Edward Wilmot Blyden

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Edward Wilmot Blyden (3 August 1832 - 7 February 1912) was an educator, writer, diplomat, and politician in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He was the Liberian Secretary of State (1862-1864) and Minister of the Interior (1880-1882); he also served as professor of classics (1862-1871), then President (1880-1884), of Liberia College (now the University of Liberia).

As a writer, he is regarded widely as the Father of Pan-Africanism; his major work, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), pushed forward the idea that Islam, a major religion in sub-Saharan Africa, has a much more unifying and fulfilling effect on sub-Saharan Africans, while Christianity, also a major religion in Africa which was mostly introduced by its European colonizers, had a demoralizing effect. This idea would play a major role in the 20th-century revival of Islam among African-Americans, which ran parallel to the rejection of Christianity as a white man's religion.

As a diplomat, he served as an ambassador for Liberia to Britain and France. He also spent time in other British colonies in West Africa, particularly Nigeria and Sierra Leone, writing for early newspapers in both colonies.

He was born in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (then under Danish rule) to free parents on August 3, 1832, and died in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on February 7, 1912.

[edit] External links

• Detailed biography on Edward Wilmot Blyden