May Kosba, “Writing Africa for Africans: Du Bois, Egyptian Africanists, and the Encyclopedia Africana Project Between Dreams and Disruptions,” Arab Studies Journal, Fall 2025, XXXIII, No. 1−2
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article?
May Kosba (MK): In graduate school, I came across a letter exchange between Du Bois and Abdul Aziz Abdul Haqq Hilmi in the Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Hilmi, who was the director of the UAR Cultural Center in Accra in 1962, had been invited by Du Bois to join the Encyclopedia Africana Project (EAP). I was mesmerized by the infectious energy and optimism in their correspondence, and their shared desire to unite African scholars and recognize their agency in producing knowledge about their continent, histories, and lived experiences. Even more inspiring was Hilmi’s elaborate response to Du Bois, in which he laid out Egyptian political notions of Africanness and illustrated how modern Egyptians fit in it. I remember eagerly searching for Du Bois’s reply, which came through his wife, Shirley, at first. She wrote that Hilmi’s words had “so lifted and encouraged him that . . . this letter has had much to do with his recovery [from illness].” That discovery was a triumphant moment for me. Since the beginning of graduate school, I had been searching for intellectual connections between Egyptians and Africans in the diaspora, particularly WEB Du Bois, given his groundbreaking work on race and Blackness and his legacy as a pan-African pioneer. Before finding these letters, I had only encountered the Encyclopedia Africana in African American and African diasporic literature, where Egypt’s presence is usually confined to its ancient past. Because I could not fit this material into my dissertation, I became obsessed with the idea that these letters needed to see the light. They tell an untold tale about Egyptian belonging in and to Africa, as Arabic-speaking African people. This story must be situated within the larger pan-African vision that, as Du Bois put it, unites Africans “beyond vague notions of race.” I was curious about what Du Bois means by the vagueness of race and the tone and language he used in those letters and speeches he delivered before his passing.
I was also drawn to the question of African diasporic social belonging in Egypt. The Du Boises themselves exhibited a strong sense of social, cultural, and emotional rootedness that reflected in their writings and relationships. This sensibility is evident in David DuBois’s autobiographical novel …And Bid Him Sing and in Shirley Du Bois’s Gamal Abdel Nasser: Son of the Nile, where she insisted on indigenizing Nasser: “It seems to me that Nasser and Egypt were inexorably bound together, that destiny shaped his role––a role which he accepted because he could not do otherwise. It is significant to note that in Egypt’s long history, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the first indigenous Egyptian Head of State in more than two thousand years.” Beyond romanticizing 1960s Egypt or the Du Boises’ political notions of Blackness and ancient Egypt, these Egyptian-African diasporic connections remain understudied and underappreciated, and their stories must be told.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the article address?
MK: I used a multidisciplinary approach combining intellectual history, discourse analysis, and archival research to trace the afterlives of two competing encyclopedia projects: The Encyclopedia Africana Project and Africana. The article aims to explore an overlooked dimension of pan-Africanism by centering Egyptian pan-Africanists’ intellectual and political investment in the making of a shared pan-African project. Through letter exchanges between Du Bois and Egyptian pan-Africanists including Murad Kamel, Abdel Malik Auda, and AA Hilmi, this article engages transnational political discourses on race and Blackness in Arab African and non-Arab African consciousness. It also focuses on the extent to which Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Africana (1999) project undermines the EAP. I aim to situate Egyptian pan-Africanists’ race consciousness and enthusiasm about this project within the encyclopedia’s larger history as an African and African diasporic project, amid competing representations of Africa, and complicating the question of who gets to speak for Africans. Uncovering Egypt’s overlooked contribution to the EAP and Du Bois’s evolving views on race reveal enduring tensions between continental and diasporic frameworks of African knowledge production. This article locates in Du Bois’s later writings on race a dynamism that is often overlooked or dismissed. Without seeking to overdetermine the meanings drawn from his late speeches and correspondences, these texts nonetheless offer a window into the intellectual complexity and flexibility that defined Du Bois’s lifelong engagement with race. Additionally, the article examines the status of the EAP volumes in general—and the Egyptian volume in particular—while tracing the factors that hindered their completion beyond the chronic lack of financial resources that ultimately affected the entire project.
J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MK: This project builds on my broader research interests, which seek to investigate Egyptian identity and race-consciousness in the Black African and African diasporic imagination, showing how Islam and Arabness shape the image-making of both Egyptians and Africans. Amid paradoxical forms of anti-Blackness in modern Egypt, contemporary discourses on race often highlight the country’s forgotten legacy of slavery and its colonial aspirations in Africa through a Eurocentric, orientalist lens—one that frames Islam and Arabness as racial identities antithetical to Blackness, thereby reinforcing Afro-Arab tensions. While these histories are of the utmost importance and deserve our careful and thorough analysis, scholarship in these fields has often overlooked the liminality of Egyptian subjectivity and race consciousness, as well as the complexity of Egypt’s racial formation—one that does not neatly map onto American- or Atlantic-centric conceptions of Blackness and Whiteness. Moreover, these scholars have neglected the epistemological and ontological erasure of and discursive violence practiced against modern Egyptian subjectivity as a result of this discourse. This framing has led scholars in multiple fields to treat modern Egypt as an Arab or “Middle Eastern” nation—geographically African, but ethnically Arab. My work challenges this epistemological and ontological split between ancient and modern Egypt, and Africa and the Middle East, a divide institutionalized through academic disciplines and political agendas. Contesting declensionist narratives that erase modern Egyptians’ Africanness, I interrogate Egyptian race-consciousness and the layered histories of race-making in Egypt, moving beyond the paradoxical colonized/colonizer binary to reveal a more intricate landscape of identity and race-consciousness.
This article expands on my dissertation, The Race Question: Egyptian Intellectualism on the Periphery of the African Diaspora, which examines how the triangulated effect of Islam, Arabness, and anti-colonial nationalism shaped modern Egyptian perceptions of race and Blackness. It shows how these dynamics informed an Egyptian anti-colonial identity that entertained an affinity with whiteness while resisting colonization. As my work explores intellectual pan-African connections between Egyptians and other Africans on the continent and in the diaspora, the article is an extension of my peer-reviewed article, “…And Bid Him Sing: Egyptian Race Consciousness in African Diasporic Memory,” published in Memory, Storytelling, and Space in Égypte/Monde arabe (2021).
J: Who do you hope will read this article, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MK: This article is particularly relevant for readers who are interested in Egyptian perspectives on their relationship to their Africanness and their intellectual connections with African diasporic figures such as Du Bois. Specifically, I hope this article contributes to existing literature on the EAP and on pan-Africanism, as well as to scholarship on Egyptian nationalism and pan-African thought in the 1960s. More broadly, I hope this article reaches readers—scholars and non-scholars alike—who are grappling with the ethical and political stakes of writing counternarratives centering race at a time of profound global crises. I am writing and publishing this work in an extraordinary historical moment, one marked by the horrors of genocide and displacement in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, and other interconnected global struggles for freedom and justice—atrocities we witness daily across social media, often with little power to intervene. As scholars, we must confront the uneasy truth that writing can be both an act of kindness and an act of aggression. My article, situated at the intersection of African, African American, and African diaspora studies as well as SWANA studies, aims to speak across these disciplinary and political divides. Finally, I hope my work will serve as a bridge—inviting dialogue rather than division, and affirming a shared struggle that transcends race, color, ethnicity, religion, language, class, geography, and nationality, on the continent and beyond.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MK: I am currently working on turning my dissertation into a book, tentatively titled Between Black and Arab: Modern Egyptian Race Consciousness and Islam in African and African Diasporic Imagination. The book examines how religion, culture, and politics shape African writers’ representations of the self in relation to Egypt, and how these portrayals negotiate discourses on race and ethnicity, indigeneity, slavery, and the dichotomy of Blackness and Arabness as constructs on the continent.
In “Can (Contemporary) Egyptians Speak?: Articulating Egyptian Arabness and Africanness, Deciphering a Postcolonial (Race) Consciousness,” currently under review, I present an interdisciplinary analysis of Arab and African presences in contemporary Egyptian cultural identity through Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of cultural identity in the African diaspora and using his theory of articulation, experimentally, as a medium to articulate (connect) contemporary Egyptian Africanness with other modes of Africanness on the continent and across the diaspora.
Excerpt from the article (from pages 14 to 17)
Du Bois and Egyptian Africanists
David Graham DuBois, Du Bois’s stepson and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s son, played a crucial role in strengthening pan-African alliances that extended beyond Nasser. He helped connect his stepfather with Egyptian scholars. On 28 February 1961, writing from Cairo’s ‘Ataba district, David described Egyptian scholars’ curiosity about the encyclopedia and inquired about potential collaboration. In response, on 13 March 1961, Du Bois sent him the project outline and requested a list of Egyptian collaborators. Notably absent from that list was Hilmi Sha‘rawi, a prominent Egyptian leftist and Africanist who wrote extensively about the intertwined histories and futures of Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic-speaking Africans. Sha‘rawi maintained strong ties with the Du Bois family. His autobiographical writings and introduction to As‘ad Halim’s Arabic translation of The Souls of Black Folk highlight this bond. In Arab Revolutions and Africa (al-Thawrat al-‘Arabiyya wa-Ifriqiyya), Sha‘rawi reflected on his formative years in Nasser’s Egypt and his relationship with David DuBois and Shirley Graham Du Bois:
They included me in their Nkrumahist leftism, along with other Egyptian leftists, when they arrived in Egypt after Du Bois’s passing in Accra in 1963. Together, we read his poem about the Suez and the pharaoh of the Nile [Nasser]’s victory over the colonial tripartite invasion of Egypt in 1956. We discussed Du Bois’s philosophy of African unity, communism. . . . To us, Du Bois was a teacher, a father figure, and an unwavering Marxist internationalist without reservations about Soviet ties. What troubled me then, and still does now, is his limited influence on the continent, despite being the true founder of the concept of African unity.
After the 1966 coup in Ghana, Shirley Du Bois moved to Egypt, settling in an apartment by the Nile, across from what used to be the Shepheard Hotel, where Du Bois had stayed in 1962. Sha‘rawi recalled her warmth, saying she “made me feel like I was part of their family. David DuBois later lived in the same apartment before passing it on to an Egyptian prior to his death.”
Du Bois wrote to ‘A’isha ‘Abd al-Rahman, known as Bint al-Shati’, a prominent Egyptian writer and professor of Arabic literature at Ain Shams University. Addressing her as “Dear sir,” he requested recommendations for scholars and institutions interested in the project, enclosing the outline. The archive is silent on how Du Bois obtained her name and mailing address, and does not include a response. Du Bois also corresponded with Hasan Ibrahim Hasan, an Egyptian historian of Islamic history, on the recommendation of Henry Frederick Charles (later Abdullahi) Smith of Nigeria’s University College of Ibadan. Smith, a British scholar of West African history, as Ousmane Kane notes, was among those who “challenged the Eurocentric nineteenth-century historiography of West Africa.” In his letter to Hasan, Du Bois stressed his aim to “avoid the vague generalizations of race and to cover the inhabitants of Africa and their descendants in other parts of the world.” He noted that many scholars from Britain, Europe, the United States, and the West Indies had shown interest and that he was “anxious to know persons and organizations with whom to correspond in Egypt and the Arab world.” Like ‘Abd al-Rahaman, Hasan may never have replied.
In April, David DuBois recommended more contacts, including Ahmad Abu Zayd of Alexandria University’s Sociology Department, calling him the “leading Egyptian/African scholar in Egypt today.” David believed Abu Zayd could help connect Du Bois with other scholars. He also recommended ‘Abd al-Malik ‘Awda, a political scientist, and Murad Kamil, a philologist and Ethiopianist, both at Cairo University. Acting on this advice, Du Bois sent letters and an outline to all three. In his 28 April 1961 letter to Abu Zayd, he reiterated his commitment to “avoiding the vague division by race” and called for Egyptian contributions that would highlight the “history of the Nile Valley and its connection with the peoples of Africa.” This history has been “misinterpreted by modern scientists” and distorted by white supremacist efforts to sever Egypt’s ties to Africa. Du Bois’s letter went unanswered, possibly due to misspelling, addressing him as “Dr. Aghmed Abul Zeid.”
In May 1961, Du Bois began receiving responses, marking a turning point in his intellectual exchange with Egyptian pan-Africanists. Kamil stressed the encyclopedia’s urgency: “it is about time African scholars were given a chance to talk about themselves, their history, and their cultural achievements.” ‘Awda expressed “great pleasure and pride” in hearing from “the father of Panafricanism.” ‘Awda had spent the preceding five years researching African political studies, focusing on political change, and stressing the importance of studying “its historical economic cultural and social evolution.” He saw the EAP as a vital scientific contribution to documenting the evolution of an “emergent Africa.” ‘Awda shared Du Bois’s belief that beyond its cultural and education impact, the project was essential because Africans “needed to strengthen their sense of purpose and unity for the future.” He asserted his sincere interest in contributing since “African studies have not been always scientifically and objectively presented.” In 1963, ‘Awda continued this correspondence with Alphaeus Hunton. He reported that Egypt had formed a committee of one hundred transdisciplinary scholars to collaborate with a regional body, including Sudan, as one of six committees working under Accra’s All-African Continuing Committee. The secretariat had proposed this structure on 13 March 1963. The letter also included the names and credentials of scholars who would lead this academic effort. One of the most notable exchanges occurred in 1962 between Du Bois and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Abd al-Haqq Hilmi, director of the United Arab Republic (UAR) Cultural Centre in Accra.