In Her Own Right: Shirley Graham Du Bois in Ghana

In Her Own Right: Shirley Graham Du Bois in Ghana

 By Dr Nicole Gipson

 

Portrait in profile of Shirley Graham Du Bois, ca. 1945.  Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers

 

Introduction:

The burden and blessing of longevity is living beyond the ones we love, but Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896 -1977) would make those later years without William count. By the time Shirley Graham and WEB Du Bois met and then married in 1951 (she was 54 and he 83 and both were divorcés), Shirley Graham was already a playwright, author, teacher, champion of civil rights,  an accomplished musical score composer, a political activist, and card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.[1]  In David Du Bois: My Mother, Shirley Graham Du Bois   her son states: “one of the most important things to realize about my mother… is that she had a lifetime of accomplishments before she married WEB Du Bois.” Their later-day marriage, respective personal achievements, and public life as political activists ensured that there was more than their commitment to each other to consider. There was also the question of legacy, not just his but hers. Gerald Horne commented on this complex relationship at the ‘Black Women and the Radical Tradition conference in 2009’ which addressed The Life and Times of Shirley Graham Du Bois and her role as a historian and political activist who was writing history:

I think her marriage to WEB Du Bois in the early 1950s  in some ways led to what was the least fertile, creative period of her life because up until that point, she had been a single mother, she had been a single person, she had been devoting herself to her career, and to writing plays and writing history and writing novels and political activism and then by this time in the early 1950s, Du Bois was an old guy he had been indicted, so she had to be something of a caretaker. And then after he died then of course her life in a sense, I hope this is not impolitic to say but, in a sense, her life took off again.

This post explores Shirley Graham Du Bois’ unfailing activism in and for Ghana, a commitment which coexisted with her life as a wife, a widow, and a Ghanaian citizen in exile after the fall of the Nkrumah regime in 1966.

W. E. B. Du Bois with His Wife

(Original Caption) 1951-W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), American educator, writer, and editor with his fiancée Shirley Graham. Photograph, 1951.

 

 

Expatriation 1961

Kwame Nkrumah with WEB Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Ghana at Republic Day ceremony, July 1, 1960.[2]

In October 1961, the Du Boises arrived in Accra, Ghana. After a discrete yet comfortable hotel sejour, the Ghanaian government housed the couple in a seven-room house high on a hill at the heart of one acre of land. This lavish gesture underscored the esteem to which the Du Boises were held by the President of the First Republic, “Osagyefo” Kwame Nkrumah.[3] Their new life in Ghana sharply contrasted with their life in the United States. In America and abroad, Shirley Graham’s Communist Party membership, overt criticism of US foreign policy in her articles, and travel to countries such as Cuba and China made her the target of US state surveillance. Meanwhile W.E.B.’s radicalism, support for the Soviet Union, and indictment trial as an “unregistered agent of a foreign power” not only overshadowed his achievements as an activist, leading scholar, and leader in the African American community but made him and his wife targets for national and international covert surveillance by American intelligence and U.S. passport invalidation.[4] The choice for the couple between second-class citizenship, harassment, and their persona non grata status in America versus a hero’s welcome abroad, was easily made. The Du Boises decided to come to Ghana, to allow him to work on his Encyclopedia Americana project. Ironically, their immigration to Ghana and subsequent acquisition of Ghanaian citizenship only improved their status back in the US for the contingent of activists, such as the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who believed that the civil rights movement should “shift to a more international perspective.”[5]

Unfortunately, over the next two years, WEB Du Bois’ declining health would gradually confine him to his bed and cast Shirley Graham to the role of his caretaker until his death on August 27, 1963. At President Nkrumah’s behest, a state funeral for WEB Du Bois was held on August 29-30, 1963. For Shirley, now the widow of one of the most important scholar/activists of the twentieth century, there was only one way to silence the whispers of grief – a return to her professional life.

Broadcast Days, 1964 – 1966

Puppets at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation studios in Japan. Ghana T.V.: Trip to Japan, 1964. MC476 Du Bois PD.84, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.[6]

 

Graham Du Bois’ appointment as director of Ghana TV on February 1, 1964, was an opportunity to enter a new phase of her life as a state-appointed leader. Throwing herself into the preparation for this new role with brio, she began a Ghanaian government sponsored regimen of international travel to study television broadcasting infrastructure in Great Britain, France, Italy, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Japan. However, she remained determined to implement “a specifically Ghanaian approach to Television organization and programing”.[7] The first fifteen months of her stint as director “went into constructing, organizing, planning, training personnel and all the other activities necessary for building television in an ambitious, but un-developed country.” [8] She also had a very clear vision for Ghana TV, one that was in line with the Nkrumah regime, “[t]he television we are planning will be a tremendous channel for education, for increased understanding and for developing and unifying the peoples of Africa. It will [lift] the African personality before the world in all its beauty and dignity.”[9]

When Ghana Television, which was part of a state-owned radio and television broadcasting house known as Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), first went on air in 1965, Graham Du Bois was of one two women in key leadership positions. Genoveva Marais, originally from South Africa became the GBC’s director of television programs. Both women had clear intentions to contribute to the Ghanaian project of nation-building through their new roles. In its early days, Ghana Television was unapologetically anti-colonial, Pan-African, and socialist but was it feminist? Jennifer Blaylock argues that “while Graham Du Bois and Marais’ media practice rarely addressed gender inequality specifically, their work as female broadcast leaders set a precedent for decolonial feminist futures even as the coloniality of gender extended into Ghana broadcasting during the independence period.”[10] Although  Graham Du Bois  plan was to build a broadcasting station that was  “indigenous” and opposed to racial capitalism, Blaylock argues that Ghana Television, “would be used to liberate African women” and “demonstrated the possibilities of gender equality in media production.”[11] However we may contextualize her today, the fact remains that Graham Du Bois was a political hire whose destiny was inextricably linked to the fate of the Nkrumah regime.

How should we remember Shirley Graham Du Bois in those broadcast days?  Was she the welfare activist who weaponized her directorship at Ghana TV in the fight for African unity, and against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism? Was she the Ghanaian citizen who engaged in this struggle, armed with the ammunition of Ghanaian and African traditions and socialist political theory? Or was she merely an “old-style Stalinist communist,” with a controlling nature, living a pampered lifestyle owing to the spoils of cronyism? [12] Whoever she had become after WEB Du Bois’ death, her political convictions (which were not out of line with the current regime), her tireless work at the GBC, her role as matriarch, and a close and trusted confidant of Nkrumah, made her an ideal champion of the state – until February 24, 1966.

 

Exile

No figures have been made public, but the number of men and women in prison at this writing must amount to several thousand. To those who were taken during the first week have been added university professors, teachers, recalled ambassadors, officers of various African bureaus and anyone who by word or deed has done anything to promote the continental union of Africa or socialism.[13]

 

Seven months after the GBC’s first broadcast the project of creating Ghanaian socialist television ended with a coup d’état. While under house arrest, she chronicled the coup as it unfolded. The above extract is from her account, “What Happened in Ghana? The Inside Story,” published by Freedomways, in the summer edition of 1966. In this same issue, we   discover a few more disturbing facts: the coup was not bloodless; it was executed with a logistical precision that suggested the operation was carried off by “directed intelligence from outside;” and this intelligence service had many agents working on the ground inside the country to facilitate the coup.[14] Graham Du Bois attributes the coup to several factors,  Nkrumah’s call for African unity and the threat that a united Africa represented to imperialists and neo-colonialists; the knock-on effects of the austerity measures in the government’s Seven-Year Development Plan; and Nkrumah’s “impertinence” in accepting an invitation from Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, a gesture that could have been interpret as the arrogance of a black man trying to “extend his influence to Asia!”[15]

Graham Du Bois’ escape from Ghana to Cairo in 1966, did not deter her activism. She simply reasserted her advocacy in exile. While speaking at UCLA in 1970, she reflected on her departure from Ghana and her commitment to staying in Africa, “I wanted to remain in Africa, felt that I was needed in Africa and I felt that I needed Africa, so I went to Egypt and this has been my residence ever since.”[16] She also continued to travel, give speeches, fulfil her responsibilities as founding editor of Freedomways and publish her analysis of the state of Africa and the existential threats to independent African nations.[17] The Shirley Graham Du Bois Collection in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has documented Graham Du Bois’ life in exile as well as her life as an “expatriate, activist, and participant in African liberation struggles” more broadly. The documentation on her stint in Africa provides a window into these prolific years and makes a valuable addition to the larger collection that chronicles the many lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois.

 

 

 

Footnotes

[1] For more information about WEB Du Bois see: W.E.B. Du Bois: A Recorded Autobiography (1961); Cornel West – The Historical Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois. For more information on Shirley Graham’s life before and after marrying WEB Du Bois see: Gerald Horne, Race Woman the Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000).; See also: Alesia E. McFadden, “The Artistry and Activism of Shirley Graham Du Bois: A Twentieth Century African American Torchbearer,” African American Studies Commons (dissertation, 2009), https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations.

 

[2] Kwame Nkrumah with WEB Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Ghana at Republic Day ceremony, July 1, 1960.  Pan-African News Wire Photo File.

[3] For more information about Kwame Nkrumah see the special issue: From Colonization to Globalization: The Political and Intellectual Legacies of Kwame Nkrumah in the Journal of Pan African Studies (2012).

[4] Although he was acquitted, he was denied a passport. This travel ban was lifted in 1958. He used his restored travel privileges to travel to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China.

[5] Horne, Race Woman the Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, 170.

 

[6] Jennifer Blaylock, “New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana,” Boundary 2 49, no. 1 (2022): 195–230, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615459, 208.

[7] Ibid., 206.

[8] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Mikhail Kotov, “Correspondence 1965,” November 7, 1965. MC 476 Box 18.15, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

[9] Horne, 178. In Shirley Graham Du Bois to Gladys, 16 December 1964.

[10] Jennifer Blaylock, “The Mother, the Mistress, and the Cover Girls,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 1 (2022): 102–33, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.102.

[11] Ibid., 102 -103.

[12] Horne, 180-181.

[13] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “What Happened in Ghana? The Inside Story,” Freedomways 6, no. 3 (Summer, 1966): 201–23, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28036996, 217.

[14] Graham Du Bois, “What happened in Ghana?”, 217-221.; See also: Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Said to have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana: Ex-C.I.A. Man’s Book Attack on Embassy Proposed Stockwell Defends Book.” New York Times, May 09, 1978. https://bris.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/c-i-said-have-aided-plotters-who-overthrew/docview/123716966/se-2.

[15] Graham Du Bois, “What happened in Ghana?” 210-213.; See also: Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Panaf, 1965).

[16] “Shirley Graham Du Bois Speaking at UCLA 11/13/1970,” UCLA Communication Archive, March 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3mhM3bHCZ8.; See also: Shirley Graham Du Bois on Imperialists and Neo-colonialism.

[17] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Egypt Is Africa,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 7 (1970): 20–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1970.11644164.; Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Egypt Is Africa (Conclusion),” The Black Scholar 2, no. 1 (1970): 28–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1970.11430994.; Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Together We Struggle; Together We Win,” The Black Scholar 6, no. 7 (1975): 36–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1975.11413708.; Shirley Graham Du Bois, “The Liberation of Africa: Power, Peace and Justice,” The Black Scholar 2, no. 6 (1971): 32–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1971.11431043.; Shirley Graham Du Bois, “The Struggle in Lesotho,” The Black Scholar 2, no. 3 (1970): 25–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1970.11431012.