“As I face Africa, I ask myself: What is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain?” This was a question W.E.B. Du Bois asked himself in 1940 and we might imagine time and again before and after that moment. It was the question that guided his scholarship and his activism. Africa, was as Nahum Dmitri Chandler has argued, “the limit of the world,” and thus we might say, the beginning of Du Bois’s imagination for a future world, free of the toil and misery of modernity. How to explain this feeling was also how to produce an epistemological break that would generate a liberative politics out of that very feeling. Born 150 years ago on February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began his journey back to the future through his grandmother Violet’s memory of a song her ancestors brought from Africa. It was that song which he heard again in the churches he visited while attending Fisk University. The search for the meaning of that song took him to the libraries of all the major Western universities, whilst becoming the first African to receive a PhD from Harvard. And then to Atlanta, where he found it being sang again in the deep South. He wrote about it in The Negro, published in 1915 and then attempted to place the urgency of the plight of its producers before the international community with his series of Pan African Conferences during the 1920s. He then connected it to the Mother herself, with his 1924 trip to Liberia. Its meaning was loudest to him in 1945, where in Manchester England, a younger Du Bois discoverers of what it meant to be African in the world during the 5th Pan African Congress, inaugurating in many respects the African independence movements. A year later, he sat down to remap his earlier works on Africa in his major undertaking, The World and Africa. He connected the song back to the soil when he left the United States to live permanently in the Ghana imagined by Kwame Nkrumah’s movement. And it was there where he uttered the words: “Awake, awake, O sleeping world, Honour the sun; Worship the stars, those vaster suns Who rule the night Where black is bright And all unselfish work is right And greed is sin. And Africa leads on; Pan Africa...” And so it must lead… We will think of W.E.B. Du Bois as more than a narrator of American racial experiences, but as one who understood those experiences to be “but a local phase of a world problem.” Or we will not think truly with Du Bois. For this is what his work ultimately meant, and what it should continue to mean for us. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.