The Ones Who Came: Du Bois, Angelou, and Accra in the Sixties

The Ones Who Came: Du Bois, Angelou, and Accra in the Sixties

Nkrumah's Accra in the early 1960s was the most exciting address in the Black world, and people came.

W. E. B. Du Bois came at 93, at Nkrumah's invitation, to direct the Encyclopedia Africana — the project he had wanted his whole life. He took Ghanaian citizenship. He died in Accra on 27 August 1963, the night before the March on Washington; the news was announced to the crowd on the Mall the next day. He is buried at his house in Accra, and his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois beside him.

Maya Angelou came, and worked at the University of Ghana, and wrote later — in All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes — the most honest account anyone has left of what it is to arrive in Africa as an African American and find that you are, in a way you did not expect, a foreigner. She was there when Malcolm X visited in 1964, and that visit changed the direction of his thinking about race, colour and internationalism in ways he acted on for the rest of his short life.

Others: George Padmore, the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist, adviser to Nkrumah, buried at Christiansborg. Julian Mayfield. Pauli Murray. A whole community of American expatriates in Accra who called themselves, half-joking, the Revolutionist Returnees.

They came for a project bigger than one visitor or one institution. Accra became a meeting place where the diaspora could learn from Ghana, argue with itself and imagine return as a political act.

If you visit Ghana. The W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture, Cantonments, Accra — his house, his library, and his grave.