essays, facts, and gures would do for the much denigrated black world of the twentieth century what Britannica and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie had done for the European world of the eighteenth century” (Gates & Appiah, 2007). He envisioned a four-volume, two-million-word Encyclopedia Africana, which would be a comprehensive knowledge of the history, cultures, and institutions of the people of African descent. The announcement of this project celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the “tercentenary of the Landing of the Negro” (Du Bois, 1909a). In a letter to Dr. Edward W. Blyden, a leading Pan-Africanist and scholar of Islam in Africa, Du Bois wrote that although the advisory board would consist of eminent “white scholars” that the “real work I want done by Negroes” (Du Bois, 1909b). In 1909, Du Bois invited over sixty Black scholars to participate in the project and wrote to at least fourteen white scholars for “co-operation and advice.”
Du Bois’ idea was first materialized by historian Carter G. Woodson who founded the Encyclopedia of the Negro with support from the Phelps-Stokes Fund. However, Woodson’s work did not deter Du Bois’ attempts. Through the 1930s and 1940s he worked to secure funding and build his editorial structure while arguing with Woodson who claimed that Du Bois stole the idea from him and was critical of Du Bois for only wanting Black scholars to contribute to the encyclopedia. In the beginning, Du Bois struggled to get his vision o the ground and published parts of it in journals. It wasn’t until 1960, when the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, invited him to move to the country and fund the project, that he started writing the encyclopedia on African soil (Gates, 2000). In 1962 at a conference to launch the encyclopedia, Du Bois expanded on his grand visionary project, “The encyclopedia hopes to eliminate the artificial boundaries created on this continent by colonial masters. Designations such as ‘British Africa,’ ‘French Africa,’ ‘Black Africa,’ ‘Islamic Africa’ too often serve to keep alive differences which in large part have been imposed on Africans by outsiders. The encyclopedia must have research units throughout West Africa, North Africa, East, Central and South Africa which will gather and record information for these geographical sections of
