ABSTRACT
In these eternally valid words a pre-eminently illustrious citizen of Liberia and Pan-Negro patriot, Edward Wilmot Blyden, had in the nineteenth century perceived the logically necessary connection between Africa’s authentic cultural heritage and the emergence of modern Africans to nationhood. Today these words of hope and prophecy are, visibly, gradually being fulfilled in independent Africa. African personality, expostulated in cultural and mental terms by Blyden, has since his day found the philosopher in Leopold Sedar Senghor, the political firebrand Pan-Africanist in Kwame Nkrumah, the pragmatic and practising statesman in Julius Nyerere, and literary pundits in a battalion of Africans all over the continent. Pervasive to the point that it has become the touchstone by which African directors of
affairs are seeking to assess their policies and judge themselves, the concept of African personality is the fountain of the hopes and aspirations of the Organization of African Unity. It is the signal that the liberation of Africa and Africans has truly begun. The psychical, cultural, intellectual, and mental emancipation of Africans we are witnesses of, and of which we are a part, has conduced to ever greater respect for Africa as well as inter-racial understanding and harmony. This emancipation has been the magic wand that has transformed the master/slave relationship of the white and Africans of the colonial yesteryear to the legalized, though not necessarily functioning, equality relationship that has increasingly marked the international scene in the last twenty-five years. Far beyond the imagination of the most sanguine Afrophiles of nineteenth-century Europe and the New World, African nations have been rubbing shoulders with white society nations. In the ecstatic language of nationality and liberty used by the Irish poet, W.B.Yeats, ‘A terrible beauty is born’.2
