Encyclopedia Africana

WEB Du Bois (1918)

The Encyclopedia Africana (short: Africana ) is an encyclopedia on the history of Africa and the African diaspora . Its founder was the African American scholar WEB Du Bois , who described its conception as “shamelessly Afrocentric”.

Background, content, issues

After Ghana's independence , Kwame asked Nkrumah Du Bois and his partner, the ballet director Shirley Graham, to oversee a major project entitled “Encyclopedia Africana”. Du Bois then began working on the encyclopedia in the early 1960s, but died shortly afterwards in Ghana.

The first edition of Africana (1999) consists of one volume. It is thematically divided into three parts and includes articles on Afro-American , Afro-Latin American and Africanist topics.

The second edition (2005, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah ) contains 3500 headwords in five volumes.

See also

• List of specialty encyclopedias

Web links

• Item selection
• Lecture

Footnotes

1. ↑ Ilan Halevi: Is the Pan-African Idea Dead? (Article) Heinrich Böll Foundation, October 11, 2010, accessed on September 14, 2014 (German).