ABSTRACT
In the mid-1950s, when W.E.B. Du Bois was barred from foreign travel – Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt invited the eighty-two-year-old scholar and his wife Shirley Graham to settle in Cairo, offering them a beautiful home on the Nile. All to say, by the time David Du Bois arrived in Cairo in 1960, there was already a local jazz scene and the State Department had launched its jazz diplomacy tours aimed at countering Soviet propaganda. David Du Bois is working as an announcer at Radio Cairo, and lobbying Egyptian officials to have his father's books – especially Black Flame Trilogy – translated. Du Bois once observed that African-Americans have a 'great message' for humanity, and would offer the world a conception of freedom that would rival the French or Greek idea of liberty. But Du Bois lists the books he wants translated, clearly seeing black culture and history as an antidote to whatever American diplomats were spouting.
