Abstract
The Africans in the diaspora contributed significantly to the social and political liberation of Africans in Africa from the colonial oppression and atrocities. This they achieved through varied and complex activities ranging from publications, conferences, congresses, rallies, boycotts, demonstrations, material assistance, and the many associations and/or organizations that acted as mouthpiece towards mobilizing support and influencing policy for African causes. These activities were instrumental and sometimes acted as a catalyst towards the decolonization process in Africa . However, the extent to which these activities contributed to the writing and teaching of African history remains unclear. This exists despite the differences of opinion or rather the mixed and ambivalent manner through which the blacks in diaspora responded to the historical happenings in Africa . This paper sets out to highlight what may be considered as the contribution of the African diaspora to the writing of African historiography and the various ways these have been appropriated when it comes to teaching African historiography both in Africa and in the west. The paper is divided into three major parts. The first part deals with conceptualization of Africa and African diaspora. The second part offers a critique of a select writings by African diaspora about Africa . The third part suggests some improvements in the teaching of diasporic history in Africa . Data for this paper will be gathered from published books, journals, periodicals, and the Internet.
Introduction
Anyone who seeks to write about the African diaspora is almost certain to get entangled in not only the exercise of definition, but also that of periodisation of the massive movements and extensive relocation of persons of African descent, over a long period of time throughout much of the world . There is a general acknowledgement that defining African diaspora presents several conceptual difficulties, indeed the term diaspora itself is difficult, for it simultaneously refers to a process, a condition, a space, and a discourse: the continuous process by which a diaspora is made, unmade and remade, the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself, the process where it is molded and imagined, and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed. Also embodied in the term diaspora are temporal, spatial, and cultural considerations, the connections and divides of the diaspora from the times, spaces, and cultures of the putative homeland. Clearly, the temporality, spatiality, and culturality of the African diaspora are more problematic than might appear at first. When and why did the dispersal of the Africans start, where and what did they spread, which and whose culture(s) did they share . All these have made the term diaspora very flexible and all encompassing. Paradoxically, while this very all encompassing nature gives the term its functional utility, it also renders it analytically imprecise and practically almost impossible to act with, as it means different things to different people. As such, this paper may not presume to be an all encompassing answer to the definitional difficulties but will represent a continued discussion in the field.
The etymology of the term diaspora and its history as it was originally applied in Greek translation of Deuteronomy 28: 25 are both well established in literature. However, until the 1960s, its usage was confined to the scholarship of the Jewish and Christian religion in general and Jewish dispersal all over the world. In 1965, George Shepperson joined the word “ Africa ” to diaspora after observing a close parallels between the Jewish diaspora and the dispersal of Africans as a consequence of slave trade. Shepperson is credited as one of the first scholars to have recognized the great similarities in the comparative histories of Jewish and African dispersions, especially the role of slavery and imperialism in the forced migration of both the Jews and Africans as made explicit in his presentation at the International Congress of African History held at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1965 entitled “The African Abroad or African Diaspora”.
In this paper, Shepperson conceptualized African diaspora as the study of series of reactions to coercion, to the imposition of the economic and political rule of alien people in Africa , to slavery and imperialism. Since then, R.W Beachey appropriated the phrase in his inaugural lecture at Makerere University in 1967 where he addressed the generally neglected East Africa diaspora. Beachey particularly wondered about what happened to all the millions of slaves who have gone from East Central Africa to Mauritius , Re-Union, the Seychelles , the Makran Coast and the countless thousand who were absorbed into the great areas of Middle East . However, in the process of experimenting with the Shepperson phrase certain difficulties were experienced. For example, Shepperson seem to have paid inadequate attention to the migration of Negro slaves and servants to Europe before the opening of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Negroes by Muslim powers. But even with these Shepperson asserted that the period of almost four hundred years of European enslavement of Africans remains the heart of the African diaspora. More persuasive writes on African diaspora such as Joseph Harris further argued that Shepperson did not take into consideration the many aspects of voluntary migrations associated with Negroes all over the world. As a result of these and other limitations, there was a need to expand on the concept African diaspora so as to encompass the widest dispersal of Africans across the globe.
This is what Joseph Harris attempted in his edited collection of essays entitled Global Dimensions (1982). On the introduction of the book, Harris offered the following oft quoted definition “the African diaspora concept subsumes the following: the global dispersal 9voluntary and involuntary) of Africans throughout history; the emergence of cultural identity a broad based on original and social conditions; and the psychological or physical return to the homeland Africa. Thus viewed, the African diaspora assumes the character of a dynamic, continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and gender” . The above definition has provided the general frame for discussions on African diasporic relations and has been appropriated by many scholar such as Alusine Jalloh who has persuasively argued that “the African diaspora was born out of the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans to various areas of the world since ancient times, but involuntary migration through the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, and Indian Ocean slave trades account for most of the black presence outside Africa today. The concept of African diaspora has come to include the psychological and physical return of people of African descent to their homeland . Today, the historical relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad is a major subject not only in history but in other disciplines as well” .
In reality, the usage of the word homeland appear problematic as the social formation of the African diaspora remain quite complex in its composition and exhibits contradictory tendencies in its practice making it difficult to make generalizations about its politics or engagement. Perhaps the warning provided Eliot Skinner in the article he wrote in the edited volume by J.E Harris entitled “The Dialectic Between Diasporas and Home Land” is appropriate. In this work, Skinner reminded African diaspora researcher of the complexities and contradictions which have characterized the Africans in diaspora and those in the homeland. There could be anger, bitterness, and remorse among people who left as a result of the conditions that forced them to leave. There could also be conflict when the host society attempts to justify the subordinate status of the migrants.
Even if the diasporic communities shared some emotional attachment to the homeland , Colin Palmer has similarly warned that the diasporic, generally speaking, possess a number of characteristics. Regardless of their location, members of the diaspora share an emotional attachment to their ancestral land, are cognizant of their dispersal and if conditions warrant, of their oppression and alienation in the countries in which they reside. Members of the diasporic communities also tend to possess a sense of “racial”, ethnic, or religious identity that transcend geographic boundaries, to share broad cultural similarities, and sometimes to articulate a desire to return to their original homeland. No diasporic community manifests all these characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered ancestral kin. In many respects, diasporas are not actual but imagined and symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into being” .
The above definition similarly raises certain operational questions. For example: are all Africans in diaspora possessing similar collective memories of Africa as their homeland or the same diasporic consciousness? In reflecting on Palmers work, Morehouse Maggi argued “…any attachment to ancestral land whether real or imagined is simply too much wishful thinking. While not denying that powerful movements of African consciousness are a reality of America , Caribbean, and British a history, their salience among the majority of the black population outside of Africa is dubious at best. It appears too essentialist to say that people of African descent are committed to and involved with the homeland of Africa . They may or may not be, depending on the individual and her temporal and spatial situation at given point of history” . This discussion leads to two critical observations. One is that we must speak of not one but many African diasporas. For example: we have the pre-Atlantic diaspora, the Atlantic or the historic diaspora, the non-Atlantic diaspora, and the contemporary diaspora. Secondly, each of these diasporas, broadly speaking, has their own unique connections and commitments to Africa, its own memories and imaginations of Africa, and its own conceptions of the diasporic conditions and identity . By way of concluding, when we speak of African diaspora we seem to be talking about the historiography of African experience with slave trade, slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. These forces have witnessed the massive movement and/or of people of African descent and their cultures throughout the world to places such as Americas , Europe, and Asia . These massive movements have seen the community of African descendants being labeled variously such as African Americans, Afro-Latin Americans, Afro-Arabs, Afro-Yemen, Afro-Pakistan, Afro-India etc., wherever they are on the globe.
African Diaspora and Africa Past
The history about the making of African diaspora, particularly, which that concern the trans-Saharan slave trade and transatlantic slave trade are well beyond this brief paper. However, by the 1520s, the depopulation of the Indians of America prompted the Spanish government to look for alternative sources of labor to aid their search for gold and silver. It was this decision that witnessed an estimated 11 to 12 million Africans men, women and children forcibly embarked on European vessels for a life of slavery in the western hemisphere. This is not to prominence transatlantic slave trade in the initial dispersal of Africans to the western hemisphere since it's hey days, trans-Saharan slave trade also saw the purchase African to work as servants or laborers in Spain , Portugal , and other countries. During the transatlantic slave trade, many Africans were captured or purchased in the interior on the continent, but a large number died before reaching the coasts. About 9 to 10 million Africans survived the Atlantic crossing to be purchased by planters and traders in the New World , where they worked principally as slave laborers in plantation economies requiring a large work force. African people were transported from numerous coastal outlets from Senegal river in west Africa and hundreds of trading sites along the coast as far south as Banguela (Angola), and from ports in Mozambique in Southeast Africa .
While the reasons for this trade are well established in literature, by the eighteenth century, the Europeans increased and effectively displayed unparallel racial superiority complex towards the continent that they had exploited for several centuries. Their attitude was engendered by the upheavals which, since the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolution, had bestowed overwhelming material power on Europe . The Europeans overlooked the fact that their power was partly derived from the slave trade, which in itself undermined societies in Africa .
The extent of the racial superiority was evident among the European thinkers, explorers, missionaries, anthropologists and even historians. For example, Hegel (1770-1831) had no hesitation when he asserted that Africa is not a historical continent; it shows neither change not development and that the black peoples were capable of neither development nor education. As we see them today, so have they always been . This preposterous view of Africa persisted into the twentieth century. . One could hear Johnston asserting “Africa, in fact, is like a wonderful museum to illustrate the past conditions of life which have existed in our own country and in the Southern and Western Europe…and with mankind in Africa it is the same thing ”. As late as 1963, a highly respected Oxford University professor Hugh Trevor Roper could similarly claim that “perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa . The rest is darkness…and darkness is not a subject of history…we cannot therefore afford to amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in the picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe ”.
This view was similarly held by European explorers such as Richard Burton . In his book Mission to Glele, King Dahomey (1864, he wrote “the pure Negro ranks in the human family below the two great Arab and Aryan races…the Negro, in mass, will not improve beyond a certain point, and that not respectable, he mentally remains a child ”. Matters were even made worse when the German school of historians claimed that only written sources could provide a proper basis for history. In London , Professor A. P. Newton echoed this theory when he claimed that Africa had no history before the coming of Europeans. History only begins when men take to writing. Primitive customs was the concern of archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists . The outcome of this attitude was that the Cambridge Modern History, which was published in the early years of the twentieth century, totally ignored Africa , and the history of the continent was left to men like Sir Charles Lucas and Gabriel Hanotaux . Colonial and imperial history accordingly took the place of history of Africa .
The Africans in diaspora were deeply affected by the negative images curved out of Africa by early Europeans who saw the continent as inferior and inhabited by primitive people. This erroneous and ignorant view in the European mind was a key rationale for not only slavery but also colonialism and racism which had a tremendous impact on the minds of Africans in diaspora. Economically, physically, and psychologically brutalized by the evils of slavery, colonialism and racism, Africans in diaspora attempted to grapple with the understanding of how their history was made and unmade. It was therefore the need to alter the intellectual climate within which historical scholarship was pursued that put people like Olaudah Equiano , Edward Wilmot Blyden , W.E.B. Dubois and Leo Hansberry to prominence as far as the writing of African history is concerned. These Africans in diaspora sought to provide the opposite of the European endeavor . They were unwilling to accept the western racial supremacist theories that the Africans were racially and culturally inferior. Through their publications, conferences, seminars, demonstrations, and protests, the Africans in diaspora endeavored to develop and to promote philosophies such as pan- Africanism, Africanism, Black Personality, Black Zionism, Negritude, and the philosophy of the wretched of the earth, all aimed at rebutting the arguments of the white supremacists, and charting the African road to development both in the New World and in Africa. They condemned slave trade, slavery, colonialism, racism, and neo-colonialism and hoped to give the black race an honorable place in the history of humankind . The tendency has been sized upon by the school of Afrocentricity in the United States of America led by Molefi K. Asante .
In their search for an authentic African history, these diasporas may be divided into four groups: those who seek to understand the complexity of slavery, colonialism, and racism, and its relationship to the history of the African diaspora; those who attempt to explain the causes of the African diaspora in terms of emotional reductionism-essentially blaming either the Whiteman or the African, but at the same time recognizing that each group played a role; those who simply try to explain the origins of the diaspora history and slavery basically in terms of morals values and analysis, and finally those who attempt to overcompensate by romanticizing African history and the diaspora connections. These categories are obviously not rigid. A combination of positions may be relevant to a given case .
Even within these categories, Africans in diaspora, academic and other commentators, maintained a complex and at times very ambivalent relationship with Africa . While its not surprising that Africans min the diaspora, rather than those on the continent were the first to launch protracted and passionate struggles for epistemological and political liberation, in which the vindication of Africa as a human and historical space was central , some of the statements of the blacks in the diaspora about the situation in Africa tended to be in line with the prevalent Eurocentric views that saw Africa as benighted, backward, void of cultural attainment and a dark continent inhabited by black savages . To be sure, there were those who reproduced the narrative of derision, who yearned for unconditional assimilation and Africa 's erasure from their memories and bodies. And even among those who longed for Africa's redemption many had internalized the civilizational binaries of the western epistemological order and they believed Africa could only be liberated from its current backwardness by the modernized diaspora returning to the motherland.
In the next few pages, I attempt to analyze the extent to which these observations could have played out in the works of Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912). In most commentaries, Blyden has been described as a prolific writer and more radical in his views. Born in the West Indies, he migrated at an early age to Liberia , where he studied, lived and worked as a lecturer, a politician, a diplomat till his death in 1912 at the age of eighty. Today, Blyden is remembered not for his public life as an administrator and diplomat, but as a man of letters and ideas. He is the undisputed author of more than eleven books some of which include: Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), West Africa Before Europe (1905), African Life and Customs (1908), Liberia's Offering (1862), The Prospects of the African (1874), The People of Africa (1871), Our Origin, Dangers and Duties (1865), The Three Needs of Liberia (1908), Problems Before Liberia (1909), The West African University (1872).
In addition to his journalistic works, Blyden also published over eighty seminal pamphlets and articles . In his numerous books and pamphlets and in the many speeches he delivered in Europe and America , Blyden persistently and vehemently condemned the racist theories of the day. He also advocated Africa for Africans, Pan-Africanism, African Personality, Islam, and polygamy, which in his view were more in keeping with the African personality . He also insisted on the purity and integrity of the black race and therefore condemned mixed marriages, championed Ethiopianism, and above all, preached racial pride and self-esteem among blacks.
In his article “The Negro in Ancient History” Blyden adduced evidence to prove that Africans played an active role in the early Egyptian civilization and were thus part purveyors to the posterity of “the germs of art and sciences”. He was able to show convincingly that Africa was not a continent without history. He examined in detail the achievements of ancient Ethiopia and Cathage and collected the abundance evidence to be found in Homer and Herodotus of the African high culture. He emphasized that the history of Africa's inland regions was no less magnificent than the past of Greece and Rome and pointed to the discovery of the ruins of the ancient capital of Bornu and was confident that the study of the continent would bring further evidence of Africa 's past grandeur. Blyden further blamed slave trade as barrier to social development of the people of Africa arguing that if normal economic contacts had been established between Europe and Africa instead of slave trade, then Africans could have overcome their backwardness.
In his book African Life and Customs (1908), Blyden demonstrated an african social and economic system most carefully and elaborated organized, venerable, impregnable, and indispensable, a thesis later made famous by Placide Temple in his book Bantu Philosophy . In the same book, Blyden identified several basic elements as consisting African culture, one of which included polygamy or plural marriage, which he regarded as the indispensable basis of traditional African family life and organization. It was necessary for the survival, solidarity and general welfare of society. It was welcomed by both men and women on the ground that it served as a cohesive and enriching rather than disruptive and impoverishing force in society. Polygamy both prevented European evils of spinsterhood and prostitution and protected women from the debilitating effects of excessive child bearing by providing a period of rest and recuperation after child birth.
Blyden also isolated communalism as a distinctive feature of African society arguing that “under the African system of communal property…every member of the community had a home and a sufficiency of food and clothing and other necessities of life”. He contrasted this with European individualism and unhealthy competition. On religion, Blyden contended that African psyche had a more developed religious sense than was the case with other people. Religion he argued had originated in Africa, since Africa was the cradle of mankind, before it spread to other areas. Africa had also protected Judaism, Christianity, and Islam during the initial stages of their development. He condemned Christianity in Africa arguing that it was the main agent of slavery, racialism, and colonial domination. He contrasted Christianity with Islam in his book Christianity, Islam and Negro Race . Islam, he argued, had brought Africans the benefits of a major world civilization without creating in them a sense of inferiority. In addition, Islam was an elevating and unifying influence which did not disrupt the African social fabric.
On racial theories popularized by persons such as James Hunt, Count Aurthur de Gobinean, and the host of Anthropological Society, Blyden began by accepting cultural and physical differences among the races. However, to him racial differences could not mean superiority or inferiority of certain races arguing that each race was equal but distinct, it was a question of destiny. In addition, he maintained that history and environment had made the different races to develop special characteristics which are complementary. While he argued that each race had its culture to contribute to the totality of human civilization and that the African should preserve his soul and refrain from getting involved with alien cultures, Blyden at the same time warned Africans against racial intermixing. For this reason, he opposed interracial marriages which he said tended to produce racial cripples or racial hybrids. He therefore believed firmly that the best course open to the former slaves in America was to return to Africa to re-colonize Liberia , Sierra Leone and other regions.
His belief on the distinctive attributes of Africans led him to assume that there was also a distinctive “African Personality”, which to his estimation entailed cheerfulness, sympathy, willingness to serve, spirituality as contrasted with the European character which was harsh, individualistic, competitive, combative and materialistic. This thesis was well captured in his lecture entitled “Race and Study” which he gave in Freetown , Sierra Leone in 1895. In this lecture he argued “for everyone of you-for every one of us-there is a special work to be done-a work of tremendous necessity and tremendous importance, a work for the race to which we belong…there is a responsibility which our personality, which our membership in the race involves the duty of every man, of every race is to contend for its individuality-to keep and develop it…therefore honor and love your race. Be yourself…if you are not yourself you have nothing left to give to the world. You have no pleasure, no use, nothing which will attract and charm men, for by suppression of your individuality, you loose your distinctive character…you will see, then, that to give up your personality would be to give up the peculiar work and glory to which we are called. It would really be to give up the divine idea-to give up God-to sacrifice the divine individuality: and this is the worst of suicides .”
Blyden also recognized the important role of education particularly in the African nation building, and as the most effective instrument of change and progress. In his book West African University , he wrote “ if the people are ever to become fit to be entrusted with the functions of self-government; if they are to become ripe for free and progressive institutions, it must be by a system of education adapted to the exigencies of the country and race; such a system as shall prepare the intelligent youth for the responsibilities which must devolve upon them; and; without interfering with their native instincts, and throwing them altogether out of harmony and sympathy with their countrymen, shall qualify them to be efficient guides and counselors and rulers of the people ”. He thus advocated for a system of education that could meet the material requirements of African societies and that which would also emphasize African cultural values. He suggested for instance that African children should be taught the life of Toussaint L'Overture, classics; Arabic, African Languages, and that education in Africa must emphasize African art, music, literature, and history. While in Liberia , he initiated a series of public lectures on African history and achievements. European textbooks presenting Africans as heathen as and worse than heathen-fools had to be discarded. To Blyden, Africans had to be taught how to think and not how to imitate. Education in Blyden's view was to prepare the African for the real life on the continent. Above all it must imbue him with a feeling of racial pride.
While by the end of the nineteenth century Blyden was convinced that the African-Americans would not return to Africa , he still affirmed that their history, their cultural heritage and their national stimuli were on the continent. He therefore advanced the constructive idea that Afro-Americans would not achieve equality in United States if they ignored the interests of Africans, thus linking the struggle of the blacks in the diaspora and that of the Africans for their liberation. He said “within the last thirty years, the sentiments of race and nationality has attained wonderful development…this seems to be the period of race organization and race consolidating. And there is no people in whom the desire for race integrity and race preservation is stronger than in the Negro . To Blyden, the unity of blacks would inevitably lead to the formation in the future of a great state embracing the African continent. He considered such a state-African in essence but with the best elements of European civilization integrated in it-this to Bylden was the only way of winning respect for the blacks enslaved and deprived of all rights in America, and backward and disunited in Africa. More than any other African of his day, Blyden helped to foster, through his speeches, letters and books, self confidence, self-assertion and race pride in the African. He fashioned a total philosophy of Africanness, a vital element of Pan-Africanism, which stressed the common destiny of black peoples, the concept of African personality, the idea of inherently socialistic character of African society, the resolute protest against the thesis that Africa had no history, the spiritual decolonization slogan and the call to Africanise the Church and African education system .
However, some of E.W. Blyden writings and speeches have been read within the Eurocentric conceptualization of Africa and Africans. The rest of this paper will not focus on these unresolved issues about Blyden. While Blyden prolific writers, those who are familiar with his works have not only found him inconsistent but also ambiguous. He did much to vindicate his race and to dispel the myth of inherent Negro inferiority, but ended up advocating for a racist discourse. In V.Y Mudimbe's words Blyden thoughts “represents an emotional response to the European process of denigrating Africa …and his concept of race is now generally considered an ideological trap ”. Indeed Blyden letters reveal his racial intolerance and a deep hatred for “Mongrels” which led him into disloyalty to the Liberian government, even when he was supposed to be representing its interests officially. It is no wonder that his countrymen more than once virtually drove him from Liberia .
Similarly, while Blyden may be pardoned for he was a victim of racial discrimination and wished to establish the respectability of his race and oppose the then prevalent racist theories of the time, he unapologetically appropriated racial dichotomies and/or binaries based on European thought that he spent almost the whole of his life opposing. For example: while Blyden preached that following the dictates of providence, Negritia or Ethiopia soon “stretches” out her hands into God” and will be reborn. Slavery itself was considered to be part of this divine plan because it was through the New World slavery experience that “the son's of Ham” could absorb Christianity in order to effect the regeneration of the African continent. At the same time, as being a Christian Abolitionist, Blyden was a Pan-Negroist striving for the re-unification of black peoples all over the world. The Pan-Negroism brought to Africa derived from the New World slavery experience involved the color-line and a racial self-definition of Africans. Both Abolitionism and Pan-Negroism provide a view of Africa from a position outside of Africa, positioning Africa and Africans within grand, originally European or New World, dichotomies, namely civilized-primitive and black-white respectively. Blyden thus applied the civilized-primitive dichotomies within the black race , namely between the New World “exiled brethren” “trained for work or re-building waste place under severe discipline and hard bondage” (=civilized), and the indigenous Africans who had to be raised from the slumber of the ages and rescued from a stagnant barbarism” (=the primitive).
Nowhere else are Blyden's ideas ambivalently demonstrated than on colonialism, religion and missionary activities, his striving to co-operate with foreign oppressors reflected in his own time the sentiments of the majority of educated Africans who saw in foreign rule and economic co-operation with the metropolitan country, the possibility not only of forming the nation and overcoming the age-old backwardness, but also of introducing Christianity of the African continent. For these reasons, Blyden saw in the European colonization an inevitable evil or a benevolent imperialism whose program was to save and to go . He thus repeatedly urged the British in the 1880s and 1890s, to occupy the whole of West Africa and thereby exclude the French and the Germans. After the partition he declared “our country has been partitioned in the order…of prudence, by the European powers, and I am sure that, in spite of what has happened, or is now happening or may yet happen, this partition has been permitted for the ultimate good of the people and for the benefit of humanity ”.
His attitude towards the missionary societies was usually antagonistic, though on occasion ambiguous. His feelings are well stated, “The attempt to Europeanize the Negro in Africa will always be a profitless task. This is the feeling of the most advanced minds of the race. If it were possible – which happily, it is not- to civilize and Christianize the whole of Africa according to the notions of some Europeans, neither would the people themselves nor the outside world be any great gainers by it; for the African would then fail of the ability to perform his specific part in the world's work, as a district portion of the human race”. Yet, while on a mission into the interior of Sierra Leone (1872) he is quoted by Lynch as a forceful advocate for the expansion of missionary activities, “Blyden also appealed to missionary societies to extend their operations into the interior. He wrote to Venn: ‘I think that a Christian missionary would be welcomed at Falaba; and it would be an important centre for the aggressive operations of the church of Christ . I beg most earnestly to call the attention of the C.M.S to Kambia and Falaba as important outposts and strategic points in the great warfare which is to restore the kingdom of this world to their legitimate heir.' But this carefully phrased appeal, too, met with no response”
Religion was not the only area in which Blyden manifested ambivalence. What was his attitude towards colonialism, the burning issue in the relationship between Blacks and Whites in Africa ? His general attitude was that whatever colonizing there was to be done, should be done by Blacks:'……..Europe must give up the idea of regenerating Africa through colonies of her own subjects. He envisioned that the instruments for the regeneration of this content are the millions of Africans in the western hemisphere, where, after nigh three hundred years of residence, they are still considered as strangers. It seems to us that European and Americans workers for Africa should recognize this fact; and those nations who actively co-operated in the work of their deportation should as earnestly co-operate in the work of their restoration. This is the redress which nature is waiting for before she will lend a finger to European effort. Justice must precede mercy. Yet how can one explain or perhaps even understand and justify the passage which preceeds the above in his chapter ‘African Colonization, “But the most elaborate bit of recent machinery for the occupation and civilization of Africa is that at the head of which stands that Royal philanthropist, Leopold II, King of the Belgians. He has already, with more than regal munificence, lavished a vast fortune in the Congo country with a view to the extinction of slavery and introduction of select civilization among the aborigines. It is a noble purpose, a magnificent aim, to build up a civilization in Africa by free labour”. The prevailing theme throughout Blyden's writings is the need for the self – regeneration of the African by learning from Western civilization, by returning to Africa from ‘exile', by investigating in the Black continent, without excessive condemnation of the European presence there.
ENDNOTES
Alpers A. Edward (2001) Defining the African Diaspora. Paper Presented to the Centre for Comparative Social Analysis Workshop, October 25, 2001; Zeleza T. Paul “The African Academic Diaspora in the United States and Africa: The Challenges of Productive Engagement” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24, 1 (2004); Gomez A. Michael (2005) Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press
Zeleza T. Paul “The African Academic Diaspora in the United States and Africa: The Challenges of Productive Engagement” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 24, 1 (2004) pg. 264.
Opoku-Mensah P. (2007) The African Diaspora, Civil Society and African Integration. CCIS Research Series. Working Paper No. 6 pg. 4.
Beachey R.W (1967 The African Diaspora and East Africa: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Makerere University College 31 July 1967.
Harris J. (19820 “Introduction” in Harris (ed.) Global Dimensions , 2 nd ed. Pgs 3-4
Jalloh A. (1996) “Introduction” in Alusine Jalloh and Stephen E. Maizlish (eds) The African Diaspora . Texas : A&M University Press, pg. 3
Palmer C. (1998) “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora” in Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter, 36, 6 September 1998, pgs. 22-25.
MorehousE M. Maggi (undated) The African Diaspora: An Investigation of the Theories and Methods Employed when Categorizing and Identifying Transnational Communities. University of California-Berkeley.
Zeleza op. cit pg. 263
Behrendt Stephen (1999) “Transatlantic Slave Trade” in Appiah K.A and Gate Jr., H.L Africana the Encyclopedia of the African and African America Experience . Basic Books. Pgs 1865.
For details see J.D Fage (1981) “The Development of African Historiography” in J. KI-Zerbo (ed) General History of Africa Vol. I Methodology and African Pre-History . Abridged Version. Nairobi : Heinemann. Pgs. 12
Ibid
Johnston, H.H., 1910, British Access the Seas : Africa
Trevor-Roper, H. (19630 “The Rise of Christian Europe” in The Listener Vol. 28 November.
Fage op.cit pg. 12
Fage op.cit pg. 12
Atieno-Odhiambo, E.S., 2000, ‘From African Historiography to an Africa Philosophy of History', Afrika Zamani no. 7 & 8 CODESRIA.
Ogot B.A (1997) Africa and the Caribbean . Kisumu: Anyange Press. Pg. 28
Molefi K. Asante (2004) In Search of an Afrocentric Historiography. Paper Presented in Barcelona , January 12-15, 2004.
For details see Mbabuike Michael (2001) “Africa Through the Eyes of African Diaspora” in Transforming Anthropology Vol. 10. No. 1, 2001 (46-51)
Zeleza T.P (2003) The Academic Diaspora and Knowledge Production in and on Africa . What Role for CODESRIA. Paper Presented During the CODESRIA 30 TH Anniversary Conference Dakar , December 10-12, 2003.
Erhagbe Edward (2007) “Assistance and Conflict: The African Diaspora and Africa 's Development in the Twenty-First Century” in Africa Development Vol. XXXII, No. 2, 2007, pp, 24-40.
Ogot B.A op cit., 33.
Boahen A.Adu (1987) African Perspective on Colonialism. London : James Currey. Pgs. 21.
Quoted in Ogot B.A op cit pg. 42
Blyden (1872) West African University . Pgs 6-7
Blyden (1887) Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Pgs. 140-141
Mudimbe V.Y (1988) The Invention of Africa . Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Indianapolis : Indiana University Press. Pgs 132
Ogot op cit pg. 51
Hollis R. Lynch (1978) Selected Letters of Edward Wilmont Bylden . New York : Millwood.
Van Hensbroek P.B. (2004) “Some Nineteenth Century African Philosophers”
Ogot B.A op cit. pg. 50
Quoted by Lynch in Edward W. Blyden
