History of Africa by Kevin Shillington

History of Africa by Kevin Shillington

Author:Kevin Shillington
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK


African political thought in west Africa

More significant in terms of African political thought in this period was Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Liberian settler, born in 1832 of free parents in the slave society of the Caribbean Virgin Islands. Having been refused entry to an American university in 1850, he took ship to newly independent Liberia, the African American republic on the west African coast. There, as a school and university teacher, a prolific writer and the editor of The Liberia Herald, Blyden became the most influential African intellectual of his generation. His writings showed great pride in the African empires of the past, but like many of his African Christian contemporaries, Blyden believed that what Africa now needed was a new ‘civilising mission’. This sounded a lot like the white paternalistic ACS, of which he was a great admirer. Unlike the ACS, however, Blyden’s civilising mission – spreading the enlightenment of western knowledge and ideas – was to be brought to Africa by westernised black people like himself. In effect, he believed that the republic of Liberia, or something very like it, should be extended all along the west African coast. In these ideas, one can see the first traces of a new African ‘nationalism’ – distinct from indigenous African authority and independent of white control. It was also one of the earliest expositions of Pan-Africanism being applied to west Africa. Like many of his contemporaries in the 1850s and 60s, however, Blyden had a misplaced faith in British imperialism as a benevolent source of enlightenment in Africa.

Figure 18.2 Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c.1806–91). Ajayi, an enslaved Yoruba from southwestern Nigeria, was ‘liberated’ from a Portuguese slaving vessel off Lagos in 1821 by a ship of the British West Africa Squadron that transported him to Sierra Leone. One of the first students of Fourah Bay College, he converted to Christianity, taking the names Samuel Crowther after a CMS benefactor. He was ordained in the Anglican faith and was a founding member of the CMS mission to southern Nigeria in 1845. Ajayi Crowther was consecrated bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. He published numerous influential books in English and translated the Bible into Yoruba. Unattributed engraving in Missionary Heroes of Africa.



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