The W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation (WEBDBMF) is getting ready to celebrate the 157th birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois. On Feb. 23, 2025, they plan to host activities and events to honor Du Bois’s legacy at the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre for Pan African Culture in Accra, Ghana — Du Bois’s home there.
Japhet Aryiku, WEBDBMF’s executive director, said their event is one of many Du Bois celebrations scheduled for this year. The nonprofit organization will also commemorate the 40th anniversary of the creation of the Du Bois Centre on June 22 and the 62nd anniversary of the passing of Du Bois on Aug. 27, 2025.
“For these events, we invite the Du Bois scholars from the U.S. to come to Ghana for them to have a symposium,” said Aryiku. “And we invite the students from all the universities in Ghana, as many students as we can fit. They can all come for a symposium.”
Since Sept. 22, 2023, when WEBDBMF signed an agreement with Ghana’s government to take over management and development of the Du Bois Centre, WEBDBMF board members have been devising plans to raise funds for renovations. Although it has become a major tourist site, the Centre has been deteriorating. Academic gowns, textiles, artifacts, objects, books, and papers authored by Du Bois have been stored in areas lacking climate controls, subjecting them to environmental conditions that threaten their preservation.
The government of Ghana was mandated to maintain the Du Bois Centre, but funds to do so have been inconsistent. The Centre has had to rely on receiving whatever was available to be allocated. The opportunity for the Du Bois Centre to be managed by a nonprofit will allow it to have consistent care — and programming to broaden its audience.
Du Bois in Ghana
The Du Bois Centre receives an average of three to five busloads of tourists daily, said Aryiku, but those tourists tend to be U.S. Americans. Most Ghanaians do not know who Du Bois was. “One of the biggest challenges that we have on our hands right now is to educate the Ghanaian public about the presence of Du Bois in Ghana,” Aryiku said. “When you ask any Ghanaian, ‘Have you been to the Du Bois Centre?,’ they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was there.’ ‘What for?’ There are three things that happen at the Centre because it’s a very large campus: They rent the ground for weddings, or for funerals, or for birthday parties … so the Ghanaian that you see … says (they have) been to the Du Bois Centre, it is because they attended one of these events. We have to do a lot of community engagement to talk about the presence of Du Bois in Ghana.”
Du Bois was a prominent civil rights activist, writer, and historian who spent most of his life in the United States., but he also traveled extensively and both documented and advocated for an end to the racism faced by people of African descent globally. As he grew older, Du Bois lost faith in the prospects for racial progress in the United States, so when he was offered the opportunity to relocate to Africa, he accepted and became a citizen of Ghana.
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence in Africa, and quickly won the admiration of activist African Americans. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, encouraged Black Americans to play a role in the new sovereign nation, which could be one of the reasons figures like Du Bois are not well known by Ghanaians today, Aryiku surmised.
After Du Bois’s death, Nkrumah wanted to memorialize him properly, but “unfortunately for Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah, the CIA staged a coup in 1966 and overthrew Kwame Nkrumah. Anything and anybody that was connected with Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy was persona non grata in Ghana. They did a very good job in suppressing the legacy of Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, that was the issue, so, Du Bois was forgotten; the legacy of Du Bois in Africa was suppressed as a result of the 1966 coup d’etat.”
Scholar and African patriot
So far, WEBDBMF has been awarded a four-year, $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that will be used to begin work on restoration of the bungalow where Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham, lived. Further funding will be designated for construction efforts in 2027, and by 2028, the renovated Du Bois Centre should be ready for public access. WEBDBMF is hoping to conduct a re-dedication of the Du Bois Centre on Jan. 1 or 2, 2029.
For this year’s celebration, the nonprofit has invited Ghana’s President John Mahama to come and lay a wreath on behalf of the people of Ghana. Having the president available will echo DuBois’s initial invitation from Nkrumah to move to Ghana as the historian worked to complete his “Encyclopedia Africana.”
Du Bois died in 1963, on the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr.-led “March on Washington.” The Amsterdam News featured an article written by the playwright William Branch on what it was like to be in Ghana, with Du Bois’s wife Shirley Graham and other activists, when the activist died.
Branch went to Du Bois’s home — now the Du Bois Centre — to sit with Graham the day after Du Bois’ death. He was present as she listened to the Ghana radio program feature that paid tribute to Du Bois. “When the commentator spoke of Dr. Du Bois’s arrest and indictment in the U.S. in 1951 on alleged grounds of ‘failure to register as a foreign agent’ (a charge of which he was acquitted), a cloud passed over Mrs. Du Bois’s face, as if in remembrance of that bitter day when government agents had actually handcuffed the then 84-year-old scholar when he appeared to answer the indictment.
“She brightened, however, at the mention of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah and his expression of deep regret and personal loss. Speaking of the late historian and sociologist as a ‘friend and father to me,’ President Nkrumah had said:
“‘I asked Dr. Du Bois to come to Ghana to pass the evening of his life with us and also to spend his remaining years in compiling an ‘Encyclopedia Africana,’ a project which is part of his whole intellectual life.
“‘We mourn his death. May he live in our memory not only as a distinguished scholar, but a great African patriot. Dr. Du Bois is a phenomenon. May he rest in peace.’”