Aug. 3, 2007 — The Republic of Liberia launched a three-day celebration Friday of the 175th birthday of Virgin Islander Edward Wilmot Blyden, which will culminate in the launching of a West African journalism award in his name.
Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirelaf sanctioned the celebrations to honor Blyden, who is known as a distinguished statesmen, diplomat, scholar, linguist, journalist and social activist. The celebrations will include a drive to collect folk tales in the national language, a one-day journalist workshop and a religious service to celebrate his life, according to a press release issued by the anniversary committee in Monrovia, Liberia.
A similar celebration will take place Aug. 5 in Washington, D.C., at the 15th Street Presbyterian Church, where Blyden read one of his memorable discourses — “Elements of Permanent Influence” – in 1890, the release said.
In Freetown, Sierra Leone, Blyden’s only surviving grandson, Ambassador Edward Wilmot Blyden III, will attend celebrations in the Foulah Town Muslim community. Prayers will be recited in Blyden's memory, followed by a community festivity. Blyden contributed to the development of education for Muslims in Sierra Leone towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the release said.
Blyden was born on St. Thomas Aug. 3, 1832, in what was then the Danish West Indies. He was the third of seven children and claimed to be a descendant of the Ibo tribe in Eastern Nigeria. He lived a rather privileged life, as both his father and mother were free and literate. The family lived in a neighborhood that was a mix of Jewish and English-speaking residents in Charlotte Amalie, and Blyden played with Jewish boys on Synagogue Hill.
When Blyden was 10, the family left St. Thomas for Porto Bello, Venezuela. He attended school and excelled in linguists. He also began to notice the disparity between blacks, who were enslaved and assigned to menial tasks, and the more privileged whites.
Blyden and his family returned to St. Thomas, and the young scholar was mentored by the Rev. John P. Knox, who came to St. Thomas to pastor at the Dutch Reformed Church. Knox was impressed with Blyden's natural aptitude for oration and literature.
When he was denied admission to Rutgers Theological Seminary in 1850 because of his race, Blyden immigrated to Liberia. There he completed high school and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1860. Blyden rose to become one of the most enlightened men of the 19th Century, contributing his original observations to religious thought, governance, diplomacy, national unity and the development of race consciousness.
His ideas would influence Africans and the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and America to develop concepts of Negritude, Pan Africanist thought, the nationalist movement of West African clergy and educators and Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. Edward Blyden’s magnum opus, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, was published in 1887.
Blyden worked in Gabon, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. He twice represented Liberia as Ambassador to France and England, where he dined with Queen Victoria and was a guest of Lord Gladstone and Lord Derby. He died in February 1912 and was buried in Freetown, Sierra Leone. A bust erected in his memory by his British admirers stands on Wallace Johnson Street in Freetown. His West African admirers erected his tombstone at Race Course Cemetery where he is buried. In his birthplace of St. Thomas, his bust is located in the middle of Charlotte Amalie in Post Office Square.
For more information about Blyden, visit Columbia University’s Edward Wilmot Blyden Virtual Museum.
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