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Du Bois
1915
Du Bois writing Africa back into world history, a decade before African history had a discipline of its own.
The Negro
W. E. B. Du Bois · 1915
In 1915, Du Bois set out to write the first serious general history of Africa and its diaspora by a Black scholar, at a moment when mainstream Western scholarship treated Africa as a continent without a past worth recording. He traces Nile Valley civilization, West African kingdoms, and Zymbabwe as evidence of African statecraft and culture, then follows the trade in men across the Atlantic and the Sahara into slavery in the Americas, and closes by naming colonial rule and American racial caste as one connected question — "the Negro problems" — that the twentieth century would have to answer. It reads today as both a founding act of Africana historiography and a document of what the field looked like before it fully existed.
13 chapters · 54,721 words · ~4.1 hr read
Contents
Preface
Du Bois states what a short general history can and can't do, a decade before African history existed as a field.
Africa Before the Trade
Geography, origins, and migrations; Ethiopia and Egypt; the Niger, Guinea, the Great Lakes, and Zymbabwe; and what Du Bois calls African culture.
The Trade in Men
The Atlantic and Islamic slave trades treated as one world-historical institution.
The Diaspora
Slavery and its aftermath in the West Indies and Latin America, then in the United States.
The Negro Problems
Du Bois's closing argument: colonial Africa and Jim Crow America as one connected question for the new century.