Du Bois’ Andromeda Complex

The year was 1911; W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk had apparently found itself on the international scene and drew a response from J. E. Casley Hayford, one of coastal Africa's most prominent theorists of Ethiopianism—a social-cultural movement that was partly religious and centered Ethiopia as the redeemer of the African race. Hayford wrote in his manifesto, Ethiopia Unbound, a critical response to Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, and regarded the theory as “one of the most pathetic passages in the history of human thought.” Du Bois perceived “a world which wields him no true self-consciousness […] this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American and Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” This thinking apparently sat in sharp contrast with Hayford's self-conscious Ethiopianism. Hayford's retort was piercing:

Hayford's critique of Du Bois at this time differs very little from Carter G. Woodson's indictment decades later in which he proclaimed that, ostensibly unlike Du Bois, he didn't “accept the gifts of the Greeks.” This, of course, was in response to Du Bois’ position that he must make use of the money, and, subsequently, the opinions that came from with that money, being offered by whites in order to create the Encyclopedia of the Negro. To be fair, Du Bois too was quite critical about the project and viewed the whites who headed it as “the enemy.”