by Sam Chian
Immanuel Wallerstein is widely remembered today as the architect of world-systems analysis—a sprawling and ambitious framework that recast modern history around capitalism’s long-term, geographical dynamics, rather than the short-term, nation-bound focus that had dominated much of social science. Yet before reaching international acclaim, Wallerstein’s early career centered on trying to make sense of African decolonization. For example, Wallerstein’s early engagement with Africa, particularly his focus on anti-colonial nationalism and Pan-Africanism, played a critical role in shaping the framework he would later elaborate in his seminal work The Modern World-System (1974). These years coincided with a period of rapid political change across the Global South, as newly independent states emerged in Africa and Asia, challenging the Cold War order. The 1955 Bandung Conference had already signaled the emergence of a ‘Third World’ political project, and by the late 1950s Wallerstein was combining rigorous academic study that also deepened calls for political involvement in transnational networks connected to liberation movements.
In 1959, Wallerstein submitted his doctoral dissertation in sociology to Columbia University, based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana between 1956 and 1957. Ghana had only recently gained independence from Britain, and Wallerstein was hosted there by the newly renamed University College of Ghana (Lentini, 1998, p. 51). By then, he had already been deeply immersed with the African continent, both academically and politically, for several years. In fact, throughout the 1950s, Wallerstein actively participated in the World Assembly of Youth (WAY), an international coordinating body for national youth councils founded in 1949 that initially operated within a broadly Western, anti-communist framework. Serving for a time as its vice president, he played a key role in reorienting the organization toward the concerns of the emerging postcolonial world (Lamri & Young, 2025). His growing network of contacts and outspoken advocacy for anti-colonial causes did not go unnoticed: by 1961, the French authorities had opened a surveillance file on him, and other colonial governments viewed him with suspicion. As a result, he was barred from entering all Portuguese colonies as well as South Africa (GUS, 2016, 8:59).
The previous year, 1960, had been popularly christened “the Year of Africa,” when no fewer than seventeen African countries won independence from colonial rule, most of them former French territories. It was a moment of extraordinary optimism across the continent and the wider world periphery, creating a sense that a new era might truly be in the making. Yet this optimism, though still palpable, was soon tempered by the harsh realities of Cold War geopolitics.
The Year of Africa ended, both temporally and symbolically, in January 1961 with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of the Congo. His overthrow, engineered through a coup backed by the Belgian state, the CIA, and other actors in the imperial core, marked a decisive turning point (Williams, 2021). Lumumba, one of the most prominent symbols of Pan-African unity, had been close to Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, whose own country had been the first sub-Saharan African state to achieve independence in 1957. Nkrumah envisioned Ghana not as an isolated success but as a spearhead for continental liberation—a vision he made explicit at the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in 1958. That gathering drew representatives from across Africa’s independence movements, including Lumumba himself and Frantz Fanon, the Martinican-born psychiatrist, revolutionary, and leading theorist of anti-colonial struggle.
In August 1960, Wallerstein attended the Eighth Council of the World Assembly of Youth in Accra; an event that further signaled Ghana’s central role in post-independence Pan-African politics. Among the speakers was Frantz Fanon, whose writings would become foundational to liberation movements across Africa and beyond. Wallerstein met Fanon there for the first time and spent time in conversation with him (Wallerstein, 1979, p. 250). They met again the following year in Washington, D.C., where Fanon was receiving treatment for leukemia. It was there, in the final months of his life, that he completed and saw into print his political testament to the decolonizing world, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Recognizing its significance immediately, Wallerstein sought to arrange an English translation, though American publishers were at first reluctant (Lentini, 1998, p. 69).
It was in this context, just before the publication of his first book, Africa: The Politics of Independence, that Wallerstein wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois, then 93 years old, for feedback on a draft paper he had written on Pan-Africanism. In a remarkable gesture of intellectual generosity, Du Bois responded with a four-page letter, offering critiques of Wallerstein’s text, as well as reflections on the broader global conjuncture in which both men were intellectually and politically immersed. Pan-Africanism, a growing movement geared towards political, economic, and cultural unity in Africa and its diaspora, was not merely an abstract ideal but a pressing political project central to the struggles of newly independent states and liberation movements still under colonial rule. For Wallerstein, engaging with Du Bois on this subject meant conversing with one of its most prominent architects at a moment when the future direction of African unity was still open and fiercely contested.
Born in 1868, Du Bois was among the most important intellectuals of the 20th century—a sociologist, historian, writer, and activist whose work spanned the rise of Jim Crow segregation, the world wars, and the Cold War. Over the decades, Du Bois produced a body of scholarship that broke new ground in the analysis of race, empire, and political economy, from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Black Reconstruction in America (1935). From the 1910s onward, he was also a leading voice in Pan-Africanist organizing, helping to convene several of the early Pan-African Congresses. By the 1950s, he had become a fierce critic of U.S. imperialism and an open supporter of socialism, increasingly aligned with anti-colonial movements across the Global South.
Du Bois’ letter to Wallerstein, written on May 3, 1961, was more than a routine academic reply. In it, he shared personal and political frustrations, such as his being denied permission by the U.S. government to travel to Ghana in 1957, a historic moment when the country had just won its independence under the leadership of the Convention People’s Party. It was of course also an occasion for Du Bois to offer intellectual guidance: he recommended that Wallerstein read Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944), a pioneering study that demonstrated the central role of slave labor in the rise of European capitalism, written by the man who, just one year later, would lead Trinidad and Tobago to independence and become its first prime minister. Wallerstein would later cite Williams approvingly in the first volume of The Modern World-System, noting the foundational role of slavery and other coercive labor systems in capitalism’s global division of labor.
The letter also addressed Wallerstein’s interpretation of Pan-Africanism. Du Bois questioned his suggestion that the movement had been dormant between 1945 and the All-African Peoples’ Conference in 1958, insisting that it had remained vibrant within intellectual circles. He further argued that the 1958 conference was, in effect, the “Sixth Pan-African Congress.” Wallerstein evidently came to share this view, later describing the gathering as the “true successor to the Pan-African Congresses” (Wallerstein, 1967).
Du Bois concluded his letter with the full text of a speech he had written for the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana. Unable to travel due to failing health, the speech was instead delivered by his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. The message was unequivocal. Decolonization, Du Bois argued, represented a decisive moment in world history—one in which the African continent stood at a crossroads. The choice, he insisted, was between capitalism and socialism. But this, Du Bois asserted, was in effect no real choice at all: socialism was on the rise, and “private ownership of capital is doomed.” Reworking the language of The Communist Manifesto, he ended with a resounding call to arms: “You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have a continent to regain! You have freedom and human dignity to attain!”
Du Bois closed the letter by quoting Nkrumah’s 1957 autobiography, in which Ghana’s first president declared: “I am a Marxist socialist.” Du Bois’s decision to end his correspondence on this note was telling. By highlighting Nkrumah’s embrace of socialism, he signaled his own political orientation at the time and the ideological direction in which he believed African liberation should move. It also foreshadowed his next step: just five months later, Du Bois formally applied for membership in the Communist Party USA and relocated permanently to Ghana, following the U.S. government’s revocation of his passport. He would die in Accra in 1963, on the eve of the founding of the Organization of African Unity.
Though their interaction appears limited only to this exchange, Wallerstein clearly held Du Bois in high esteem, not only as a pioneering scholar of race and empire but as a principled internationalist committed to African liberation. This is perhaps most telling in that both men also shared a deep regard for Nkrumah. Du Bois had known him personally since the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945; Wallerstein, though he never met Nkrumah, would continue to express admiration for Nkrumah’s political legacy well into the 21st century (Wallerstein, 2005, p. vi). Nkrumah, thus, stands as a figure through whom their overlapping ideological and intellectual convictions came into political focus: the belief that true African independence was inseparable from a broader project of continental unity and socialist transformation.
Seen from this perspective, Wallerstein’s career can be reread not only as that of the architect of world-systems analysis but also as that of a theorist of decolonization, one whose political engagements and scholarship moved between the metropoles of the Global North and the liberation movements of the Global South. As Wallerstein’s work suggests, the so-called boundaries between these cultural worlds were far more porous than they appeared. In his letter, Du Bois made clear that the fate of the African continent in the twentieth century was inseparable from the global contradictions of capital. Wallerstein, for his part, would devote the rest of his life to tracing those contradictions, historically and geographically, through the long arc of the modern world-system. Ultimately, Wallerstein’s work teaches us that the fates of the core and periphery of the capitalist world-economy have always been inseparably linked, and that the struggle for African liberation not only challenges the world-system of imperialist exploitation but also gestures toward the possibility of a more just world beyond.
Sam Chian is a teacher and independent scholar with a focus on modern world history and critical social theory. His recent work includes an article for Review of African Political Economy on Immanuel Wallerstein’s career as an Africanist, and he has a forthcoming piece in the Journal of World-Systems Research.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: “Africa, administrative divisions, 1 May 1961,” via Wikimedia Commons. This map depicts the colonial boundaries of Africa as they stood May 1, 1961, capturing the precise historical moment between Wallerstein’s April 27th letter to Du Bois and Du Bois’s reply on May 3.
