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President
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana with W.E.B. DuBois and Shirley Graham
DuBois, along with Kojo Botsio, Ghana Foreign Minister in 1963. The
DuBois' became citizens of Ghana and led research and media
institutions between 1962-1966., a photo by Pan-African News Wire
File Photos on Flickr.
EAP Editorial Board Archive
1964 September 24
First Annual Meeting: EAP Editorial Board
Part 1
A Speech by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
University of Ghana, West Africa
Distinguished members of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia
Africana Project , Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is a great pleasure and privilege for me to inaugurate this
first meeting of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia Africana
Project . The presence on this Board here today of representatives
from all parts of the Continent of Africa is yet another token of
the African cultural renaissance which is manifesting itself side
by side with the political resurgence of the African
Continent.
I must also confess, distinguished guests, that today I feel a
great sense of relief and joy to think that at long last a first
significant step has been taken towards the positive realisation
and consummation of a long cherished dream. Years ago, I felt that
Africa needs to buttress her unimpeachable claim to political
independence with parallel efforts to expose to the world the bases
of her rich culture and civilisation through the medium of a
scholarly Encyclopaedia. I therefore invited W.E.B. Du Bois of
blessed memory to come to Ghana to help us establish the framework
for this great natural heritage.
Dr. Du Bois was happy to come to Ghana in the very evening of his
life to embark upon this task; he took Ghanaian citizenship, and
immediately plunged headlong into the stupendous work of setting
out the general aims of this project and securing the interest and
support of eminent scholars throughout Africa for its realisation.
To him this was an exciting States to produce such an
Encyclopaedia. It is perhaps not without significance that Du Bois
should have had to wait until the very sunset of his life to find
and receive encouragement and support for this project, not in the
abundance of the United States, but rather in an Africa liberated
from the cramping and oppressive conditions of colonial rule.
In taking upon ourselves this great responsibility for Africa, we
are reminded of an old Roman saying: "Semper aliquid novi ex
Africa." Africa had a noble past which astounded even the ancient
Roman world with its great surprises. Yet, it was only much later,
after a millennium and a half of African history that we are now
busily engaged in reconstructing for all the world to know, that
racial exploitation and imperialist domination deliberately
fostered a new and monstrous mythology of race which nourished the
popular but unfounded image of Africa as the "Dark Continent." In
other words, a Continent whose inhabitants were without any past
history, any contribution to world civilization, or any hope of
future development - except by the grace of foreign tutelage!
It is unfortunate that men of learning and men of affairs in Europe
and America from a century ago down to yesterday, have spent much
valuable time to establish this unscientific and ridiculous notion
of African inferiority. A European author declared that "the
history of civilization on the continent begins, as concerns its
inhabitants, with Mohammedan invasion" and that African is poorer
in recorded history than can be imagined. Even the Eleventh Edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica also declared:
....... "Africa, with the exception of the lower Nile Valley and
what is known as Roman Africa is, so far as its native inhabitants
are concerned, a continent practically without history and
possessing no records from which such history may be conducted
..... the Negro (referring to the Black man) is essentially the
child of the moment and his memory, both tribal and individual, is
very short," And "if Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia be excluded, the
story of Africa is largely a record of the doings of its Asiatic
and European conquerors and colonizers. And here I want to sound a
note of caution about the term "Negro." I hope that in the record
of the Encyclopaedia Africana the term "Negro", whatever meaning or
connotation has been given to it, will not find a place, except
perhaps in a specific article proving its opprobrious origin and
redundancy. I would like that people of African descent and
Africans in general should be described as Black men, or Africans.
I personally would like to be referred to as a Black man, African
or Ghanaian, not referred to as a "Negro".
It would be long to attempt to survey this field of malicious
distortion against Africa. But this would be a useless and
unprofitable venture, and I am sure that your Editorial Board would
not suffer this pointless waster of valuable time. But listen a
while to Leo Frobenius in his Voice of Africa:
"The ruins of the mighty past lie slumbering within the bosom of
the earth but are glorified in the memory of men who live beneath
the sun." He dwells on the "god-like strength of memory in those
who lived before the advent of the written word" and he continues:
"Every archaeologist can quote examples from the nations of the
North. But who would imagine that the Negro Race (here again
referring to the Black race) of Africa possessed an equally
retentive mind for its store of ancient monuments."
It may be argued, however, that this sort of view about Africa is
dying out, and we may be accused of whipping a dying horse. It is
also true that, particularly in the years since World War II, there
has been a marked improvement in much of the writing by
non-Africans on Africa and there are today a number of writers and
scholars who have made signal contributions to African
historiography. Nevertheless, it is to be doubted if the popular
image of the so-called Dark Continent has been much affected by the
widening horizon of knowledge of Africa.
The fact is that the powerful forces which seek to block the
advance of the 280 millions of Africans to a place of full equality
in the world community and which strive to maintain neo-colonialist
or even overt colonial domination and white supremacy rule in
Africa, find it in their interest to perpetuate the mythology of
racial inferiority.
Thus it is not simple ignorance of Africa, but deliberate
disparagement of the continent and its people that Africanists and
the Encyclopaedia Africana must contend with. The foulest
intellectual rubbish ever invented by man is that of racial
superiority and inferiority. We know now, of course, that this
distortion and fabrication of the image of man was invented by the
apostles of imperialism to salve their conscience and justify their
political, cultural and economic domination of Africa.
I understand that through the medium of the Information Report,
published periodically by the Encyclopaedia Africana Secretariat,
have appeared expressions of support and pledges of co-operation in
the work of this great project from numerous eminent scholars. And
I am particularly happy that among those who have expressed their
endorsement of our work are distinguished scholars in the United
States, the Soviet Union, China, India, Britain and other countries
outside Africa.
I am sure the members of the Editorial Board share my appreciation
of this world-wide support of the idea of an Encyclopaedia Africana
. However, it is of course only logical that an encyclopaedia work
on Africa should be produced in Africa, under the direction and
editorship of Africans, and with the maximum participation of
African scholars in all countries.
While I believe that no contribution to the projected Encyclopaedia
should be rejected solely and simply because the author happens to
be non-African, there are surely valid reasons why the maximum
participation of African scholars themselves should be aimed at.
Let me illustrate this point with an example from a book published
just fifty years ago by George W. Ellis, an Afro-American who
served from 1901 to 1910 as Secretary of the United States
diplomatic mission in Liberia. From this study came his book, Negro
Culture in West Africa, published in 1914.
In the Preface to this work Ellis tells how he had sought to widen
his knowledge of Africa, before coming to Liberia, by the diligent
study of encyclopaedias, geographies, and works of ethnology and
anthropology, only to find that much of this information was
"unsupported by the facts" and gave a picture "substantially
different" from the character of African life which he himself
found in West Africa.
Acknowledging the services of European authors such as Harry
Johnston, Lady Lugard and others, Ellis stated that to him:
"it seems more necessary and imperative that the African should
explain his own culture, and interpret his own thought and soul
life, if the complete truth is to be given to the other races of
the earth. "
But there were already men in West Africa who had blazed a
significant trail in this direction: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Joseph
Casely Hayford and John Mensah Sarbah. Many other Africans in
preceding generations helped to lay the basis of our present
efforts to project a new African image of Africa. One thinks of
such figures as James Africanus B. Horton and his "A vindication of
the African Race." (1868) and of Carl Reindorf, Attoh Ahumah,
Anthony William Amu, Samuel Johnson of Oyo, Blaise Diagne, Herbert
Macaulay and others in West Africa, of Duse Mohammed Effendi of the
Sudan, Lewanika of Barotseland, Apolo Kagwa of Buganda, and leaders
such as John Tengo Jabavu, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Clements Kedalie
in South Africa. And let us not forget the important contributions
of others in the New World, for example, the sons of Africa in
Haiti, such as Antenor Firmin and Dr. Jean Price-Mars, and others
in the United States such as Alexander Crummell, Carter G. Woodson
and our own Dr. Du Bois.
All of those whose names I have mentioned believed in and urged the
necessity of writing about Africa from the point of view of African
interests and African assumptions and concepts - and not from the
point of view of Europeans or others who have quite different
interests, assumptions and concepts, whether conscious or
unconscious. This is precisely what we mean when we say that the
Encyclopaedia Africana must be frankly Afro-centric in its
interpretation of African history and of the social and cultural
institutions of the African and people of African descent
everywhere.
It is to be hoped, therefore, that the work on the Encyclopaedia
Africana may provide both the forum and the motivation for the
development of a virile and salutary new trend in the writing of
African history, writing which will rank in scholarship with any
other historiography, but which will also be based upon a frame of
reference that is independently African, and will lead the way in
independent thinking about Africa and its problems.
I am anxious that I should not be misunderstood in my emphasis on
an Afro-centric point of view for the Encyclopaedia Africana .
There are some who will say that his implies simply reversing the
faults and distortions of the colonialist minded writers on Africa,
painting everything white that they pictured as black, and
everything black that they pictured as white.
I should like to assure our guests, the members of the Editorial
Board, that that is in no sense my conception of what the
Encyclopaedia Africana should be. Most certainly it must and will
set the record straight on many points of African history and
culture. But it will do this not simply on the basis of assertion
backed by nothing more than emotion, but rather on the foundation
of first-class scholarship linked with the passion for scientific
truth.
I will not romanticize or idealize the African past, I will not
gloss over African failings weaknesses and foibles, or endeavour to
demonstrate that Africans are endowed with either greater virtues
or lessor vices than the rest of mankind. There is undoubtedly
considerable evidence of much that is noble and glorious in our
African past; there is no need to gild the Lily nor to try to hide
that which is ignoble. But here again it is a question of whose
standards and values you are applying in assessing something as
noble or ignoble, and I maintain that the Encyclopaedia Africana
must reject non-African value-judgments of things African.
It is true that despite the great advances made during the last
twenty years in the various disciplines of African studies, so much
of Africa's history has yet to be unearthed, scientifically
analysed, and fully comprehended. This sometimes gives rise to the
question whether enough is yet known to undertake at this time the
compilation of an encyclopaedia of the sort envisaged. Those who
entertain such hesitation and doubt only expose the extent of their
ignorance about Africa's great past.
Before the colonial era in Africa, Europeans had had many
encounters with Africans on the cross-roads of history. They had
married into African royal families, received Africans into their
courts as ambassadors and social equals, and their writers had
depicted African characters as great heroes in their literature. In
common with the rest of mankind Africans made extensive use of
cereals, they learned the art of raising cattle, adapted metal
tools and weapons to their own use, and, to quote Basil
Davidson,
"undertook mining and smelting and forging on a continental scale,
borrowed crops from other lands, introduced soil conservation,
discovered the medicinal value of a host of herbs and plants, and
worked out their own explanations of mankind and the universe. All
this had happened before the first ships set forth from
Europe."
Let me give another quotation even at the risk of boring you, this
time from Leo Frobenius again, a well-known historian who made 17
expeditions into African, North, East, West and South, in order to
learn at first hand of the culture of the African peoples.
Frobenius makes a basic statement in his book African Civilisation,
which unfortunately has not yet been translated into English.
Doubtless, there is reason why no complete translation has yet been
made. From a limited translation made by Anna Malise Graves, I
quote:
"When they, European navigators, arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and
landed at Ouidah in Dahomey, the captains were greatly astonished
to find streets well laid out, bordered on either side for several
leagues with two rows of trees, and men clad in richly coloured
garments of their own weaving. Further south in the kingdom of the
Congo, a swarming crowd dressed in silk and velvet, great states
well ordered and down to the most minute details, powerful rulers,
flourishing industries, civilised to the manner of their
bones.
And the condition of the countries on the eastern coast,
Mozambique, for instance, was quite the same. The revelations of
the navigators from 15th to the 17th century gave incontrovertible
proofs that Africa stretching south from the edge of the Sahara
desert was still in full flower - the flower of harmonious and
well-ordered civilisations. And this fine flowering the European
conquistadors or conquerors annihilated as far as they penetrated
into the country."
Indeed, the history of Africa goes back into the dim recesses of
time and antiquity. There are even scientists in our time who are
beginning to claim that Africa was the very cradle of mankind. The
fossil remains of man discovered by Dr. L.S.B. Leakey in Tanganyika
have been dated by scientific processes as one and three-quarter
million (1,750,000) years old. From the head waters of the Nile in
Tanganyika let us move swiftly to its mouth on the Mediterranean
Sea and the Isthmus of Suez where the great civilization of Egypt
was fostered for thousands of years down to the Christian era.
There, as we all know, man rose to the phenomenal heights of
statecraft, science and religion and the excellence of the arts.
Evidence from language, religion, astronomy, folklore and divine
kinship, as well as geographical and physical proximity, confirms
the basic African origin of this Egyptian cultural eminence.
This great flowering of the mind in Africa was unfortunately
scorched by the ravages of the slave trade which encouraged
extensive destruction through tribal warfare. Close upon this set
in the evil of colonisation and the deliberate effort, to which I
have already referred, of painting the African block and backward
as a valid justification for colonial rule. I have endeavoured to
touch on some of these questions only as a means of making a clear
case for justifying our attempts to provide Africa with an
Encyclopaedia portraying vividly the glory of Africa's great
past.
I should now like to say just a few words on the vital question of
how this great undertaking is to be carried through to completion.
I must say at the outset that a broad policy having been laid down,
the precise plans for achieving it must be left to the Editorial
Board and its staff of competent experts. My purpose is only to
call attention to the underlying principle - the principle of
Pan-African co-operation - which I believe to be indispensable in
any concrete plans of work on the Encyclopaedia.
As you are aware, the preparatory work on this project has been
carried forward for a little more than two years by a Secretariat
here in Accra, functioning under the aegis of the Ghana Academy of
Sciences. This Secretariat has not been content to work in
isolation; it has been continually active in establishing contacts
with scholars and institutions throughout Africa and abroad. A
motion declaring "that all African countries should contribute to
the work of the Secretariat" was unanimously adopted at a
Conference on the Encyclopaedia Africana attended by some 150
persons from Africa and elsewhere in December, 1962. Soon
thereafter, the Secretariat undertook the establishment of
Co-operating Committees of scholars in various African
countries.
The Secretary of the Secretariat, Dr. W. A. Hunton, met with
several of these Committees during a tour which he made in East and
North Africa some months ago. Following this came the nominations
by the Co-operating Committees of their respective representatives
to serve on the Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia. In this way
the basis, at least, of Pan-African co-operation in this work has
been established.
The members of the Editorial Board now have before them the
Secretariat's detailed prospectus of what the Encyclopaedia
Africana should contain and how the material should be presented.
This is merely a blueprint of what is to be constructed. The
Editorial Board members are asked to examine this blueprint with
great care, proposing whatever alterations they consider would
result in a more perfect plan for the Encyclopaedia. Once this has
been agreed upon, the stage will have been set for the play to
begin - that is to say, for the work of preparing and assembling
the Encyclopaedia articles to commence. I sincerely trust that the
deliberations of the Editorial Board at this first meeting will
successfully hit that mark.
The progress of the work from that point only will depend in the
first instance, as I see it, on the degree of whole-hearted and
effectively organised support that can be procured from African
scholars in all countries, from the many institutes of African
studies and research agencies of various kinds which are to be
found today throughout our continent, and from the various
independent African governments which are ready to provide the
fullest measure of financial support for this work.
So far, the financial burden has been borne by the Government of
Ghana alone. As I have already stated, I have no specific proposals
to present with regard to these matters. But I am convinced that
the task is not insuperable. The fact that we have advanced this
far in accomplishing, almost single-handedly, the formation of a
Pan-African Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia Africana augurs
success in the further stages of the work. I trust this project
will be welcomed by all the African Heads of State, and will have
the full support of the Organisation of African Unity. We must now
think in terms of continental political unity in everything we do
for Africa. Without such cohesion and unity none of us can survive
the intrigues and divisive forces of the imperialists and
neo-colonialists.
The work of this Encyclopaedia Africana will take us one further
step towards the great objective to which we are dedicated - a
Continental Union Government of Africa.
Speaking on behalf of the Government of the Republic of Ghana and
as Chancellor of our Universities, I can assure the members of the
Editorial Board that work on this Encyclopaedia will have the
fullest co-operation of our Universities, learned societies and
research institutions in Ghana, as well as the financial support of
the Government of Ghana.
Distinguished scholars and members of the Editorial Board of
theEncyclopaedia Africana , on behalf of the Government and people
of Ghana and on my own behalf, I extend a warm welcome to you. May
this your first meeting mark the auspicious beginning of your work
in a great undertaking for the benefit of mankind.
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SOURCE: Encyclopaedia Africana: Dictionary of African Biography®™
Volume 1: Ethiopia & Ghana, Page 183
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