Edward Wilmot Blyden, grandfather of African liberation

By Cameron Duodu, London, UK.

While George Padmore is well known as the ‘father of African emancipation’, Cameron Duodu reminds us of the life and ideas of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ‘the grandfather of African emancipation’.

In my recent report on the unveiling of a plaque at No. 22 Cranleigh Street in Camden in North London to commemorate the years that the premises were the residence of the Trinidad-born writer, George Padmore, I mentioned that Padmore was regarded as the ‘father of African emancipation’.

A lesser-known fact about Padmore is that his lifelong devotion to the cause of African liberation was ignited in him by another African who was also born abroad - Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in the Virgin Islands (then under Danish rule) but spent most of his life in West Africa, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but also in the then British colony of Lagos.

As Padmore’s intellectual mentor, Blyden ought, therefore, to be rightly recognised as ‘the grandfather of African emancipation’.

These acknowledgements are important, for you cannot read about the history of American liberation, (for instance) without also being told of the debt which the American founding fathers owed to some of the British advocates of ‘the rights of man’, whose ideas influenced them. But African history was - and still continues -to be taught largely as if our liberation dropped out of heaven and grew in splendid isolation, nurtured entirely by its own inner vicissitudes.

The reason is, of course, that it is extremely inconvenient for some of the whites who own the political/history teaching/publishing industry, which mediates between us and our knowledge of our own continent, to accept that there is only ‘one Africanness’ in the world. Even more difficult to grasp for some is the fact that the black colour of a person brought up in a white environment can - and does - often arouse so much curiosity about the origins of that colour (and the possible loss of intellectual and spiritual identity associated with the person’s removal from its ‘source’) that he or she can spend a lifetime exploring and retrieving what he or she had lost. And when what is lost is found, it sometimes becomes a lifelong mission to communicate it to others with such force and passion that a whole movement - both political and intellectual - can arise out of it to unite peoples separated by land and sea.

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