Thread by @JonathonLEarle

It was an absolute pleasure to spend time in Ghana with the library of W.E.B. Du Bois, who moved to Ghana in his late 90s to work on the Encyclopedia Africana. I am researching how the Ganda intellectual Ernest Balintuma Kalibala shaped Du Bois’ arguments on Black liberation 1/4

& progress, which were reworked in Black history writing throughout interwar America. Kalibala, pictured here at the Namirembe Conference in 1954 (top row, second from right), earned a PhD from Harvard for his sociological research on Buganda: ‘The Social Structure of the 2/4

Baganda Tribe of East Africa’, (unpublished PhD, University of Harvard, 1946). Kalibala also worked alongside May Edel—who helped establish the anthropology department @RutgersU—to publish an English translation of Apolo Kaggwa’s Ekitabo Kye Mpisa Za Baganda in 1934. 3/4

Here we have a letter that Kalibala sent to Du Bois in 1925 on Buganda’s economic history and, as Kalibala saw it, Uganda’s importance in thinking more broadly about international Black progress following the First World War. 4/4

*Du Bois moved in his early 90s (93), not late.