This essay examines how W. E. B. Du Bois balanced his Pan-African scholar-activism against the lure of pursuing the parochial interests of a “Negro elite” by cooperating with German nationalism and colonialism. Based on an analysis of primary sources from 1907 to 1947, the author examines Du Bois’s relationship with German colonizers and the Herero people. The essay argues that Du Bois created a dynamic that caused him and future Pan-Africanist scholar-activists cognitive dissonance. That dissonance emerged from tensions between his ideological commitment to Pan-Africanism and African liberation on one hand and his German intellectual influences on the other. The essay concludes arguing that the contemporary Black scholars must sort out this inconsistency especially as it relates to the increasingly international, immigrant share of the African American population and increasing need for Pan-African cooperation and groundings.
Samuel Livingston (Mon,) studied this question.