Spoiling the Egyptians: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Uses of Racist Scholarship

In the Foreword to his 1947 book, The World and Africa, W.E.B. Du Bois outlined the purpose of his project and the problem of his sources.  He beautifully laid out his book’s purpose in the first paragraph of the foreword, a paragraph that stands as a fine model of how to announce a bold, clear, simply-stated, high-stakes intervention to challenge a scholarly discourse.  Du Bois wrote:

Since the rise of the sugar empire and the resultant cotton kingdom, there has been consistent effort to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history, so that today it is almost universally assumed that history can be truly written without reference to Negroid peoples. I believe this to be scientifically unsound and also dangerous for logical social conclusions. Therefore I am seeking in this book to remind readers in this crisis of civilization, of how critical a part Africa has played in human history, past and present, and how impossible it is to forget this and rightly explain the present plight of mankind.

There is his purpose: to properly situate Africa and the African diaspora within world history in order to offer a more sound and complete account of the human past and current human struggles, an account whose very soundness will render more difficult the purposeful misrepresentation of Africa’s legacy that served to further the exploitation and oppression of people of African descent.

His project was bold, because he was working against the “consistent effort…of omitting Africa from world history.”  So his problem was big: how could he write an authoritative history if the recognized authorities within historical and ethnological studies had not given sufficient place to Du Bois’s subject.  He laid out this problem a few paragraphs later in the Foreword:

I feel now as though I were approaching a crowd of friends and enemies, who ask a bit breathlessly, whose and whence is the testimony on which I rely for something that even resembles Authority? To which I return two answers: I am challenging Authority—even Maspero, Sayce, Resiner, Breasted, and hundreds of other men of highest respectability, who did not attack but studiously ignored the Negro on the Nile and in the world and talked as though black folk were nonexistent or unimportant.  They are part of the herd of writers of modern history who never heard of Africa…

Okay, that’s the first part of the answer:  I’m challenging Authority, not reinscribing it.

But where’s the rest of the answer?  Du Bois’s paragraph ended without spelling out how he would establish the authority of his account.

The rest of the answer is the rest of his Foreword, where for each chapter he lays out the published accounts and manuscripts upon which he has relied in writing that chapter.  Here is how he begins this brief bibliographic essay:

For chapters one and two I have relied upon my own travel and observation over a fairly long life.  For confirmation I have resurrected William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity, a popular history of how Europeans treated the natives in their colonies.  The book was published in London in 1838, and since then imperial Europe had tried to forget it.  I have also made bold to repeat the testimony of Karl Marx, whom I regard as the greatest of modern philosophers, and I have not been deterred by the witch-hunting which always follows mention of his name.  I like Robert Briffault’s  The Decline and Fall of the British Empire(1938) and George Padmore’s How Britain Rules Africa (1936).  I have mentioned the work of Anna Graves, who is usually ignored because she does not follow the conventions of historical writing and because no publisher has thought that he could make money out of her work.

Yes, there’s the rest of the answer:  Du Bois knew that he already was an authority already on the historical, economic, and sociological phenomena of which he had made long study, and the reader ought to know so as well. Beyond that, Du Bois “resurrected” testimonies and interpretations long extant, long available, but long ignored.  Further, Du Bois drew from the economic and social analysis of Karl Marx, whose importance as a thinker was undeniable, however one viewed the implications of his thought.  Additionally, Du Bois relied upon very recent scholarship and commentary on European attempts at mastery of Africa – mastery of its peoples, mastery of its knowledge.  Finally, Du Bois is not hesitant to draw on the relevant insights of non-scholarly writers – indeed, he must do so, for he is seeking to bring forth a scholarship of African subjectivity where he found that practically none had existed.  Anna Melissa Graves (whose papers are housed at Swarthmore), an activist in the international women’s peace movement, had recently written a book recounting her own experiences of travel and work in Africa and reproducing the testimony of West Africans she met during her time there.  In terms of sociology, I suppose Graves would have been something like a participant-observer, but she wrote her works in a popular style and achieved modest sales, two factors that made it easier for Du Bois’s contemporaries to ignore her terstimony.

These, then, were some of the ways that Du Bois hoped to both challenge authority while establishing authority:  he would use his own experience, long-elided accounts that contained valuable information not available elsewhere, an economic analysis shaped by Karl Marx’s thought, the best recent scholarship he could find, and contemporary sources that the scholarly world seemed bent on ignoring.

There was one more kind of source, though, that Du Bois necessarily encountered in his research for this book:  the kind of source that did not ignore the history of African peoples, but rather distorted and demeaned it.  Would Du Bois make use of those sources too?

Yes he would; yes he did.  He did so because, again, he was trying to carve out a new space in the discourse for broadened view of Africa and Africans in world history.  When you don’t have many scholarly antecedents for the line of argument that you are pursuing, you have to use the scholarship you can, even when much of it is profoundly objectionable.

That was Du Bois’s insight, anyhow.  He implied as much in a single sentence assessing some of the sources he used to understand the history of the civilizations of the Nile:  “The works of Sir Ernest Budge, George A. Resiner, A.H. Sayce, and F.L. Griffith have naturally been of use when they were not indulging their opinions about Negroes.”

Let us sit with that sentence for a minute.

Here is W.E.B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest American public intellectual of the 20^th century, laying out for the reader the sources from which he has drawn to present a historical narrative unhampered and undistorted by the historical and pervasive racism of Euro-American scholars towards people of African descent. He is looking for useful and reliable information wherever he can find it.  And he is looking at “authoritative” information as well – the highly regarded accounts, the standard scholarly works, even though those works were shot through with racist ideas about Black men and women.  Thus his use of the word “naturally” – sure, he is saying, of course I found much in these well-known authorities to inform my own argument. But to do so I had to move through and move past their contemptuous pronouncements about people who are Black like me.

And that, finally, was the reason that Du Bois undertook this work.  “I am faced with the dilemma,” he wrote in the concluding paragraph of the foreword, “that either I do this now or leave it for others who have not had the tragedy of life which I have, forcing me to a task for which they may have small stomach and little encouragement from the world round about.”  In the end, Du Bois grappled with the racism and contempt and intentional dismissiveness of his sources to wrest from that hostile landscape a new point of reference, a new perspective, a new argument on new ground from which future scholars of Africa and the African diaspora could begin their own work.

Once such a foundational inquiry is laid, and once others expand significantly on such ground-breaking work and build scholarship that does not proceed from racist assumptions – once enough of that work is out in the world and part of the scholarly conversation, the less need there is for anyone after to ground the authority of their own research in scholarship that is marred by racism or sexism or paternalism.  The old idols are cast down.

But one should never be afraid, as Du Bois was not afraid, to plunder the work of prejudiced scholars if there is in it something useful – an archival tidbit, a statistical table, whatever – that cannot be easily found elsewhere.

On their way toward deliverance, the people of God did not hesitate to despoil the Egyptians.  So take what useful materials you may find, wherever you may find them, and shake the dust off your feet as you go onward to better things.