Dusé Mohamed Ali was known for his journalism and for developing Pan-African discussions internationally. Ali is commemorated by a blue plaque at 55 Victoria Mansions, where he lived when he began editing The African Times and Orient Review.

The origin story for Dusé Mohamed Ali (aka Dusé Mohamed) is unclear. Ali himself claimed that he was born in Alexandria on 21 November 1866, the son of an Egyptian army officer, Abdul Salem Ali, and his Sudanese wife, and that he went to Britain as a child in 1876 with a French friend of his father’s. According to Ali’s serialised autobiography, after his father died in the battle of Tel El Kebir (part of the nationalist uprising led by Ahmed ‘Urabi), Ali travelled to Egypt before returning to Britain around 1883.

Much, if not all of this was probably invention. The stories Ali wrote about his father borrowed from Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s writing. Blunt confided to his diary that he found Ali perplexing because he lacked knowledge of Islam. Aubrey Herbert, a traveller and diplomat who was fluent in Turkish and Arabic, noted that Ali could not speak either language. And though Ali claimed to have attended King’s College, London, no evidence of this has been found.

Recently Jacob Dorman has suggested that Ali was in fact named William Rand, and probably hailed originally from Trinidad, Tobago or Barbados. Someone of that name toured the US and Canada in the 1880s with a production of WG Wills’ Claudian – and seems to have given talks on Egypt.

However, Ian Duffield, who researched Ali extensively, wrote that whether his autobiography was embroidered, invented, or true, ‘throughout his life Dusé Mohamed Ali displayed, in his writing, an unvarying support for the cause of Egypt, and in a wider sense for black people everywhere’. Ali’s unreliability as a narrator of his own life does not diminish his influence.

A precarious life

Ali lived precariously as an actor, freelance journalist and playwright. By the 1890s he was working as a clerk for a shipping company in Hull, where he produced Shakespearean recitals and contributed to a history of the town in verse. The 1901 census seems to feature him twice (in Newcastle and in Harrogate) and it is recorded that he married Elizabeth Brunyee in Knaresborough that year. But by July 1901, he was advertising from an address near the Elephant and Castle as an actor: “a Dark Man for Dark Parts”. Similar advertisements show his movements on tour around the country with various productions for around a decade.

After this, his writing and anti-colonialist views began to come to the fore. Between 1909 and 1911, Ali wrote 11 articles for The New Age, a progressive journal edited by AR Orage. He was notably critical of British conduct in Egypt.

When US President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the use of a “Big Stick” approach to control the Egyptian people, Ali was enraged. Persuaded by Orage to channel his anger into a book, The Land of the Pharaohs appeared just six months later. The speed of production perhaps helps to explain similarities with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, which were noted by some reviewers.

Lambeth and the African Times and Orient Review

Ali enjoyed a higher profile from this point and became a founding editor of the African Times and Orient Review in 1912. Inspired by the international reach of the United Races Congress held in London in 1911, the paper was financed by several West African businessmen and circulated in North America, the Caribbean, Egypt, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Japan as well as Europe. It attacked racism and economic imperialism and supported nationalism; it called for ‘Afro-Asian solidarity’, an economic network between Africa and the diaspora, and stimulated interest in and study of the long history of African civilisations. Marcus Garvey was employed as Ali’s protégé at the Review in 1912–3.

The offices for the Review were in Fleet Street, but Ali lived at 55 Victoria Mansions, Lambeth, an early 20th-century mansion block, from at least 1911; he appears to have moved to Vauxhall by the middle of the decade. He used Victoria Mansions – his only surviving identified London address – on his writing paper for letters, suggesting he felt settled here, though he also found it harder to travel for a time: Scotland Yard and the security services were keeping a close watch on him due to his impassioned words and extensive networks. Ali lived with Beatrice (née Nash) by this point, to whom he claimed to have been married for six years, though there is no evidence of his having divorced his previous wife.

Beyond journalism, Ali was an active member of several communities: he was vice president of the London Central Islamic Society, founded the Anglo-Ottoman Society, and established the Indian Muslim Soldiers’ Widows and Orphans’ War Fund. At his later home, just north of Regent’s Park, he offered rooms to visiting African, Asian and Afro-American students.

US and Nigeria

Ali tried to establish economic as well as political Pan-Africanism by setting up trading networks between West Africa and the US. He was the first modern Pan-African advocate to appreciate the importance of an economic approach. However, his was not successful and, abruptly and in financial difficulties, he left for the US without Beatrice in 1921. As part of Garvey’s wider circle, he lectured, authored articles for the Negro World and established organisations such as the Universal Islamic Society in Detroit.

In 1931, Ali moved to Lagos in Nigeria. He wrote for the Nigerian Daily Times, edited the Nigerian Daily Telegraph, and set up his own weekly paper, The Comet, in 1933. This shared news of political struggles, pan-African activity, and the voices of the Nigerian Youth Movement, the first nationalist organisation in Nigeria.

In 1944, Ali chaired the Nigerian Union of Students’ conference, which led to the formation of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, headed by Nnamdi Azikiwe, who bought The Comet that year. Ali died on 25 June 1945 at the African Hospital in Lagos and was buried in the Okesuna Muslim cemetery.

Further Reading

• Marika Sherwood, ‘Ali, Dusé Mohamed [known as Dusé Mohamed] (1866–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)

• David Dabydeen and Shivani Sivagurunathan, ‘Ali, Duse Mohamed (1886/7–1945)’, The Oxford Companion to Black British History, ed. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones (2007)

• Jacob Dorman, ‘“Western Civilization through Eastern Spectacles”: Duse Mohamed Ali, Black Orientalist Imposture, and Black Internationalism’, Journal of African American History, Vol. 108, Issue 1