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Nineteenth-Century Negritude: Edward W. Blyden

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Robert W. July
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Extract

Almost a century ago, Edward W. Blyden evolved a philosophy of Africanism which foreshadowed many concepts of today's African intellectual leaders. Basing his system of thought on the notion that racial qualities were exclusive and complementary, he urged the African to cultivate his own qualities and avoid bad imitations of the characteristics of other races. A deep religiousness and close communion with nature had developed in Africa a humanitarian regard for social responsibilities and personal relations conspicuously absent in materialistic Europe. The African needed only to follow his natural instinct and to reaffirm his own values in order to regain his ancient sense of dignity and once again make his unique contribution to world culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 73 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964

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References

1 Journal of the African Society, XI, 362–4;Google ScholarBlyden, Edward W., Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, second edition, London, 1888, xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

2 Shepperson, George, ‘Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism’, The Journal of African History, I, 2 (1960), 310. Shepperson refers to Blyden's use of the phrase in connexion with a sermon by Majole Agbebe in 1902. However, Mr Hollis R. Lynch, who is preparing a full-scale biography of Blyden while in residence at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, states that Blyden first used the term ‘African personality’ as early as 1893 during a lecture given at Freetown.Google Scholar

3 Blyden, Edward W., ‘The Negro in Ancient History’, The People of Africa, New York, 1871, 1–34.Google Scholar

4 Ibid. 21–4; Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 224; Wilson, H. S., ‘E. W. Blyden on Religion in Africa’, The Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion, II, ii (12 1960), 61.Google Scholar

5 Blyden, Edward W., African Life and Customs, London, 1908, 8–9;Google ScholarBlyden, , West Africa Before Europe, London, 1905, 136–7.Google Scholar

6 Blyden, Edward V., The African Problem and the Method of Its Solution, Washington, D.C., 1890, 21–3;Google ScholarThe Problems Before Liberia, London, 1909, 11–12;Google ScholarChristianity, and the Negro Race, i–iv, 43–4.Google Scholar

7 Blyden, Edward W., West Africa Before Europe, 131–4; The Prospects of the African, London [1874?], 5–6. Though his reasons are different, it is interesting to note Blyden's preference for the tribal African of the interior is strikingly similar often expressed preference of many European administrators for the ‘unspoiled over the urbanized educated African of the seaboard areas. Europeans called the unrepresentative of the mass of Africans, though actually it was the educated African's opposition to colonial government policy which was most frequently at cause.Google Scholar

8 West Africa Before Europe, 140;Google ScholarThe African Problem and the Method of Its Solution, 22–3.Google Scholar

9 Ibid. 11–12; Blyden, , The Return of the Exiles and the West African Church, London, 1891, 31;Google ScholarA Chapter in the History of Liberia, Freetown, 1892, 31.Google Scholar There was another implication to Blyden's racial exclusiveness which was only barely hinted at in his published writings. If the races were happiest and most productive when separated from each other, it was only a short step to conclude that miscegenation was unhealthy and to be avoided. Such a notion appears only very occasionally and obliquely, as for example Blyden's assertion that the Creoles of Freetown were effete and doomed, or his belief that it was the mixed tribes of the Sahara—the Fulani and Tucolor, for example— and not the pure-bred Negroes, who were responsible for the great wars during the nineteenth century. Cf. Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone, London, 1962, 456;Google ScholarWest Africa Before Europe, 88–90. 1 am greatly indebted to Mr Lynch, however, for converting what was only a suspicion based on Blyden's public statements to a Conviction. Mr Lynch reports that Blyden's private correspondence leaves no doubt as to a virtually paranoic opposition to miscegenation. He felt that men of mixed blood lost their clarity of purpose and became divided in their loyalties, thus compromising the mission of the races. This aspect of Blyden's thought could nut be publicly stated for fear of antagonizing influential mulattoes, white philanthropists, and Negro friends who did not share his opinions. One last implication remains to be drawn from Blyden's racial theories. In postulating exclusive though equal roles for each race, he seems to have accepted the prevailing nineteenth-century thesis that mental and emotional traits were racially linked; indeed, his theories seem to be essentially a refinement of that thesis. Such a view is of course antithetical to present-day opinion, which ascribes no racial basis to personality traits.

10 African Life and Customs, 9, 11–12. This notion of the African's closeness to nature permeates present-day negritude. See the writings of Léopold Senghor: for example, ‘L'esprit de la civilisation ou les lois de Ia culture négro-africaine’, Présence Africaine, Ier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, nouvelle série bimestrielle, No. 8–9–10, Juin–Nov., 1956, 51–65. Blyden was thinking mainly in terms of Africa as a centre of agricultural production, but his position none the less contains some of the mystical belief in the African's closeness to the soil which characterizes modem negritude thought.Google Scholar

11 African Life and Customs, 10–49.Google Scholar For a penetrating analysis of present-day responses in Africa to the question of what type of society best suits African needs and desires, see Hunter, Guy, The New Societies of Tropical Africa, London, 1962, esp. 316–47.Google Scholar

12 African Life and Customs, 62, 68–73.Google Scholar

13 Blyden, , Africa's Service to the World, London [1880?], 7–12, 16.Google Scholar

14 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 278; The Prospects of the African, 7–9.Google Scholar

15 Blyden, , Liberia's Offering, New York, 1862, v; The Prospects of the African, 19.Google Scholar

16 Ibid. 17, 19–20.

17 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, v; A Chapter in the History of Liberia, 5.Google Scholar

18 Blyden, , The Significance of Liberia, second edition, Liverpool, 1907, and The Problem Before Liberia.Google Scholar

19 West Africa Before Europe, 73–5. See also Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 30–53.Google Scholar

20 Ibid. 15–25, 281; West Africa Before Europe, 37–93, esp. 65; Blyden, ‘Mohammedanism in Western Africa’, The People of Africa, op. cit. 74–98.Google Scholar

21 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, iii–iv.Google Scholar

22 Fyfe, Op. cit. 385.Google Scholar

23 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 82–92;Google ScholarWest Africa Before Europe, 106–7.Google Scholar

24 The Lagos Training College and Industrial Institute, Correspondence Between Edward W. Blyden, LL.D. and His Excellency Sir Gilbert T. Carter, K.C.M.G., Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Lagos and Its Protectorates, Lagos, 1896, 6.Google Scholar

25 Ibid. 6–10; Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 94–106.Google Scholar

26 Proceedings at the Banquet in Honour of Edward Wilmot Blyden, LL.D., London, 1907, 55–6.Google Scholar

27 See, for example, Diop, Cheikh Anta, Nations Nègres et Culture, Paris, 1954.Google Scholar

28 Blyden, , From West Africa to Palestine, Freetown, 1873, 104–9, 114; ‘The Negro in Ancient History’, op. cit. 3–16;Google ScholarThe Significance of Liberia, 6.Google Scholar

29 African Life and Customs, 9;Google ScholarWest Africa Before Europe, 95–100, 121;Google ScholarThe African Problem and the Method of Its Solution, 16–17;Google ScholarProceedings at the Banquet in Honour of Edward Wilmot Blyden, LL.D., 41;Google ScholarThe Return of the Exiles and the West African Church, 6.Google Scholar

30 See, for example, Mphalele, Ezekiel, The African Image, London, 1962.Google Scholar

31 West Africa Before Europe, i–ii.Google Scholar