ABSTRACT
Edward Wilmot Blyden, politician, writer and diplomat, has been seen as one of the key thinkers in the development of Pan-African ideas. Edward Blyden was born the third of seven children in the then Danish colony of St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, at a time when slavery had not yet been abolished. Both of Blyden’s parents were free, however; his father was a tailor and his mother a school teacher. Blyden was educated at a local school by his mother and for a time in Venezuela, his family’s temporary home from 1842-4. Here he became fluent in Spanish, the first of many languages he was to master.
