Program of African Studies

 by Harry Nii Koney Odamtten (Santa Clara University)

Edward Wilmont Blyden c.1860

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) needs no introduction in most academic circles. He is a celebrated figure in many intellectual disciplines and fields: African Studies, Black Studies, Classical History. I first came to the knowledge of Blyden as an undergraduate student at the University of Ghana. However, I began to take his writings and ideas more seriously when as a graduate student at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies. I explored the material plausibility of achieving what Ghanaian premier Kwame Nkrumah describes as Philosophical Consciencism. I subsequently came to learn that Nkrumah’s ideas and Ali Mazrui’s concept of the Triple Heritage were intellectually traceable to Blyden’s early work on Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, and African Life and Customs.

My decision to study and write about Edward Blyden is partly due to an interest in helping the efforts of intellectual historians of Africa in identifying, developing, and defining what should constitute a canon of African Intellectual Histories. While the field of African Studies has burgeoned in the last century and there are perhaps a few scholars like myself who will answer to being referenced as intellectual historians, African intellectual history is one of the least claimed sub-fields. Blyden remains a vital cog for any scholar interested in transnational and trans-Atlantic interactions between Black intellectuals and other intellectuals in different historical periods and intellectual hubs such as the Enlightenment, the Victorian Era, European Humanist Discourse, Black Atlantic, and Black Internationalist histories. In situating Blyden within a long history of African intellectual history, my goal in Edward Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations is neither to negate these connections nor to make Blyden the inheritor in an unbroken chain of all African intellectual histories. That will be a misreading or a deliberate exercise in sarcasm.

Instead, I have aimed to show “empirically” the specific African historical contexts in which Blyden’s ideas develop and how they have evolved. Thus, Edward Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations emphasizes the exchange of ideas between Blyden and other West African intellectuals, Muslim and indigenous African thinkers, as critical to his final transformation before his demise. These Muslim African encounters will be the subject of my talk at Northwestern University on February 24, 2021. Blyden’s systematic study of Islam’s history in West Africa and his articulation of an “African Personality” resulted from his encounters with indigenous and Muslim West Africans.

It is no slight to scholars in European History; however, as a scholar of African History and African and African American Studies, there is no compulsion to write for a European Studies audience. My obligation to help develop an African Intellectual History corpus constrains me to look deep within Africa and less without it. In Blyden’s words, it is an “African Standpoint” – writing African histories that privilege or center African concerns.  Edward Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations pivots into several sub-fields and disciplines. However, taking inspiration from Pieter Boele van Hensbroek’s The “Import Thesis” about African Political Thought, it is also an exercise in writing outside of the exterior gaze. African Intellectual Histories should not always have to be defined by their external engagements.

Dr. Odamtten will be the first speaker in the ISITA Dialogues Series on Wednesday, February 24. His talk is titled “Africanization: The Bridge to Edward Blyden’s Final Intellectual Transformation.” Click here to register for the event.