African American Travel Narratives from Abroad by Gary Totten

Author:Gary Totten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781613763636
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

As in other passages in Du Bois’s travel narratives, both the natural and human beauties of Africa are emphasized here, while the reference to the “void” of Africa is a curious parallel to imperialistic representations of Africa as a blank space on a map.

At the end of the piece, Du Bois sustains his exotic portrait of Africa, in contrast to its “taming” or modernization:

The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood. . . . Africa is the Spiritual Frontier of human kind—oh the wild and beautiful adventures of its taming! But oh! the cost thereof—the endless, endless cost [of turning it into a modernized society]. Then will come a day . . . when there will spring in Africa a civilization without coal, without noise, where machinery will sing and never rush and roar, and where men will sleep and think and dance and lie prone before the rising sons, and women will be happy.

Du Bois looks forward to the time when the iron routine of labor will have ceased to exist: “The objects of life will be revolutionized. Our duty will not consist in getting up at seven, working furiously for six, ten and twelve hours, eating in sullen ravenousness or extraordinary repletion. No—We shall dream the day away and in cool dawns, in little swift hours, do all our work.” In the essay Du Bois mingles travel impressions with the political and cultural work of travel and uses his romanticized vision of what Africa is and could remain to argue against its “taming.”55 Interestingly, the same iron routine that Stillman uses in her essay to argue for black strength Du Bois uses to argue for civil rights and the freedom to indulge in leisure activities, that is, to achieve the ability to fully embrace something similar to the tourist experience.

Du Bois’s writing about Africa in the June 1924 Crisis is more overtly focused on political and cultural issues. He writes of the challenges of “pioneering” in Liberia and provides sociological observations of African manners and family life. He critiques culture in the United States, noting that it has occurred to him, when “see[ing] the awkward and ignorant missionaries sometimes sent to teach the heathen, that it would be an excellent thing if a few natives could be sent here [to the United States] to teach manners to black and white.”56 Du Bois focuses on the African individual, but not in the sensual or exoticized manner in which Stillman portrays the glistening black body or even in the same way that Du Bois himself depicts the sensual African body in his other travel pieces, as we have seen. In contrast to Wells, who actively deploys the black female body to enact cultural work, when Du Bois and Stillman turn their attention away from the spectacle of black bodies, they are able to focus more clearly on the cultural work of travel.

Fauset’s travel writing in The Crisis reveals some of the same characteristics, including the tendency to exoticize black bodies.

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