Edward Wilmot Blyden

Edward Wilmot Blyden was born to free parents in Charlotte Amalie, on the Danish Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, on the third of August 1832. Denied admission to Rutgers Theological College in 1850 because of his race, he sailed for the new Republic of Liberia and made his life there.

He served as Liberian Minister of State (1864), Minister to Britain (1877-1879), Minister of the Interior (1880-1884), and President of Liberia College (1880-1884). He stood twice for the Liberian presidency and was twice defeated. He was a Presbyterian minister, an Arabic scholar, and the leading Black intellectual of the nineteenth century to argue that African civilization stood on its own historical terms and required no European authentication.

His major works — Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) and African Life and Customs (1908) — anticipated by two generations the arguments that Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois would later make for African civilizational integrity. He coined or popularized the term "African personality" and the phrase "Africa for Africans," both later central to Pan-Africanism. He took a respectful and analytical interest in Islam — most unusual for a Christian missionary of his era — and read Arabic well enough to lecture in it.

He was a precursor to almost every twentieth-century Pan-Africanist thinker. Marcus Garvey directly cited him. Nnamdi Azikiwe published an edition of his works. Henry Sylvester Williams convened the 1900 London Pan-African Conference within the conceptual framework Blyden had established.

He died in Sierra Leone on the seventh of February 1912, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the nineteenth-century intellect from whom Pan-Africanism descends.