BLYDEN, EDWARD WILMOT

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), a noted Africanist, was born of free parents on the island of St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands. He was of pure Black African descent from the Ibo tribe of Nigeria.

At the age of 17, denied entrance to a college in the United States because of his colour. He was encouraged to go to Liberia, West Africa, in order to fulfill his ambition to fit himself to serve his race. He entered the Alexander High School at Monrovia, recently established under Presbyterian auspices, where he soon became a teacher, then Principal of the school. He was also ordained as a Presbyterian Minister.

In 1861 and 1862, he was appointed by the Government of Liberia as commissioner to the United States to encourage emigration to Africa. In 1862, he was named Professor of the Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at the newly founded Liberia College at Monrovia, and in 1864 he was appointed Secretary of State of Liberia.

In 1866, he journeyed to the East and visited Egypt and Syria, spending three months at the Syrian Protestant College on Mount Lebanon for the purpose of perfecting his Arabic which he felt would be of use in his contacts with the Mohammedans in the interior of Africa.

Being proficient in Spanish, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, as well as English, his native tongue, he became known not only as an educator and author but also as a linguist and statesman. He was a fluent speaker and a brilliant writer.

Following his return to Liberia, Blyden resigned from his position at the college and spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he undertook two diplomatic expeditions to the interior of that country on behalf of the Government. The first was in 1872 to Falaba, and the following year to Futa Jallon where the treaties he concluded with the inland chiefs were successfully carried out. Returning to educational work in Liberia he reopened the Alexander High School on the St. Paul’s River in 1875.

In 1877 he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Liberia to the Court of St. James’ and was reappointed to that post in 1878, and again in 1892. In this period Blyden seems to have reached the peak of his career. His official duties brought him in touch with the outstanding men of the day. William E. Gladstone, Lord Brougham, Herbert Spencer, R. Bosworth Smith and Stoppard Brooke became his personal friends, and he was elected an Honorary Member of the Athenaeum Club.

In 1880, as President-elect of Liberia College, he was sent to the United States as Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, before which body he made an earnest plea on behalf of his college and Africa. He was introduced to the assembly by his former pastor at St. Thomas, the Rev. John P. Knox, from whom he had parted company thirty years earlier.

The opening of Liberia College proved to be a milestone in the history of Liberia. Blyden’s term of office, however, was short-lived due to conflicts over administration, and in time the college was forced to close down. The next four years Blyden lived in a voluntary exile as a writer in Sierra Leone.

The next decade Blyden spent in travel in the interior of Liberia advocating the amalgamation of the interior tribes with the Americo-Liberians of Monrovia, and on a lecture tour to the Southern States of America, with visits to England and along the coast of Africa. In 1895 he went to France as Minister Plenipotentiary from Liberia. In 1896, upon the invitation of a group of citizens of Lagos, he attempted to form there a West African University, a project which he had first proposed at Freetown, in 1972. (This attempt foreshadowed the later establishment of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in 1960). This project failed because of lack of financial support.

In 1900, at the time of the reopening of Liberia College, Blyden was again invited to become President, but again difficulties were such that after a few months in office he resigned.

Following a brief stay in England, Blyden returned to Sierra Leone to become Director of Mohammedan Education for that country, a work which was the culmination of his ever increasing interest in education and Islam. The year 1907 marked his retirement from his official labours.

Dr. Blyden had many staunch friends in England and Africa, but there were those who misunderstood his attitude toward Mohammedanism. He was constantly accused of having embraced that faith, although he always denied this.

During these later years he frequently wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, both British and American, as well as African. His most important works are: Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887); From West Africa to Palestine, (1873); West Africa Before Europe (1905); and African Life and Customs (1908).

In these, he makes a plea for an understanding of the value of Mohammedanism for Africa, emphasises the need for cooperation between Christianity and Mohammedanism, and calls for increased respect for the distinct contribution of the Black African to world civilisation. One of his early teachers wrote of him that Edward Wilmot Blyden was a hundred years ahead of his time, and this statement seems to be confirmed by the increasing acceptance of his views and theories on the part of African scholars and statesmen, and others who are interested in the development of Africa.

Dr. Blyden always remembered with affection his early benefactors, and to the end of his life retained an interest in those who had been his students. When he returned to Sierra Leone from the inauguration as President of Liberia of one of his college students he fell ill and died at Freetown on February 7, 1912.

A fountain, surmounted by a bust, was erected to his memory, facing the entrance to the harbour of Freetown, by his friends and admirers in Africa and England, and a ship of the Elder Dempster Lines was named the “Edward Blyden.”

EDITH HOLDEN