ABSTRACT
It is in the logic of things that Edward Wilmot Blyden has enjoyed hero status in the hands of historians of the nineteenth century African educated elite.1 In erudition, in literary output, in the defence of the Negro race against jaundiced white disparagers, and in oratorical powers, he had no compeer. A distinct diadem in the Pan-Negro literary crown, he excelled his contemporaries with his international stature that extended across the Atlantic to the New World. His versatility was uncommon, having been at different times an educator, a scholar, a civil servant, a journalist, a missionary, and a diplomat. Above all, from the age of nineteen, when he first set his foot on African soil, until his death at the ripe age of eighty, Blyden was a truly sincere, dedicated, ‘pan-Negro patriot’, imbued all the time with a sense of service to his race. And so much was his spell on his contemporaries in West Africa that ditties were composed about him, one as early as 1890 as follows:
Africa’s destiny lay hid in night, God said let BLYDEN be, and all was light.2
