can look to Du Bois’s account of ancient African history and its significance for the study of universal history to flesh out the relationship between race and universal history that Du Bois presents in ‘Conservation of Races’.

Du Bois explicitly argues in ‘Conservation’ against physical features as the most salient or compelling aspects of racial identity:

while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences—the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.⁷¹

Du Bois raises the question ‘of what race…were the ancient Egyptians?’ in Black Folk Then and Now: he answers that ‘they certainly were not white in any sense of the modern use of that word—neither in color nor physical measurement; in hair nor countenance; in language nor social customs’.⁷² In the preface he had flagged the significance of ancient Egypt for contemporary debates about race in antiquity: ‘convincing proof of Negro blood in the Pharaohs was immaterial in 1900 B.C. and an almost revolutionary fact in 1900 A.D’.⁷³ His assessment of the ‘race’ of the Egyptians, however, encompasses not only descent and physical traits but also language and custom, and the Greek historians are key to Du Bois’s account. He points out that ‘Herodotus, who knew and saw Egyptians four hundred and fifty years before Christ, in an incontrovertible passage alludes to the Egyptians as “black and curly-haired”’.⁷⁴ He also includes Herodotus’ narrative of the oracle at Dodona, which was allegedly established by ‘black doves’: Herodotus’ explanation is that the doves were in fact women from Egypt.⁷⁵ Du Bois must have found these comments from Herodotus remarkable because, in his view, ‘color was not important in the ancient world’.⁷⁶ He suggests that ancient writers often failed to attend to the ‘color and racial descent’ of distinguished figures, because these matters were ‘not thought of sufficient importance to emphasize’.⁷⁷ Du Bois is interested not only in ‘mere physical distinctions’ but in ‘spiritual, psychical, differences’ (the terms he had used decades prior in ‘Conservation’) that both distinguish and unify different peoples.

These are points that interest his ancient sources as well. The lengthiest quotation from a Greek or Latin text that he includes in Black Folk Then and Now is Herodotus’ argument that the Colchians were Egyptian, because they shared distinctive customs:

There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race…My own conjectures were founded first on the fact that they are black-skinned and have wooly [sic] hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstances that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practiced circumcision from the earliest times [Herodotus 2.104].⁷⁸

Frederick Douglass had discussed the same passages in ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered’ (1854), although Du Bois does not cite Douglass (an oversight typical of Du Bois’s attitude towards his predecessors in Black intellectual traditions).⁷⁹ Douglass is primarily interested in Herodotus’ impression of the physical resemblance between the Colchians and Egyptians.⁸⁰ Du Bois includes greater context for Herodotus’ observation, and there are intriguing resonances between Herodotus’ efforts to make sense of the relationships between different peoples and Du Bois’s own. For Herodotus, many nations share the same physical type: the blackness of the Egyptians and Colchians is thus not the most compelling evidence for their close relationship. Most important for Herodotus is the link of custom, that these three nations ‘have practiced circumcision from the earliest times’. In ‘Conservation’, similar physical appearance is only weak evidence for the ties between different human groups, since the range of physical types contracts over time: the physical resemblance of the Colchians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians is not sufficient to establish a close bond between them. Ways of life, however, become ever more diverse in Du Bois’s account of human history; shared customs between different communities should thus be especially remarkable evidence for their close relationship, and for their belonging to the same race. He follows his discussion of Herodotus with a passage from Diodorus, who ‘says that the Ethiopians declared that the Egyptians were settlers from Ethiopia. “That Egypt itself is a land built up by the slime and mud which the Nile brought down from Ethiopia. Most of the Egyptian laws and customs are of Ethiopian origin”’.⁸¹ Du Bois draws on the Greek historians to emphasize the importance of ‘ways of life’ (as he puts it in ‘Conservation’) for identifying salient points of commonality and of difference between human communities. If we read the report that ‘Egyptians were settlers from Ethiopia’ with the theory of history that Du Bois presents in ‘Conservation’, we can see (1) the process of increasing physical resemblance between groups, as Ethiopians settle in the land of Egypt, and (2) increasing variation in ways of life, as the ‘laws and customs…of Ethiopian origin’ are descended from, but not identical to, the ‘laws and customs’ as practiced in Ethiopia. His history of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia becomes a kind of microcosm of ‘universal history’ as Diodorus defined it: Du Bois draws together multiple sources for the benefit of his readers, and he describes relationships which show that different peoples belong, or should be understood to belong, to a single community.

The ancient world, and especially ancient Africa, is where Du Bois observes the process of integration and differentiation of peoples that he outlines in ‘Conservation’, and this process has moral stakes for his audience. Du Bois declares in Black Folk Then and Now that ‘the ancient world knew no races; only families, clans, nations; and degrees and contrasts of culture’.⁸² The chronological or geographical boundaries of ‘the ancient world’ are left undefined, but this claim maps onto Du Bois’s account, in ‘Conservation’, of the gradual unification of smaller communities into races. Du Bois’s narrative of African antiquity, like his account of the earliest history of human groups in ‘Conservation’, emphasizes communication and exchange between different communities.⁸³ In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois claims that

Negro tribes migrated down the Nile, slowly penetrating what is now modern Egypt. They there gradually came in contact and mingled with whites from the north and Semites from the east. Stimulated to an unusual degree by this contact of the three primitive stocks of mankind, the resulting culture of Egypt was gradually developed.⁸⁴

Describing the rise of the Abyssinian Empire in eastern Africa, Du Bois observes that ‘Arabian, Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman influences spread slowly upon the Negro foundation’.⁸⁵ He goes on to explain (with some notably outdated terminology) the movement of peoples across the continent:

Herodotus tells of certain youths who penetrated the desert to the Niger and found there a city of black dwarfs. Succeeding migrations of Negroes pushed the dwarfs gradually into the inhospitable forests and occupied the Sudan, pushing on to the Atlantic. Here the newcomers, curling northward, came in contact with Europeans or Berbers, or actually crossed into Europe; while to the southward the Negro came to the Gulf of Guinea and the thick forests of the Congo Valley. Indigenous civilizations arose on the west coast in Yoruba and Benin, and contacts of these with the Berbers in the desert, and Semites from Arabia and from the east gave rise to centers of Negro culture.⁸⁶

All of these migrations, moreover, follow the pre-historical movements of ‘humankind in Africa’ who ‘started from the Great Lakes, developed down the Nile Valley and spread around the shores of the Mediterranean, forming thus the basis of both African and European peoples’.⁸⁷ To tell the story of Africa, it turns out, Du Bois must tell the story of numerous peoples and their interactions with one another. Likewise, the stories of other peoples—such as Jews, Greeks, and Romans—properly understood, necessarily include their encounters with and relations to the peoples of Africa.

Du Bois’s survey of migration and contact between peoples in Africa recalls his own admission, earlier in the book, that ‘race would seem to be a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating’.⁸⁸ Returning to the ancient history of Africa becomes a way of conceptualizing and witnessing the very difficulties of teasing apart the story and identity of a specific people, when all of these stories are necessarily entangled in one another. Africa in Black Folk Then and Now becomes a space for writing and reading a ‘universal history’, which, as Diodorus imagined it, follows the principle that all human beings are ‘united one to another by their kinship’, despite being ‘separated by space and time’. Readers can approach this story from different perspectives, either by focusing on the narrative of a specific people (such as the Egyptians), or by following the constant process of ‘changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating’ that drives Du Bois’s history of Africa and of the world itself. Du Bois rejects the idea that ‘the Negro has no history’, and he also asserts that this history is rightly part of a larger narrative that all of his readers must see as part of their own. The moral project of writing and reading Black history as human history becomes especially clear in his approach to the history of slavery and the central place of Africa in that history.

A cynical reading

Du Bois’s account of ancient Africa in Black Folk Then and Now lays the foundation for a cynical narrative of universal history, in which human societies across space and time are united by the institution of slavery.⁸⁹ His universal history, on this more pessimistic reading, is a study of how ‘mankind in Africa became goods’.⁹⁰ He traces the development of slavery beginning in the ancient world, when, according to Du Bois, ‘slaves made goods [and] the goods made them free because men knew the worker and the value of his work’.⁹¹ Nor was enslavement specifically associated with Africans: Greece and Rome captured slaves from Europe and Asia, and ‘Egypt enslaved races of all colors’.⁹² The industrial revolution, and the transatlantic slave trade in particular, disrupted ‘the trend of human thought…toward recognizing the essential equality of all men, despite obvious differences’.⁹³ Hostility to blackness and the association between Africa and slavery emerged in the eighteenth century to facilitate the exploitation of enslaved Africans: ‘Suddenly comes America; the sale of men as goods in Africa; the crops these goodsmen grew; the revolution in industry and commerce; in manufacture and transport; in trade and transformation of goods for magnificent service and power’.⁹⁴ This transformation required the neglect and erasure of evidence that would show that ‘all men…are united one to another by their kinship’ (Diodorus 1.1.3), a kinship that Du Bois aimed to demonstrate in his narrative of ancient Africa.

Diodorus compared his history to a ‘great fountain’ from which different readers could draw what each needed; Du Bois’s history illustrates the mixing of the waters, the impossibility of drawing out a story that one regards as one’s own without touching on other narratives at the same time. To study antiquity with Du Bois requires encountering and learning about the history of Africa, where Greeks and Egyptians, Romans and Ethiopians, came into contact with one another. The moral object of Du Bois’s philosophy of history becomes especially clear in passages from Black Folk Then and Now that reprise material published a quarter-century earlier in The Negro.⁹⁵ Here, he explains that the expansion of the slave trade took place during ‘a period that gave the world Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham Lincoln…In the midst of this advance and uplift, this slave trade and slavery spread more human misery…than can well be calculated’.⁹⁶ Monumental developments in literature, theology, and art were matched by the temporal and spatial reach of the violence of enslavement: ‘Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead…for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God’.⁹⁷ Du Bois alludes to Psalms 68:31 (‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’), a key text for the tradition of ‘Ethiopianism’ and its two-fold conception of a divine plan for ‘the rise in the fortunes of Africa and all her scattered children’ together with ‘God’s judgment upon the Europeans’.⁹⁸ This reading of history in terms of destiny and divine judgment is familiar not only from African American traditions of universal history but from the preface to Diodorus’ Bibliotheke, where he calls historians ‘ministers of Divine Providence’: in the same way that providence ‘[brings] the orderly arrangement of the visible stars and the natures of men together into one common relationship’, historians ‘[record] the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state’ (1.1.4).⁹⁹ For Diodorus, the unification of historical narratives is modelled on a divine project; for Du Bois, exposing the unity of progress and suffering is essential to the moral project of the universal historian.

Du Bois evokes the cynical perspective on world history again in the preface to The World and Africa, published shortly after the end of the second World War: he describes this book as ‘a history of the world written from the African point of view; or better, a history of the Negro as part of the world which now lies about us in ruins’.¹⁰⁰ Yet the effort to tell a universal history ‘from the African point of view’ could also, for Du Bois, show the way to a more hopeful future. In the conclusion to Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois insists that ‘the proletariat of the world consists not simply of white European and American workers but overwhelmingly of the dark workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and South and Central America…It is the rise of these people that is the rise of the world’.¹⁰¹ Similarly, he concludes The World and Africa by praising ‘the fire and freedom of black Africa, with the uncurbed might of her consort Asia’ which are both ‘indispensable to the fertilizing of the universal soil of mankind’.¹⁰² The importance of Africa for telling a universal history reappears in Du Bois’s 1940 memoir Dusk of Dawn, when he considers the diverse peoples to whom he is attached through his own ancestry:

Since the fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory…the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.¹⁰³

The ‘social heritage of slavery’ as Du Bois imagines it becomes the basis of ‘kinship’ between peoples, a kinship that he discovers through the work of studying the history of his own family and of the wider world. For Diodorus, the work of universal history was to ‘to marshal all men, who, although united one to another by their kinship, are yet separated by space and time, into one and the same orderly body’. Du Bois creates this ‘body’ of mankind through his study of Africa, where he finds, from antiquity to his own vision of the future, stories that include all of his readers.

Conclusion

When Du Bois describes his meeting with Boas in 1906, he portrays himself as ignorant not just about the content of African history but about the systems that stood in the way of his education. In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois wants to teach his readers about the politics of the study of African antiquity, about scholarly efforts to ‘cut the history of the Nile Valley entirely away from the history of Africa’ and refusal ‘to associate the Negro race with humanity, much less with civilization’.¹⁰⁴ Du Bois rejects what Emily Greenwood calls the ‘false genealogies and cultural traditions masked as historical continuities’ by means of which ‘ancient Greece is often carelessly and erroneously linked with modern Europe, as though they shared a singular, continuous history’.¹⁰⁵ He draws on Greek and Roman sources, which people with his education would have learned to recognize as authoritative, to make Africa representative of, and central to, the processes of migration and exchange which he regards as foundational to all human history. He thus orients his readers to the moral and educational potential of historiography ‘from the African point of view’, and he teaches them to be attuned to the relationships between groups that have been told they are separate and distinct. Historical education is no panacea for the injustices that concern Du Bois, but with his efforts to advance the project of universal history, he shows how learning can, at the very least, awaken us to our own ignorance.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Harriet Fertik is assistant professor in the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University.

Acknowledgements

This piece was a long time in the making and I owe thanks to many for helping me to develop it. I learned much from conversations (especially with Darla Migan) during K. Anthony Appiah's seminar at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. I benefited greatly from discussions with participants at Racing the Classics at Princeton University (especially Adam Lecznar) and Race Work in the Classics at the University of Illinois; I thank the organizers of those gatherings, Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Clara Bosak-Schroeder, for inviting me to share my work. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to workshop this piece with thoughtful graduate students at Ohio State University. I am grateful to Evan Lee, Sarah Derbew, Clara Bosak-Schroeder, Mathias Hanses, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful questions, suggestions, and critiques. Any remaining shortcomings or errors are, of course, my own.

References

Footnotes