Présence Africaine Editions

William Leo Hansberry : Pioneer Afro-American Africanist

Author(s): Joseph E. HARRIS
Source: Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, No. 110 (2e TRIMESTRE 1979), pp. 167-174
Published by: Présence Africaine Editions
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24349929
Accessed: 16-02-2022 21:09 UTC

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Joseph E. HARRIS

William Leo Hansberry :

Pioneer Afro-American Africanisf

David Hume, the influential Scottish philosopher, once wrote :

« I am apt to suspect the Negroes (...) to he naturally

inferior to the White. There never was a civilized, nation
of any other complexion than white, nor even any indivi
dual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious
manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences ».

George Hegel, the German philosopher, once noted :

« (...) it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes

the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable
of no development or culture, and as we have seen them
at this day, such have they always been (...) At this point,
we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no
historical part of the world; it has no movement or
development to exhibit ».

A great landmark in historiography occurred when William

Graham Summer of Yale University, Josiah Strong, the popular
American historian of the nineteenth century, John Burgess,
William Dunning, U.C.B. Philips and others at Columbia Univer
sity spread the stigma of black inferiority. The American his
torian, Harvy Wish, in his book, American Historians, for

(*) Most of this article is based on Hansberry's private papers, inter

views with his family, friends, and colleagues and edited in Joseph E. Har
ris : Pillars in Ethiopian History : The William Leo Hansberry African
History Notebook, Volume I and Africa and. Africans, Vol. II (Howard
University Press, 1974 and 1977).
This article was read at the African Studies Association Conference in
Baltimore, Maryland, on November 4, 1978.

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 168 PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE

example, credited the Burges

convincing U.S. textbook writers of the inferior capacity of
Blacks.
The above are illustrations of the low regard professional
historians had for African history up to about the 1960s. This
means that the profession recognized no African historiography.
How, then, may we discuss such a thing for the early twenteith
century ? The answer is clear, of course : one refutes those
quotations, disallows the general assessment of the historical
profession at that time, and proceeds to present historians like
Hansberry as pioneers in the field, here in the United States.
One other comment is relevant. The profession of history
has undergone certain changes that, in a sense, have vindicated
the approach of Hansberry and others. The dominant thrust
of historiography up to about a dozen years ago was focused
on the powerful countries and, within these countries, on in
fluential social groups. This translated into Western European
countries, the United States, the Soviet Union and a few others :
strong political and economic groups were the focus within
them. We are now witnessing a period in which a new crop of
historians not only are concentrating on Third World countries
(for want of a better description), but are also studying the
slaves as well as the masters, the colonized and the colonizers,
the rich and the poor, etc.
In short, the overwhelming majority of the world's people,
long invisible or blurred on the pages of recorded history, are
now receiving part of the center stage of professional and
popular history. In the area of African history, Hansberry
played a prominent rôle as a pioneer.

*
* *

As a youngster in Alcorn A & M College in Mississippi, H

berry was already « tempted » to question the general th
that, prior to European discovery in the fifteenth centu
« Black Africa was altogether devoid of any history of ser
academic concern ». Then, in 1916, he was introduced to t
little-known book by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro, which inclu
several chapters on ancient and medieval Africa. Hansberry w
thus inspired to strike out on the unexplored path of Afr
historiography which led him to Harvard College where
received his B.A. in 1921 and M.A. in 1932, both in history,
with a good distribution of courses in anthropology and archaeo
logy.

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WILLIAM LEO HANSBERRY... 169

In spite of Harvard degrees, Hansbe

He was unable to pursue training i
there was no program designed for
Hansberry embarked on a long endeavor of self-education. He
began to collect whatever sources he could in several languages
— English, French, German and Arabic in particular — and
this required a reading knowledge of some languages and the
employment of translators for others. He also compiled a huge
repository of photographs and slides.
The more Hansberry taught himself about Africa, the more
he began to articulate a perspective which would guide his
research and teaching for some forty years. His search for
courses and sources on Africa soon revealed the virtual absence
of any efforts on the part of white and black Americans to
examine Africa's past. He was distressed that black schools and
colleges knew so little about recent studies on Africa and even
less about older works. It was in 1921, therefore, that he staked
out a major professional goal. He distributed a statement an
nouncing his intention of visiting several schools and colleges
in order to « bring to the attention of teachers and students the
significance of ancient African civilization ».
This was consonant with the thinking of a number of Afro
American historians of that time. Indeed, Hansberry's announce
ment was sponsored by the Association for the Study of Negro
Life and History (later renamed Afro-American Life and History)
founded and supervised by Carter G. Woodson, a prolific black
American historian who wrote books and articles on African
history.
The 1920s were also the time of the Harlem Renaissance
when Blacks affirmed their African origin and heritage. The
great Pan-African Conferences, launched by Du Bois, also conven
ed during the 1920s. In fact, at the Fourth Pan-African Con
ference in New York in 1927, Hansberry discussed African his
tory and its relevance for Blacks. He thus pioneered a Pan-Afri
can approach to the subject.
In short, Hansberry was among the vanguard of the small
group of Afro-Americans developing a perspective for the study,
teaching, and writing of African history. But more than his
colleagues, he had worked more diligently with the sources and
maintained an academic base.

That academic base was the Department of History at Howard

University where Hansberry received an appointment as instruc
tor in 1922 to establish a series of courses on « Negro Civili
zations of Ancient Africa ». Those courses constituted the Afri
can Civilization Section of the History Department at Howard.

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 170 PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE

I therefore conclude, on the basis of the information I have,

that this was the first program of African Studies in this
country, the United States.
If those courses on Africa were in the History Department,
why do I regard them as constituting a program ? In the first
place, the label « civilization » was a conscious choice to denote
an interdisciplinary approach, another dimension of histo
riography as pioneered by Hansberry. In this case, his Harvard
training in anthropology and archaeology enabled him to launch
such an interdisciplinary program. The first three courses were :

a) Negro peoples in the cultures and civilizations of prehis

toric AND PROTOHISTORIC TIMES.

This was a survey course based on the latest archaeologi

and anthropological findings concerning the Paleolithic a
Neolithic cultures of Africa, the pre-dynastic civilization
Ancient Egypt and relations to the protohistoric and ear
historic civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western
and Southern Asia.

b) The ancient civilizations of Ethiopia.

This course was a survey from about 4000 B.C., covering the
general areas encompassed by the present-day countries of The
Sudan and Ethiopia. Hansberry relied on Egyptian, Hebrew
and Greek sources as well as archaeological and anthropologi
cal data from several expeditions, including the Harvard-Bos
ton Expedition at Kerma, Napata and Meroe.

C) THE CIVILISATION OF WEST AFRICA in medieval and early

MODERN TIMES.

This course surveyed the political and cultural developments

of Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Yorubaland as portrayed in Arab
chronicles, and the archaeological and anthropological evidence
of English, French and German investigations.

To teach these courses today would require tremendous

preparation, source materials and energy; in the 1920s, the
task was even more monumental. But Hansberry had begun to
identify and acquire the necessary materials while at Harvard,
and was able to launch his program with source materials that

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WILLIAM LEO HANSBERRY... 171

several Universities lack even today

the principal Arabic works (in Engli
as well as those originally written i
addition, Professor Hansberry, with
Geology Department, produced hund
1925) to illustrate various aspects of
was made of maps and charts. With
had equipped an office and workshop
But to do so had required the genera
Library of Congress, the anthropolog
sonian Institution and the Libraries at Harvard. In all of those
efforts, including the use of various translators, he was forced
to rely heavily on his personnal funds.

*
* *

In June 1925, Hanberry's African Civilization Section o

Histoid Department sponsored a symposium on « The
and Civilizations of Negro Peoples in Africa ». This p
effort presented twenty-eight scholarly papers by his st
including some from Panama, British Guiana (now Guy
Colombia. On view at the symposium were fossil fin
various archaeological objects. Indeed, Howard Univers
Professor Hansberry would seem to have been well on
to carving out a very special niche in African Studies.
Hansberry was young, ambitious and determined.
particularly encouraged in his endeavors by the response
students, not only because of their enthusiastic enrolmen
elective courses (more than eight hundred students h
rolled by 1924), but also because of the expense many
undertook to purchase various kinds of illustrative m
The public response was also gratifying. Hansberry recei
ters of commendation from persons across the count
Harvard Anthropology Department, from the editor
Scientific American and from Canada and Portugal. In ad
favorable comments were reported in The Nation of New
The Southwestern Christian Advocate of New Orleans and The
Tribune of Georgetown, British Guiana.
Encouragement such as this buttressed Hansberry's high
aspirations for his program and the University. Indeed, he
began to formulate « a plan for expanding a pioneer project in
collegiate education ». He called it the « Varia Africana Plan for
Howard University ». Hansberry explained : « there is no dearth
of published information about Africa ; the published literature

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 172 PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE

is most abundant. But the general public knows very little of

those publications and their content. This is also true of many
specialists who are required to formulate and express opinions
about the achievements of Negro people ».
Hansberry cited four key reasons for this state of affairs :
a) the information was never made accessible to the public ;
b) it was technical in character and was written by special
ists ;
c) most of the historical data were collected and described
incidentally, or were indirectly concerned with African history,
and to extract from these required a working knowledge of the
basic principles and techniques of the specialists and their nom
enclature ;
d) the many national origins of the authors meant that much
of the data appeared in a variety of languages, including
Amharic, Arabic, Coptic, etc.
However, Hansberry did not regard the problems as being
insurmountable. He stressed the need to assemble, correlate,
simplify and make the material readable and accessible to the
public. He listed some of the great repositories which would
have to be visited : the Widener Library of Harvard ; the
Bodleian and Ashmolean of Oxford ; the British Museum, the
F. L. Griffith Library at Boars' Hill (England) ; the Bibliothèque
Nationale of Paris ; the Koniglische Bibliotek of Berlin ; the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the Library
of Congress.
Hansberry believed that his « Varia Africana » would make
Howard University capable of revolutionizing the old and deeply
ingrained misconception about Africa, Africans and black people
generally. He noted : « no institution is more obligated and no
Negro school is in a better position to develop such a program
as Howard. No institution has [more] access to specialized
libraries — the Moorland Collection at Howard and [the] city
repositories ; nowhere else are the thought and planning put
forth ; no better courses exist anywhere else ; there are no
better trained students anywhere, by virtue of racial back
ground. This is the area in which Howard has the most pro
mising and immediate opportunity to distinguish itself as a
leader in the general cause of public enlightenment ».
Thus, long before the era of Black Studies and the acade
mic Black Power demands for community control of education
and the development of curricula to meet the needs of Afro
Americans and others, Professor Hansberry perceived Howard
University as the vanguard of black education. To help realize

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WILLIAM LEO HANSBERRY... 173

that goal, he submitted several propo

finance his projects. His first major
to The Spelman Fund on July 11, 1929
posal (*) not only reveal Hansberry's
goals in the area of African Studies, but also reveal the revolu
tionary character of his plan for education at Howard University.
He proposed to show that :
a) « Africa rather than Asia was in all probability the birth
place of the human race » and that « it was they [the Africans],
it appears, who first learned and then taught the rest of mankind
how to make and use tools, to develop a religion, to practice
art, to domesticate animals, to smelt metals — particularly
iron — and to create and maintain a deliberately constructed and
tradition-bound (...) State » ;
b) the dessication of the Sahara and Libyan deserts caused
« the autochtonous Negroids and Negroes (...) to emigrate to
Europe and Asia » ;
c) « many of the peoples and cultures of Ancient Egypt
originated in Equatorial Africa » ;
d) « the peoples of Ethiopia (...) vied with the mighty
Assyrian Empire for the position of first place among the great
organized world powers of that age » ;
e) « Ghana, Melle, Songhay, Nupe, were larger in size,
more effectively organized, and higher in culture than most
of the contemporary States of the Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic
and the Slavic regions of Europe » and that « increased dessi
cation of the Sahara, the introduction of the Mohammedan
religion and the Islamic systems of polity, and the establish
ment of Arab, Berber and European systems of slave-trading
brought on the disintegration of these Negro States and their
civilizations ».

*
* *

Hansberry, a victim of the times, did not receive funds fo

his proposal. However, he did additional graduate work at the
Universities of Chicago (1936) and Oxford (1937-1938). He con
tinued his search for funding sources in the 1940s and it was
in 1947 that Professor Earnest Hooten, Chairman of Harvard's

(*) Most of these views are now generally accepted.

12

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 174 PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE

Anthropology Department, w
posal :

« I am quite confident th
anything like the knowled
Africa] than Hansberry ha
to take the Ph. D. degree
versity or institution (..
profound interest in this

In 1953, Hansberry finally

in Africa. As a Fulbright R
and Ethiopia, he was able t
affirm many of his earlier
career was behind him, he
Virginia State College (1961
Morgan State College (1965
Award from the Haile Selassie I Prize Trust (1964), but several
of his objectives were not reached during his lifetime.
Hansberry's greatest contributions were very likely in the
classroom. However, he published a number of articles in which
his views were articulated. For example : in 1930 he published
« Sources for the Study of Ethiopian History » in Howard Univer
sity Studies in History, vol. II ; « A Negro in Anthropology » in Op
portunity, 1933 ; « African Studies » in Phylon, 1944 ; « Ethio
pia in the Middle Ages » in The Ethiopian Review, 1944 and
« Africa and the Western World » in The Mid-West Journal,
1955. These articles expressed views on African history and
historiography that were unpopular then but pretty well
accepted today.
In sum, one might stress Hansberry's pioneering efforts as
the interdisciplinary approach to African history, his Pan-Afri
can perspective, his conviction that Egypt's achievements were
Africa's contributions, his emphasis on « folk » culture as well
as high culture, and his belief that exposure to the truth, in
so far as that was possible, would lead to a resolution of the
conflict between Blacks and Whites.

Joseph E. HARRIS
U.S.A.

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