Saturday,
June 15
Today was the supposed to be my
adventure to Wili falls with my friend Kofi, but sadly the plans fell through
(and I didn’t quite feel like another trip to the Volta region having just
returned). With some time to kill before
I head off to Kumasi in a week’s time, I’ve decided to do some city
browsing. After a filling breakfast (the
usual eggs, bread, tea PLUS some of the delicious fruit I bought yesterday –
Abrobe, Ankah, and Banana), I set out to find a car to “37 station.” Accra is massive; it’s like LA in that just
because you’re in the city doesn’t guarantee you’ll be close to any of the
places you want to visit in a day. In
addition, the public transportation can only get so far – at some point, you’ll
have to either walk or take a taxi.
After being dropped at 37 station
(about 7 miles east of Tudu station), I made my way to the US embassy down the
road to get directions then took a Taxi up to the W.E.B Du Bois Memorial Centre
for Pan-African Culture.
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| It's not just a memorial, it was his ACTUAL house! Donated by President Nkruma! |
Although the
little information I could find online said the center would be open, no one
was home. I read for a little wile,
explored the nearby complexes (there’s also an African Diaspora Forum house and
a Marcus Garvey center conveniently placed next to Du Bois’ house), and even
happened upon a Caribbean music pre-carnival party.
After returning to Du Bois and reading for
another hour, I had just about given hope.
On my way out, however, an elderly woman who worked for the complex saw
me and flagged me down, telling me she’d fetch someone to give me a tour. Sometimes, being white here pays off. Twenty minutes later, no one showed besides
an African-American family from Florida and their private Akan tour guide, Yao. More frustrated with the situation than I
was, Yao berated the complex owner in Twi and got someone to open up Du Bois’
house for a tour (I snuck in and tagged along here).
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| Note: Obama and I were in Ghana at the same time! (For one night) |
The tour, although brief, was very
informative and unlike the kind of tour you’d receive in America. I got to see Du Bois’ personal library
containing the 1003 books he brought from America in 1961.
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| Du Bois' personal copies of his work! |
The entire library was left untouched,
including the original copies of his own publications – the tour guide even let
us open the cabinets! There were
original family photographs, diplomas from college and graduate schools from Du
Bois and his second wife, and regalia that Kwame Nkrumah bestowed Du Bois on
his arrival to Accra!
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| Priceless Family photographs - the top left is from 1868! |
The final stop was the tomb. Only two years after arriving, in 1963, Du
Bois died on the eve of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. The
tomb was decorated with a popular Ghanaian tradition – Valentines Day-esque
memorial hearts adorning the marble casket.
To the left of Du Bois, his 2nd wife’s ashes are kept in a
wooden chamber, and the circular room is adorned with 8 or so traditional Ghanaian
stools bearing symbols from the Akan.
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| The final resting place of W.E.B. Du Bois |
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| Remains of Shirley Graham Du Bois |
I’ll throw some pictures here, and
below is an excerpt from one of my papers I wrote for my fall Classical Sociological Theory class,
taught by Professor Phil Zuckerman. Take
a look, it’ll help you appreciate how cool it was to go see this guy’s house!
 |
| The man himself, decked out in gold |
 |
| (and me!) |
With a
lifetime spanning nearly a century, Du Bois spent his life studying the history
of exploitation based on race. Growing
up as an African-American in an overwhelmingly white populated and dominated society,
Du Bois struggled not only with identifying how and why race led to social and
economic inequality, but also had trouble discerning what it meant to be
“African-American.” In order to examine the racial divide in America, Du Bois
first had to identify what it really meant to be both black and “American,” for
the two identities seemed to conflict with one another. Du Bois was ever cognizant of the discrepancy
between the American ethos of “All men
are created equal” and the blatant racial segregation and mistreatment of
blacks; being an American came with an entirely different set of rules and
expectations for African-Americans. In
his 1897 article “The Conservation of Races” published in The Occasional Papers of the American Negro Academy, Du Bois explored
how the Negro neither wishes to assimilate by “…bleach[ing] his negro soul in a
flood of white Americanism,” while at the same time not impose on the whites or
“Africanize America” (Du Bois, 1897, p. 24).
No, Du Bois simply wished “to make it possible for a man to both be a Negro
and an American,” which was easier said than done. For Du Bois, the freedom to be black while
still being treated as any white American would bloom from equal representation
in political discourse and labor force, a concept borrowed from Marx. Until then, however, African-Americans will
tiptoe with a “double consciousness,” where, because they lack a definite,
stable identity, they will constantly evaluate themselves personally and from
the perspective white Americans.
Voting
rights and developing a voice in politics would be the first step toward
achieving an equal and autonomous identity for African Americans, followed by
equal partnership in economic pursuits.
Giving a voice to the oppressed will help the group develop their own
identity instead of having the dominant group create it for them. When examining himself and African-Americans
as an oppressed group constrained by a white-imposed identity, Du Bois
understood that matters of identity autonomy and social/economic equality could
only be tackled with the introduction of equal representation in politics.
As a
pioneer in rural and urban sociology, as well as the sociology of religion and
crime (and of course, race), Du Bois’ study of the economic situation of African-Americans
gave a new perspective on why blacks were so much poorer than whites. Du Bois’ The
Philadelphia Negro (1899) was a study of life for African-Americans in
their segregated neighborhoods, and the factors that kept them in poverty. Du Bois explored the sociological factors why
the African-American was disproportionately found on the wrong side of the law,
and the relationship between crime, poverty, and labor. Du Bois gave evidence for his claim that those
who commit crime do it out of necessity (because they are poor), and theorized
that white-dominated society had created unfair structural inequalities in the
labor and justice system to constantly find African-Americans exclusively and personally responsible
for their poverty and imprisonment. Demonstrating
how the racial divide is self-enforcing, Du Bois expanded on Marx’s division of
labor theory – which split up the people of the world into proletariats and
bourgeoisie – and applied it to race.
Within the socially constructed proletariat class, African-Americans
were further subordinated due to unfair judgment as a race, not as individuals.
“Because the Negro workmen may not often work side by side with white workmen,
the individual black workman is rated not by his own efficiency, but by the
efficiency of a whole group of black fellow workmen which may often be low” (Du
Bois, 1899, p. 48). Synthesized, Du Bois
saw the inherent struggle within the subgroup of working class, for not only
did African-Americans have to hurdle institutionalized racism to get hired into
the working system, they were then hyper-scrutinized and judged on their
performance as a race, not as an individual worker. Du Bois built on Marx’s division of labor
theory with his own theory of institutionalized racism, which served as another
compounding structural inequality for-African Americans.
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