Edward Wilmot Blyden: A Voice from Bleeding Africa

“Africa will furnish a development of civilization which the world has never yet witnessed. Its great peculiarity will be its mortal element.”

Edward Wilmot Blyden was a Liberian educator, writer, diplomat, and statesman. During the late 19th century, Blyden was among the best-known and most highly respected African intellectuals in the Western world. He is often credited with helping to popularize the phrase “Africa for the Africans,” and is widely regarded as a “father of Pan-Africanism” or “Father of Pan-African Ideals.”

Edward Blyden was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, on August 3, 1832, to free, literate parents of Igbo (Ibo) descent. Recognized in his youth for his talents and drive, he was educated and mentored by John Knox, an American Protestant minister, who encouraged him to pursue further studies in the United States. Blyden went to the United States in May 1850 for theological studies but was refused admission to three Northern theological seminaries because of racism. In January 1851 he emigrated to Liberia, the African American colony founded by the American Colonization Society, which had declared itself an independent republic in 1847.

Blyden continued his formal education at Alexander High School in Monrovia and was appointed its principal in 1858. From 1855 to 1856 he edited the Liberia Herald and wrote the column “A Voice From Bleeding Africa.” In 1862 he was appointed professor of classics at the newly opened Liberia College, a position he held until 1871. Although Blyden was largely self-taught beyond high school, he became an able and versatile linguist, classicist, theologian, historian, and sociologist. From 1864 to 1866, in addition to his professorial duties, Blyden served as secretary of state of Liberia.

From 1871 to 1873 Blyden lived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he edited Negro, often described as the first explicitly pan-African journal in West Africa. Between 1874 and 1885 Blyden was again based in Liberia, holding various high academic and governmental offices, and in 1885 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Liberian presidency. After 1885 Blyden divided his time between Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Lagos.

In Freetown, Blyden helped to edit the Sierra Leone News, which he had assisted in founding in 1884 “to serve the interest of West Africa … and the race generally.” He also helped found and edit the Freetown West African Reporter (1874–1882), whose declared aim was to forge a bond of unity among English‑speaking West Africans. From 1901 to 1906, while living in Freetown, Blyden directed the education of Muslims at an institution in Sierra Leone. During this period he became deeply engaged with Islam, recommending it to African Americans as the religion he believed to be most in keeping with their historic roots in Africa. He also led two important expeditions to Fouta Djallon in the interior.

Blyden served Liberia again as ambassador and representative to Britain and France. As a diplomat, he traveled to the United States, where he spoke in major Black churches about his work in Africa. Blyden believed that African Americans could best end their suffering under racial discrimination by returning to Africa and helping to develop it. He was criticized, however, by African Americans who sought full civil rights in their birth nation, the United States, and did not identify with Africa in the same way.

In 1891 and 1894 he spent several months in Lagos and worked there in 1896–1897 as a government agent for native affairs. While in Lagos he wrote regularly for the Lagos Weekly Record, one of the earliest propagators of Nigerian and West African nationalism.

Although Blyden held many important positions, he is remembered more as a man of ideas than as a man of official power. Seeing himself as a champion and defender of his race, he produced more than two dozen pamphlets and books. Among his most important works are A Voice from Bleeding Africa (1856); Liberia’s Offering (1862); The Negro in Ancient History (1869); The West African University (1872); From West Africa to Palestine (1873); Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), generally regarded as his major work; The Jewish Question (1898); West Africa before Europe (1905); and Africa Life and Customs (1908). Unlike many of his Western contemporaries, Blyden articulated a vision of African development that profoundly challenged conventional, Eurocentric views.

Blyden, who formally remained a Christian throughout his life, argued that a legion of Christianized and Western‑educated Blacks would not by itself lead Africa to the promised land of modernity and continental development. He contended that Christianity, as it was commonly practiced among Europeans and in the Americas, had often had a demoralizing effect on Black people, whereas Islam, on the other hand, had exerted a more unifying and elevating influence in many African societies. He also believed that Western-style education was being used as a critical instrument to support and prolong the colonization and exploitation of Africa. According to him, “All educated [Blacks] suffer from a kind of slavery in many ways far more subversive of the real welfare of the race than the ancient physical fetters. The slavery of the mind is far more destructive than that of the body.”

As an educator and college president, Blyden waged a battle for what he called the “decolonization of the African mind,” long before that phrase became common. In his 1881 inaugural address as the newly installed president of Liberia College, he outlined his vision of independent African colleges producing a new generation of African youth. He declared: “It is our hope and expectation that there will rise up men, aided by institution and culture, … imbued with public spirit, who will know how to live and work and prosper … how to use all favoring outward conditions, how to triumph by intelligence, by tact, by industry, by perseverance, over the indifference of their own people, and how to overcome the scorn and opposition of the enemies of the race…” For Blyden, education “…should aim…not simply [for the provision of] information, but [for] the formation of the mind. The formation of the mind being secured, the information will take care of itself. Mere information of itself is not power – but the ability to know how to use that information – and this ability belongs to the mind that is disciplined, trained, [and] formed. It may be a pleasant pastime to store the mind with facts…but if the mind is not trained to apply them, they will lie there like so much useless lumber.”

Through a properly grounded educational curriculum and a deeper sensitivity to the value of indigenous African culture, Blyden believed that a generation of African leaders and scholars could be groomed to defeat colonialism and embrace a form of modernity rooted in native cultural resources. He maintained that the core of Africa’s educational curriculum should be based upon traditional concepts of education and African cosmology. At its core, this curriculum must acknowledge that “the African view of the universe is based upon the truth that man, nature, the universe, and God are in harmony. There is no alienation. The basic model[s] of human action [are] cooperation, peace, and building great projects. Th[ese are] diametrically opposed by the European worldview which sees man as alienated from God, at war with nature, and surrounded by an indifferent universe.”

Blyden was a pioneer in the struggle to liberate and decolonize the African mind and to establish independent African educational institutions. At the turn of the century, he stood almost alone in his articulate defense of traditional African cultural institutions and their compatibility with modernity. In 1893, Blyden issued this challenge to the African world:

“It is sad to think that there are some Africans, especially among those who have enjoyed the advantages of foreign training, who are blind enough to the radical facts of humanity as to say, ‘Let us do away with our African personality and be lost, if possible, in another race’. Preach this doctrine as much as you like, no one will do it, for no one can do it, for when you have done away with your personality, you have done away with yourselves. Your place has been assigned you in the universe as Africans, and there is no room for you as anything else.”

Blyden died on February 7, 1912.

Personal life

Blyden married Sarah Yates, an Americo‑Liberian from the prominent Yates family. She was the daughter of Hilary Yates and the niece of Beverly Page Yates, who served as vice‑president of Liberia from 1856 to 1860 under President Stephen Allen Benson. She and Blyden had three children together.

Later, while living in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Blyden had a long‑term relationship with Anna Erskine, an African American woman from Louisiana. She was a granddaughter of James Spriggs‑Payne, who was twice elected President of Liberia. Erskine and Blyden had five children together, and his direct descendants living in Sierra Leone are from this union. They have been considered part of the Krio population. Some Blyden descendants continue to live in Freetown, among them Sylvia Blyden, publisher of the Awareness Times.

Legacy

Edward Wilmot Blyden has left an indelible mark on the pages of history. He was not only one of the most original thinkers of his time; he was arguably the foremost African intellectual of the 19th century. His brilliant career in both Liberia and Sierra Leone spanned religion, education, journalism, politics, and philosophy. He is best remembered as an African patriot whose writings contributed significantly to the rise of Pan‑Africanism and West African nationalism.

Blyden’s ideas and speeches urging a return to Africa and the re‑creation of an African nation helped seed African consciousness movements across the African world. There is a clear line of Black leaders who inherited his ideas, directly or indirectly. W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey carried these themes into the twentieth century, continuing to champion the call for African unity and a return to Africa. Their political ideas, in turn, became sources of inspiration for leaders of African independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Sékou Touré, as well as for Blyden’s own grandson, Edward W. Blyden III, whose Sierra Leone Independence Movement (SLIM) played a key role in the country’s independence from Britain. In South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki has often referenced Blyden in his speeches, and in Ethiopia his writings are closely studied in Rastafarian circles.

“There is a talent entrusted to you. It is your duty to call into action the highest forms of your being. It does not matter what your calling may be – whether it be what men call menial or what the world calls honorable – whether it be to speak in the halls of Congress or to sweep out those halls – whether it be to wait upon others or to be waited on— it is the manner of using your faculties that will determine the result – that will determine your true influence in this world and your status in the world to come. Everyone should do his part to advance humanity. Each should exert himself to be a helper in progress. Whatever your condition, you do occupy some room in the world; what are you doing to make a return for the room you occupy? There are so many of our people who fail to realize their responsibility, who fail to hear the inspiring call of the past and the prophetic call of the future.”

Source:
http://africaunbound.org/index.php/aumagazine/issue-1/item/edward-blyden-on-the-struggle-for-african-liberation-2.html
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/edward-wilmot-blyden
http://www.columbia.edu/~hcb8/EWB_Museum/Legacy.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wilmot_Blyden