Edward Wilmot Blyden

Agora

Edward Wilmot Blyden

1832–1912

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Africans have a personality and culture of their own worth and should unite and develop it instead of imitating Europe.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · Latin America & Caribbean · Society & History, Politics & Law, Religion

West Indian-born scholar and diplomat in Liberia: an early theorist of Pan-Africanism and of the idea of an “African personality”.

Key ideas

African personality
Pan-Africanism
Islam and Christianity in Africa

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Influence

Influenced 1

Kwame Nkrumah

influenced
Nkrumah took up Blyden’s idea of an ‘African personality’ and made it a watchword of Pan-African unity in the late 1950s (I Speak of Freedom, 1961). K. Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom (1961); E. W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887); H. R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot (1967)
Evidence: AI draft
Kwame Nkrumah › 1909–1972

Works

1887Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race
Islam has served Africans better than missionary Christianity – a plea for African self-respect.

Position

Blyden argued that Africans are not a backward copy of Europeans but a people with their own gifts and history – an “African personality” expressed in community, spirituality and closeness to nature. Education and religion should therefore strengthen African character instead of erasing it. In Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race he contended that Islam, spread largely by Africans themselves, had served the continent better than missionary Christianity, which bred contempt for everything African. He called for the return of the diaspora and for African unity. His belief in fixed racial characters is now criticized, but he deeply influenced Garvey, Nkrumah and the Négritude movement.

Life & context

Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in 1832 on St Thomas in the Danish West Indies. Refused admission to theological colleges in the United States because of his race, he emigrated to Liberia in 1851. There he became a Presbyterian minister, a professor and later president of Liberia College, secretary of state and envoy to Britain. He also worked in Sierra Leone and Lagos, and died in Freetown in 1912.