W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan‐Africanism in Liberia, 1919–1924

Abstract

inconsistencies and indeed the larger paradoxes and problems of Pan-Africanism. It does so by analyzing the separate encounters of U.S.-born William E. Burghardt Du Bois and the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey with the West African republic of Liberia between 1919 and 1924, as each black leader attempted to launch his own particular strand of Pan-Africanism in Africa. 2 Du Bois and Garvey were two of the most significant Pan-Africanist figures in the early twentieth century. As a result, their separate engagements with Liberia represent a litmus test for the practicality of Pan-Africanism. By showing how both Du Bois and Garvey adopted ambivalent and contradictory positions in their different dealings with Liberia, this article illustrates the difficulty of putting Pan-Africanism into practice. Their experiences prove that in spite of some common understanding about its essence, Pan-Africanism has over the course of its existence signified a variety of ideas with different political and social connotations for different groups of blacks. More harshly, Pan-Africanism, as manifested in Liberia by both Du Bois and Garvey, was a flawed and impractical project laden with Western cultural hierarchies. Consequently, the task of implementing it proved to be a botched project mainly because, as an ideological construct, Pan-Africanism underestimated the complexity of human situations when the politics of race, identity, and nationality all blended on a single stage.Conventional approaches to historicizing Pan-Africanism tend to privilege its achievements, rhetorical flourishes, and universal claims, even to the extent of downplaying or ignoring its shortcomings. 3 Pan-African constructs have often been misappropriated in scholarly discourses, with the result that the complexity and diversity of both continental African and black diasporan experiences have been obscured. By contrast, this study subjects the common interests, aspirations, and cultural affinity presumed among all blacks in the received wisdom

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