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Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Michael J. C. Echeruo
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Extract

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 669 - 684
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Livingston, Thomas W., Education and Race: a biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden (San Francisco, 1975), pp. 217 and 219.Google Scholar

2 Cf.Fanon, Franz, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris, 1952)Google Scholar and Les Damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961).Google Scholar

3 This, too, is the underlying theme in the work of Freyre, Gilberto, The Masters and the Slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization, translated by Putnam, Samuel, 1946 (New York, 1968 edn), which seeks to explain the ‘negro’ experience in terms of ‘slavery’ rather than ‘race’. The conflict in Brazil between masters and slaves would have occurred even if all the latter had been white and treated likewise. Indeed, he argues that the pervasive force of Brazilian ‘blackness’ is testimony to the equally extensive presence of slavery in its civilisation. In short, Freyre attempts to exculpate (and so, liberate) the Brazilian negro from the curse of blackness, while Fanon tries to psychoanalyse and explain the wretchedness of the ‘colonised’ (but not enslaved) African by making his blackness an incidental and almost irrelevant factor. The black is not oppressed because he is black but because he is oppressable.Google Scholar

4 It is part of Fanon's dilemma that he could not properly belong to any of the formal categories of Algerians. When it was decided to make a protest on behalf of an arrested student, Fanon volunteered: ‘As the rule was to have representation of both national groups, the delegation included three Moslems and three Europeans: two Jews and myself’. But when a police officer remarked that he was the ‘only Frenchman in the gang… You are from France’, Fanon retorted, ‘No, I was born in Algiers’. See L'An cinq de la révolution algérienne (Paris, 1959),Google Scholar published as A Dying Colonialism, translated from the French by Chevalier, Haakon (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 145. Fanon was actually born in Martinique.Google Scholar

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7 See Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York, 1973),Google Scholar and Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1988), ch. 4.Google Scholar

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9 Blyden, Edward W., From West Africa to Palestine (Freetown and Manchester, 1873), pp. 104–5.Google Scholar

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13 Quoted in Blyden, , From West Africa to Palestine, p. 114.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. pp. 113–15.

15 Lynch (ed.), op. cit., pp. 8–9.

16 See Echeruo, Michael J. C., Victorian Lagos: aspects of nineteenth-century Lagos life (London, 1977), pp. 42–3, for African views on the mulatto as ‘jackdaw’. Also, Gates, op. cit. pp. 68–9, for the various arguments concerning the capacity of the African to ‘improve’ on his native abilities.Google Scholar

17 Lagos Times, 6 August 1882.

18 ‘An Address Before the Maine State Colonization Society, Portland, Maine, June 26th, 1862’, in Lynch (ed.), op. cit. p. 13.

19 Ibid. pp. 15 and 17.

20 ‘Cosmopolite’ was the new term much liked by the ‘new Negro’ of America and by the ‘new African’ of the colonies, world citizens who thought that the specificities of race and nationhood for Africans were retrogressive. The group was comprised initially of the mixed breed, but in time included those who were in the same condition by adoption. A columnist of The Mirror, a newspaper published in Nigeria in the 1880s, signed himself regularly as ‘The Cosmopolite’, and used to inform readers about the ‘choice selection’ of European fashion goods in Lagos. For example, on 17 Novermber 1888, he was glad to report that ‘Ladies and Gentlemen need be in no fear of boots and shoes, hats &c., latest styles and patterns’ for the Christmas season.

21 ‘On Mixed Races in Liberia’ (1969), in Lynch (ed.), op. cit. p. 188.

22 Ibid. p. 189.

23 Appiah, Anthony, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race,’ in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London, 1986), p. 27.Google Scholar

24 The Oxford English Dictionary cites and entry from 1861: ‘The fourth generation of mulattoism is as absolutely sterile as muleism’.Google Scholar

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28 Bois, W. E. B. Du, Dusk of Dawn: an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept (1940, New York edn, 1968).Google Scholar Du Bois was well aware of the poet's lines and referred in ibid. p. 27 to ‘that coloured Robert Browning who died just after I received my first bachelor's degree’.

29 Creative Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois: a pageant, poems, short stories and playlets, edited and compiled by Aptheker, Herbert (White Plains, NY, 1985), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

30 Ibid. p. 10.

31 Ibid. p. 13.

32 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 9.

33 Ibid. pp. 34–5.

34 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 99.

35 Ibid. p. 101.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Bois, W. E. B. Du, ‘In Black’, in The Crisis (New York), 20, 6, 1920, pp. 263 and 266.Google Scholar

39 SirJohnston, Harry H., A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races (1899, Cambridge, revised 1930 edn), pp. 450–1.Google Scholar