The paper has two parts. The first part engages Abiola Irele�s articulation of the �African idea� as the source of utopias and dystopias in the narratives of Du Bois; the second part continues the dialogue on Du Bois through an engagement with my own work on Du Bois�s interpretation of the African presence in his philosophy of race, in relation to Irele�s works. I will argue that Irele�s African idea� and my �Africa in Du Bois�s philosophy of race� are powerful fountains from which flow a previously suppressed African contribution to the global narratives on utopias and dystopias.

I will further suggest that the African idea gives the world powerful ideals which, even if unrealized, serve as maximum possibilities for the human condition. We must separate ideas from ideals. Utopias are guided by ideals, which are not necessarily realizable. Ideals are imagined goals to which we can aspire as we yearn for paradisiacal possibilities for human beings. I suggest that we look at ideals as contingent ideas, thus allowing the limited possibilities of realizing certain ideas as practicable ideals. It is in these highly qualified senses that the African idea and Africa in Du Bois�s philosophy of race are both regulatory mediations of ideals, and thus sources of utopias and dystopias.

Narratives examining utopias and dystopias have been singularly dominated by Eurocentric philosophical prisms. A long line of classics beginning with Plato�s Republic, passing through the �ethical community� of More�s Utopia and the �cosmopolitan community� of Kant�s Essays on History, have theorized a vision of ideal societies, popularly called Utopias, guided by an imaginary of the European self, to the conspicuous exclusion of African utopian narratives as a regulatory ideal. Dystopias were likewise glamorized as singularly European. Africa was excluded in both senses. The African idea was systematically erased from history as source of both hope and hopelessness, both triumph and tragedy, thus as a potent reservoir of utopias and dystopias.

Irele�s recent writing breaks through this epistemological domination by inserting powerful utopic works written by Blacks. Irele has shifted the geographic gaze of utopias and dystopias away from Europe toward the sunlight of the African experience. In this light, Du Bois�s Souls of Black Folk and Toni Morrison�s Paradise emerge as masterful contributions, showing humanity guided by emancipatory ideas and ideals. Irele shows the sense in which Du Bois�s race idea is in fact a regulatory concept and not � as Appiah would have it � an embittered counter-racism. For Irele, this African idea articulates the previously suppressed worldview of marginalized communities. Following Herder and against Appiah, Irele argues that the endowments of a people are celebrations of capacities hitherto judged as unworthy of expression, unfit to occupy social space. These suppressed capacities are for the first time examined as utopic ruminations which not only supplement European utopias but add entirely original Africa-centered presentations of human possibilities and shortcomings.

Irele�s intervention into this European sacred ground will be remembered as a gigantic contribution to African literary tradition, informed by wide reading, a curious and deciphering mind, and an unbiased appreciation and mastery of European texts juxtaposed with recent and emerging African literature. Evaluating Irele�s prose is a daunting task, but I will try to present some of his salient contributions focusing especially on Du Bois. In a splendid recent article, �What is Africa to me?� (Souls, Summer-Fall 2005), in which he presents the utopic constructs of many Diaspora thinkers, including Claude Mackay, Langston Hughes, Lorna Goodison, and Derek Walcott, Irele notes that

The German experience thus forms the background to Du Bois�s celebration of Black folk culture, arising from his subsequent encounter with the rural South, where, alongside the deprivation and misery of its Black population that aroused his compassion, he was struck by the distinctive character and expressive quality of their African inheritance�. This aesthetic dimension of the black collective circumstance was first discovered by Du Bois in the spirituals�. The strange beauty of the spirituals gave aesthetic dimension to this association of people with a soil, a particular space, and beyond, with a continent. This vast hinterland of awareness that lay behind and ratified Du Bois�s enunciation of a deeply rooted collective expression of the Black American gave to the work a symbolic dimension that lifted it well above its documentary character. (27f)

For Du Bois, Irele argues, Africa is a �place in the world, not to disturb the tranquility of other men, but to lay down our burden and rest our weary backs and feet by the banks of the Niger and sing songs and chant our hymns to the God of Ethiopia.�

The metaphors of �laying down our burden� and �the resting of our weary backs� are meant to be reinsertions of the African idea in the form of light, comfort, and rest for all the worn out bodies who suffer the negative effects of the human condition. On this view, Africa is not the heart of darkness but the heart of light, of dis-alienation. Africa�s black folk, who dwelt in the rural South, argues Irele, attracted Du Bois�s attention as the source of an expressivist tradition, giving the world music and poetry of global significance. Following Du Bois carefully, Irele notes that the African idea is a social space where Africans fashion a self and construct values which mark their original being in the world, manifest in black religions, music, and ethical comportments.

With the same breadth of infectious passions he uncovers the architectonics of Toni Morrison�s Paradise, a utopic/dystopic narrative which uses the African idea to create an ideal space for the descendants of Africa, transcending any immediate evil or irrational impulses. The �dream of home� evoked in the novel, says Irele,

sums up the deep import of the African idea, with its utopian projections, as it has shaped the responses of the Diaspora Black community to its uncertain condition in America. It articulates in mythic terms the insistent longing for home, the deep nostalgia for origins, in the fullest sense of the word, for which Africa stands as the abiding image of the Black Diaspora consciousness and imagination. (42)

Du Bois, for his own part, presented himself to the world as African in the following sense:

My African racial feeling was then purely a matter of later learning and reaction; my recoil from the assumptions of the whites; my experience in the south at Fisk University. But it was nonetheless a real and a profound determinant of my life and character. I felt myself African by �race� and by that token was African and, at the same time, an integral member of the group of dark Americans who were called Negroes. (quoted, 30)

Irele maps out the spectrum of Du Bois�s influence on the intellectual currents of his time and rightly notes that Du Bois�s African idea is comprised of ethical practices and distinct religious convictions. It is precisely this distinctiveness that the Herderian expressivist tradition captured so well and which Du Bois in turn made his own. Central to Du Bois� race idea is the notion that the human self is expressive and that its expressiveness is manifest in the culturally rooted existential response to racial discrimination. On Irele�s view, the racially discriminated African responds by affirming his/her being in the world, in the face of the racist�s �bad faith,� particularly the racist�s attempts at making the African absent. The African thus affirms a personal zone of being, as a fountain of human possibilities, a potent source of values in service of the human condition.

II As Irele has shown, Du Bois made Africa the centerpiece of his life and research, filling his writings with African matters. Consider the following hymn to Africa, from a piece called A Day in Africa:

I rose to sense the incense of the hills

The royal sun sent crimsoned heralds of the dawn

She glowed beneath her bridal veil of mist �

I felt her heart swell while the King

Paused on the World�s rough edge,

And a thousand birds did pour their little hearts

To maddened melody.

I leapt and danced and found

My breakfast poised aloft,

All served in living gold.

You see Du Bois�s Africa is hopeful, rich and splendid with history. Incense, cold, wisdom, music, dance, and birds environ it. It is an Africa without problems, a center of civilization, the first home of humankind. Du Bois takes pride in this black world; its rivers, lakes, minerals, purple flowered carpet, and soil flow from his pen as he writes about them. His Africa is wreathed in crimson, blue and green, as a stanza in A Day in Africa has it. For Du Bois, Africa is also sunshine, vegetation �bursting life of leaf and limb.� He writes,

The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood. This is not a country: it is a world � a universe of itself and for itself, a thing different, immense, menacing, and alluring. It is a great black bosom where the spirit longs to die� three things Africa has given the world, and they form the essence of African culture: beginnings, the village unit, and art in sculpture and music.

Given this enormous respect for African matters, Du Bois can hardly be accused of thinking that blacks are backward and ignorant How could that be, when passage after passage celebrates the achievements of blacks, our ancestors? In the pages of Du Bois narratives, Africans are presented as historically effective people. These are the people known to be the producers of Axum and Lalibela in Ethiopia, the pyramids of Egypt, the noble kingdoms of West Africa, not to forget the fact that Africa is the birthplace of Lucy, the miracu-lous, our oldest female ancestor.

For him, Africa is the homeland of the black race. As he put it, �Wherever one sees the first faint steps of human culture, the first successful fight against wild beasts, the striving against weather and disease, there one sees black men.� Such passages speak for themselves. Du Bois�s blackness is a source of pride, a fountain of his humanity, and Africa is an embodiment of his black body, his black being. Neither inferior nor superior, he defends it, as a foundation of his selfhood, a framework of moral organization. The pan- africanism he so eloquently presented to the world is grounded in this moral/cultural framework.

Du Bois knew the absurdity of the human condition deeply, but fought against it with a vision of a transformed humanity founded on African possibilities of being: the contingent projects of compassion, care, and, a Moral framework. He was convinced that these contingent projects were destined to be black people�s contributions to the birth of new men and women that the world had not seen before.

Like Fanon after him, he too wanted to turn a new leaf, out of the incense of the African hills, the royal African sun, the soft vegetation, the maddened melody and the purple flowered fields, the lush and the green. One of the duties of the talented tenth is to mend the broken black self by diffusing these empowering visions of blackness and africanity to diasporic blacks. To do so, they need first to familiarize themselves with the rich history in Du Bois�s texts, thereby rediscovering their African roots.

Change begins with the self, and then it is shared with other selves. The African-American middle class needs to penetrate this history and heal itself. A people must know its history. That is what Du Bois advocated in his time, and it is what we need now. With Africa as background and foreground, Du Bois created an original historical and existential philosophy of race. Once this is put in place, it can work quite handily with the revolutionary participatory track that Cornel West, the public intellectual of our time, so much desires. The public intellectual as has the responsibility to educate the black masses. Whereas Du Bois�s talented tenth would quietly impart esoteric and lyrical passages in the classroom and at corporate quarters, the gifted public intellectual could popularize this knowledge. Hopefully there will be no material barriers to this process, so that those who need it most can be there to be enlightened, so as to act, to march, and to fight for their rights.

Teodros Kiros PhD

December 23, 2008