The Negro

Glossary

B

Benin: The West African kingdom on the lower Niger that Du Bois credits with an indigenous bronze- and brass-casting tradition so technically accomplished that period authorities, notably Felix von Luschan, judged it equal to contemporary European art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tracing twenty-three kings back roughly a thousand years by its own oral record, Benin later developed, alongside Dahomey and Ashanti, what Du Bois calls a harsher and more militarized culture of conquest, a shift he attributes not to any inherent trait but directly to the disorganizing pressure of the Atlantic slave trade on the Guinea coast.; Related: Guinea, The Trade in Men, The Bantu Migrations
Bilad es-Sudan: The Arabic phrase meaning "Land of the Blacks," which Du Bois uses as the geographic name for the roughly two-million-square-mile belt of Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Nile, south of the Sahara. It is within this territory, drained by the Niger, that he locates the medieval empires of Ghana, Melle, and Songhay and the trading cities of Timbuktu and Jenne. Du Bois treats the term as evidence that the region's own inhabitants, and the Arab traders who dealt with them, understood it as a coherent civilizational zone long before European mapmakers took notice of it.; Related: The Niger, Ghana (Ancient Empire), Melle (Mali), Timbuktu

C

Candace: The dynastic title borne by a succession of queens who ruled the Ethiopian kingdom of Meroe, at least one of whom, by Du Bois's account, led a war against Rome in the time of Augustus and won unusually respectful terms from her Roman adversaries. He relates the Roman historian Pliny's report that one Candace had forty-four royal predecessors, and notes that a Candace also appears in the New Testament Book of Acts. Du Bois treats the Candaces, including the legendary account of a Candace refusing Alexander the Great entry into her kingdom, as evidence of Meroe's sustained political power and prestige in the ancient Mediterranean world.; Related: The Ethiopia and Egypt Debate, Monomotapa

F

Fetish (African Religion): The animist religious philosophy that Du Bois describes as the underlying framework of traditional African religious life, tending in some regions toward polytheism and monotheism, and existing alongside the later arrival of Islam and Christianity. Drawing on missionary ethnographers of his day, notably Mary Kingsley and Robert Nassau, he insists fetishism is not mere "senseless degradation" but a logically coherent account of a world understood as saturated with spirit, quoting Nassau's statement, after forty years among African communities, that he never encountered a people whose religious thought was "only a superstition." Du Bois's presentation reflects the missionary-ethnographic vocabulary and sources available in 1915 rather than the terminology African religious studies would later develop.; Related: The Bantu Migrations, The Great Lakes Region

G

Ghana (Ancient Empire): The earliest of the great Sudanese trading states Du Bois describes, positioned on the edge of the Sahara and built on the gold, ivory, and salt trade with North Africa; he notes a king list of seventy-four rulers reaching back roughly a thousand years before the Christian era. By the eleventh century its capital had both a native and a Muslim quarter, and its king had converted to Islam, though the older Negro culture beneath this Islamic overlay was, in Du Bois's reading, adapted rather than erased. Ghana's decline before the rising Mandingan state of Melle in the thirteenth century opened the way for Melle's ascendancy in the region.; Related: Bilad es-Sudan, Melle (Mali), The Niger
Guinea: Du Bois's period geographic term for the roughly six-hundred-mile West African coastline stretching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth of the Niger, encompassing the historic "grain, ivory, gold, and slave coasts" and the kingdoms of Yoruba, Benin, Dahomey, and Ashanti. He derives the name from Jenne, the Sudanese trading city, and describes an indigenous coastal civilization, visible in Yoruba and Benin bronze work, terra-cotta, and city architecture, that he dates possibly to three thousand years before Christ. It was this coast, he argues, that bore the heaviest and most sustained impact of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.; Related: Benin, The Trade in Men, Liberia

H

Hamite: A racial-classification term from period ethnology that Du Bois engages critically rather than endorses. He describes it as a label applied to the "obvious mulatto groups" arising from ancient and modern mingling of Semitic and Negro peoples in Africa, and objects that some scientists used it to transfer millions of Negroid Africans into the "white" race by definitional fiat rather than physical evidence. Du Bois's discussion reflects the vocabulary of 1915 physical anthropology, a field he treats throughout the book as unreliable for fixing racial boundaries; he raises the term to expose how such classifications minimized Black achievement, not to endorse the classification itself.; Related: What Is a Negro?, The Ethiopia and Egypt Debate

L

Liberia: The West African republic founded through the American Colonization Society, chartered in 1817 to resettle free Black Americans, with land purchased in 1821 and independence declared under Governor Joseph J. Roberts in 1847. Du Bois notes the irony that the United States, reluctant to receive a Black foreign minister, withheld recognition of Liberia's independence until 1862, and he documents the territorial and financial pressure Liberia faced from British and French colonial ambitions afterward. He singles out Edward Wilmot Blyden, who emigrated from the Danish West Indies, as Liberia's "greatest citizen" and a prophet of Black cultural renaissance.; Related: Guinea, The Partition of Africa

M

Mansa Musa: The fourteenth-century ruler of Melle whom Du Bois calls the empire's greatest king, remembered for a 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca made with a caravan of sixty thousand people, including twelve thousand enslaved attendants, and roughly five million dollars' worth of gold, a display of wealth that, by Du Bois's account, left a lasting impression on the cities of the Middle East. He quotes the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun's praise of Mansa Musa's justice and the twenty-five years of stable, well-administered rule that followed his return, during which he rebuilt Timbuktu and endowed its university. Du Bois offers Mansa Musa's reign as one of several rebuttals to the claim that Africa produced no state-builders of the first rank.; Related: Melle (Mali), Timbuktu, Songhay
Melle (Mali): The Mandingan empire, known today by the modern spelling Mali, that Du Bois describes as rising in 1235 and eclipsing Ghana as the dominant power of the western Sudan through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its greatest king, Mansa Musa, made a celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with a retinue of sixty thousand people and roughly five million dollars' worth of gold, then returned to rebuild Timbuktu and stock its mosque with scholars from Fez. Du Bois presents Melle's eventual eclipse by Songhay as part of the ordinary cycle of rising and falling states, not as evidence of any special African incapacity for empire.; Related: Mansa Musa, Timbuktu, Songhay
Monomotapa: The Bantu kingdom of the Zambesi region, centered among the Makalanga people, that Du Bois describes as extending from the coast near Mozambique deep into the interior and maintaining feudatory allied states and an organized gold trade with Arab and later Portuguese merchants. He links Monomotapa's rulers to the builders of Zymbabwe and traces the kingdom's decline through repeated invasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the nominal conversion of its kings to Christianity under Portuguese influence. The kingdom's gold wealth, Du Bois notes, was popularly connected in his sources to the biblical Ophir and the legendary Queen of Sheba.; Related: Zymbabwe, The Great Lakes Region

R

Reconstruction: The post-Civil War period, roughly 1865 to the mid-1870s, during which formerly enslaved Black men voted, held office, and helped write new Southern state constitutions establishing public schools, ending debtors' prison for petty offenses, and abolishing punishments like the whipping post. Du Bois defends Reconstruction governments against the charge that they were uniquely corrupt or incompetent, arguing their extravagance was no greater than the speculative excess found nationwide, and quoting white contemporaries, including a Reconstruction-era governor and a "carpet bagger" judge, who testified to Black officials' integrity. He locates Reconstruction's undoing not in any failure of Black governance but in the white South's preference, as reform efforts began to succeed, for a "Reign of Terror" over continued Black political participation.; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, The Fifteenth Amendment, The Negro Problems

S

Songhay: The largest and, in Du Bois's account, most famous of the medieval West African empires, centered on the great bend of the Niger and ruled across three dynasties spanning roughly a thousand years. Under Sonni Ali and his successor Mohammed Askia, called Askia the Great, Songhay conquered a territory "as large as all Europe," built the University of Sankore at Timbuktu into a center of Islamic scholarship, and administered a standing army and organized viceroyalties. Its defeat by a smaller Moroccan force armed with firearms at Tenkadibou in 1591 marks, for Du Bois, the pivot at which the slave trade replaced legitimate trans-Saharan commerce as Africa's primary link to the outside world.; Related: The Niger, Mansa Musa, Timbuktu

T

The Asiento: The contract by which the Spanish crown licensed other European powers to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies, held successively by Portugal, the Dutch, and France before passing to England under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Du Bois details the scale of the English Asiento, an obligation to deliver at least 144,000 enslaved people over thirty years, and traces how the resulting trade built Liverpool's commercial fortune and, in North America, drove the Negro population from roughly 50,000 in 1710 to 462,000 by 1770. He treats the Asiento as the mechanism that shifted the transatlantic slave trade from irregular, small-scale traffic into an organized, treaty-backed institution.; Related: The Middle Passage, The Trade in Men
The Bantu Migrations: The centuries-long southward and eastward expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples, who called themselves, Du Bois notes, "La Bantu," or "The People," out of the region between Lake Chad and the Great Lakes, eventually settling and ruling nearly all of Africa south of the Gulf of Guinea. He traces the movement in three main streams: one down the Congo basin, one east to the Great Lakes and south to Zymbabwe and the Zambesi, and one that eventually met Bushman and Hottentot peoples at South Africa's Cape. Du Bois presents the Bantu not as a single ethnic bloc but as a linguistic and political union forged through generations of conquest and absorption, calling them "the Africans with whom the world of to-morrow must reckon."; Related: The Great Lakes Region, Zymbabwe, The Congo
The Congo: Africa's largest river and the vast rainforest basin it drains, which Du Bois describes as a natural "caldron" that drew wave after wave of Bantu migrants and became the crucible in which the Bantu nations were formed. He details the pre-colonial kingdom of the Ba-Congo, centered at San Salvador, which accepted Christianity and sent its nobility to be educated in Portugal, alongside the Luba-Lunda states to the east. The chapter closes with an account of King Leopold II's Congo Free State, which Du Bois calls "a monument of shame to Christianity and European civilization" for the forced-labor atrocities committed there under the guise of philanthropy.; Related: The Bantu Migrations, Guinea, The Partition of Africa
The Ethiopia and Egypt Debate: Du Bois's central historiographical argument in Chapter 4: that ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian civilization was substantially the work of Black African peoples, not a separate achievement later credited elsewhere by omission. He marshals the evidence available to him, Herodotus's description of Egyptians as "black and curly-haired," skeletal measurements from the Thebaid, and the features he reads in royal statuary and Pharaonic portraiture, all drawn from the ethnological and archaeological methods of 1915, before radiocarbon dating or modern population genetics existed. This was the most contested claim in the book among his contemporaries, and he presents it explicitly as a corrective to scholarship that had, in his view, quietly reassigned Nile Valley achievement away from Africa whenever it seemed too impressive to leave there.; Related: Hamite, Candace, What Is a Negro?
The Fifteenth Amendment: The 1870 constitutional amendment barring states from denying the vote on account of race, which Du Bois identifies as the single provision that, "and that alone, struck the death knell of slavery," by making a full legal return to bondage impossible even after white Southern governments regained power. He traces its passage as the third and final federal strategy attempted after emancipation, following the failures of simply freeing slaves without protection and of a limited Freedmen's Bureau guardianship. Even after later disfranchisement campaigns curtailed its practical effect, Du Bois argues the two decades of Black voting it enabled produced irreversible gains in landholding, literacy, and institution-building.; Related: Reconstruction, The Freedmen's Bureau
The Freedmen's Bureau: The federal agency, proposed by Charles Sumner, established after the Civil War to oversee labor contracts for freed Black workers, represent them in court, distribute land and capital, and build schools. Du Bois treats its brief existence as one of the war's genuine missed opportunities, arguing that a Bureau sustained for decades, rather than dismantled within a few years under pressure from former slaveholders, might have prevented the reimposition of near-slavery through debt peonage and the convict lease system. He quotes Carl Schurz's assessment that no other institution could have wielded the "moral power" necessary to keep the postwar South from collapsing into open conflict between its races and classes.; Related: Reconstruction, The Fifteenth Amendment, The Underground Railroad
The Great Lakes Region: The cluster of lakes in East Central Africa, including the sources of the Nile, that Du Bois identifies as the likelier location for the ancient Egyptian "Punt," the land from which Egyptians themselves believed their civilization had come. He traces it as a crossroads where Egyptian, Semitic, and Bantu influences met and mingled over millennia, and as the staging ground from which Bantu migrations fanned out toward the Congo, the Zambesi, and South Africa. The kingdom of Uganda, with its complex feudal government under King Mutesa and his successors, receives particular attention as evidence of the region's sustained political sophistication.; Related: The Bantu Migrations, Zymbabwe, Monomotapa
The Haitian Revolution: The 1791 to 1804 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in which some 450,000 enslaved people rose against their masters and, under leaders including Toussaint L'Ouverture and later Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defeated French, British, and Spanish forces to establish the independent republic of Haiti. Du Bois credits the revolution with reshaping North American history directly, arguing that the losses France suffered fighting Haitian forces led Napoleon to abandon his plans for an American empire and sell the Louisiana Territory. He also traces Haiti's subsequent material support for Simon Bolivar's South American independence campaigns as part of the revolution's wider hemispheric legacy.; Related: Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Trade in Men
The Middle Passage: Du Bois's term for the transatlantic voyage by which enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas, chained together in conditions he describes through the testimony of the English abolitionist Sir William Dolben, who recounted enslaved people packed "like herrings in a barrel" and dying in such numbers that crews had to remove corpses each morning. He estimates that only about half of those loaded onto slave ships survived to become laborers in the Americas, and that mortality among the sailors who crewed these ships was likewise extraordinarily high. Du Bois treats the Middle Passage as the connecting link between African enslavement and American plantation slavery within the single system he calls the trade in men.; Related: The Trade in Men, The Asiento
The Negro Problems: Du Bois's title for his closing chapter and the framework that closes the book: the claim that colonial rule over roughly 121 million Africans and the caste system confronting nearly ten million Black Americans are facets of a single connected twentieth-century question rather than separate local matters. He surveys four "solutions" then in circulation, including forced labor and racial segregation, and argues each subordinates Black economic advancement to white profit. The chapter closes by asking whether the coming century's revision of the color line will be settled by reason or by violence, and looks toward what he calls a growing unity of feeling among "the darker races."; Related: The Trade in Men, The Partition of Africa, Reconstruction
The Niger: The great river of West Africa, which Du Bois identifies as playing the same civilizational role in the western Sudan that the Nile played in the east: the artery along which the empires of Ghana, Melle, and Songhay rose, traded, and eventually fell to a Moroccan invading force at the Battle of Tenkadibou in 1591. He traces its course as watering the Sudan below the Sahara and connecting the trading cities of Timbuktu and Jenne to trans-Saharan routes reaching North Africa, Egypt, and beyond. The chapter bearing its name is devoted largely to how Islam, arriving along these same routes, transformed but did not originate the region's indigenous political culture.; Related: Bilad es-Sudan, Songhay, Timbuktu
The Partition of Africa: The late-nineteenth-century division of the African continent among European colonial powers, which Du Bois dates from the Franco-Prussian War and the exploration of the Congo and traces through the Berlin Conference and the treaties and wars that followed. By his count, Britain claimed over 2.1 million square miles of African territory plus Egypt and the Sudan, France over 4.1 million, and Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, and Spain divided most of the remainder, leaving only Liberia and Abyssinia independent. He frames the partition as the mechanism by which nineteenth-century colonial capital replaced the slave trade as the chief method of profiting from Black labor, arguing it required abandoning the modest political and educational gains Black workers had won earlier in the century.; Related: The Negro Problems, Liberia, Monomotapa
The Trade in Men: The title Du Bois gives Chapter 10 and his framing for the slave trade as one continuous institution rather than two separate histories: the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean trade organized under Islam from the seventh century onward, and the Atlantic trade organized by Christian European powers from the fifteenth century onward. He argues that the Atlantic trade's unprecedented scale, driven by American plantation demand, is what transformed African domestic slavery and inter-tribal captivity into a racialized commercial system, and estimates the combined toll, counting deaths in raids and on the Middle Passage, at roughly one hundred million people. Du Bois insists that neither the ancient world nor early Africa treated color as a "badge of slavery" before this era.; Related: The Middle Passage, The Asiento, The Negro Problems
The Underground Railroad: The network of enslaved and free Black people, together with white abolitionist allies, who organized escape routes for fugitive slaves between roughly 1830 and 1850. Du Bois emphasizes that this was substantially a Black-led enterprise, citing the historian Wilbur Siebert's list of 128 identified Black "operators" and figures like Harriet Tubman, who personally guided several thousand people to freedom, and William Lambert, credited with aiding some thirty thousand escapes over three decades. He treats the Underground Railroad as evidence that emancipation was not simply granted from outside but actively won through organized Black resistance.; Related: The Freedmen's Bureau, The Trade in Men
Timbuktu: The Niger river city that Du Bois treats as the preeminent symbol of indigenous West African scholarship and commerce, home to the University of Sankore, where law, literature, grammar, geography, and surgery were studied by students drawn from across the Sudan. Sacked more than once, by the Mossi in the fourteenth century and later by Moroccan invaders in 1591, it was repeatedly rebuilt, and Du Bois quotes the sixteenth-century traveler Leo Africanus describing its abundant merchandise and craftsmen. For Du Bois, Timbuktu stands as direct evidence against the claim, common in his day, "that Negroes have no history."; Related: Songhay, Melle (Mali), Mansa Musa
Toussaint L'Ouverture: The formerly enslaved Haitian general and statesman whom Du Bois calls "the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of all time." Rising from the Maroon resistance to become supreme commander and governor of Haiti, Toussaint negotiated the withdrawal of British and Spanish forces, secured emancipation, and promulgated a constitution establishing legal equality before being lured into a parley by Napoleon's forces in 1802, seized, and shipped to France, where he died in prison the following year. Du Bois quotes the abolitionist Wendell Phillips's tribute at length and credits Toussaint's resistance with forcing Napoleon to abandon his plans for an American empire, leading directly to the Louisiana Purchase.; Related: The Haitian Revolution, The Trade in Men, Liberia

W

What Is a Negro?: The definitional problem Du Bois poses at the opening of Chapter 2, rejecting the era's attempts to fix a single physical "type" by citing the explorer David Livingstone's observation that the caricatured Negro "can be found only in caricature and not in real life," and insisting no scientific definition of race is possible given how gradually physical traits shade into one another. He argues for including the "mulatto" within the term "Negro," following American usage of his day, and locates the normal African physical type not in an extreme stereotype but, quoting the writer Palgrave, in the varied, dignified faces preserved in Egyptian statuary. The discussion is Du Bois's direct engagement with, and rebuttal of, the racial-classification science dominant in his era.; Related: Hamite, The Ethiopia and Egypt Debate

Z

Zymbabwe: Du Bois's own period spelling, reproduced here as he wrote it, of the stone ruins known today as Great Zimbabwe. Drawing on the seventeenth-century Portuguese chronicler De Barros and contemporary surveys, he describes fortified stone enclosures, gold and copper workings, and a royal "temple" residence spread across some 150,000 square miles between the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers, and argues, against period theories favoring an Asiatic or Phoenician origin, that the site's implements, weapons, and art are African in origin. He connects Zymbabwe's builders to the southward-migrating Bantu peoples and treats the ruins as physical evidence of an organized African state predating European contact.; Related: The Bantu Migrations, Monomotapa, The Great Lakes Region