As long as this market shall remain open, there can be no hope for the civilization of benighted Africa....
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Public Record
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor at Atlanta University and over the course of his life wrote many books and articles. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
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We must face the fact that this problem arose principally from the cupidity and carelessness of our ancestors.
The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe.
Red piles the pulp of hearts and heads And little children's hands.
But each must be complete or it cannot for me exist.
Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa.
Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into the tossing waters, and the white gulls sail and scream above them.
I try to lunch, but no place near will serve me.
If, then, European triumphs in culture have been greater, so, too, may her failures have been greater.
In other words, the deeper reasons for the triumph of European civilization lie quite outside and beyond Europe,--back in the universal struggles of all mankind.
What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880.
That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily.