Edward Wilmot Blyden III

Edward Wilmot Blyden III (19 May 1918 – 10 October 2010) was a diplomat, political scientist and educator born in Freetown Sierra Leone Protectorate.

He distinguished himself as an educator and contributor to post-colonial discourse on African self-government, and Third World non-alignment.

He was the grandson of Edward Wilmot Blyden.

Edward Wilmot Blyden III was born Edward Wilmot Abioseh Blyden-Taylor on 19 May 1918, to Isa Cleopatra Blyden and Joseph Ravensburg Taylor, a Creole, in the "Baimbrace" neighbourhood of Freetown.

As an infant, he suffered the effects of rickets brought on by malnutrition in the wake of the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic.

While this affected his ability to walk in early childhood it was not a lasting disability.

Edward and his sister Amina were raised by their mother, Isa Cleopatra Blyden and their Liberian grandmother, Anna Espadon Erskine, who were both headmistresses of primary schools in the Muslim communities of Foulah Town and Fourah Bay even though the family were active members of the Zion Methodist Church, Wilberforce Street.

He attended the Ebenezer Amalgamated Primary School.

He attended the Wesleyan Methodist Boys High School and, after graduating, matriculated at Fourah Bay College.

He worked as a teacher and briefly for the Sierra Leone Railway during the early 1940s.

His earliest published essays on African education and colonialism date back to these years.

After the Second World War, Blyden, was invited to continue his education at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in the United States where his grandfather had received an honorary doctorate.

He graduated from Lincoln in 1948 with an A.B. degree and matriculated at Harvard University, where he earned M.A., MEd degrees in Education and began research for a PhD in Political Science.

The subject of his doctoral thesis was the pattern of constitutional change and emergence of African political thought in the twentieth century.

During this period, he met with Edith Holden granddaughter of John Pray Knox with whom Blyden's family had longstanding historical connections and with whom he later worked on the definitive biography of his grandfather Edward Wilmot Blyden.

In 1950 he met and married Amelia Elizabeth Kendrick a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Boston University.

Thus by the mid-1950s, Blyden's African perspective on post-colonial nationhood and self-determination was widely known and respected among Africans and Asians seeking to define the roles of post-colonial nations on the world stage.

Blyden interrupted his graduate studies in 1954 to return to Sierra Leone where he took up a position as head of Extra Mural Studies at Fourah Bay College.

In 1954 he was the sole delegate from colonial Sierra Leone to the Eighth General Assembly of UNESCO in Montevideo, Uruguay.

He became increasingly active in the politics of independence and after a sensational series of Town-Hall lectures, he formed the Sierra Leone Independence Movement in 1957.

Promoting the view that a newly independent Sierra Leone would not be well served by the fractious nature of party politics, he galvanised his followers with the Movement's signature call and response: "What's the Word? SLIM!" Prominent supporters of SLIM included regional and international Pan-Africanists like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Eric Williams, Julius Nyerere and John Henrik Clark who viewed the progress towards independence in Sierra Leone as part of a wider effort to forge an independent West Africa united by the same socio-political principles.

In 1957, Blyden and Paramount Chief and Member of Parliament Tamba Songou Mbriwa of Fiama Chiefdom, Kono District lodged a formal protest at the Colonial Office in London against the illicit exploitation of Sierra Leone's diamonds, demanding a Royal Commission of Enquiry into serious riots in the Kono District.

In the pre-elections of 1957, SLIM won no seats which disappointed Blyden and his supporters within and without the country.

Blyden and Mbriwa went on to form an alliance, merging their parties to form the Sierra Leone Progressive Independence Movement (SLPIM)

At the eve of independence, a West Africa Correspondent's Report summed up Blyden and SLIM's impact on pre-independence politics as follows:

"If the news that all Sierra Leone parties have formed a National front to greet Independence means what if seems to, prospects are better than ever they were...

A man to whom the country owes an apology if this moment of concord holds is E. W. Blyden, III.

He argued with considerable vigour and wit that the country was not ripe for party politics and it was in this faith that he created the officially 'non-party' Sierra Leone Independence Movement.

He lately took his doctorate at Harvard after retiring discomfited from active politics.

It is improbable, however that this interminable monologuist, whom the Vanguard saluted ironically on his departure for trying to teach a country politics by the book will receive any acclaim from the hard-bitten realists who have now joined together.

I told you so makes few friends."

In 1960, Blyden was invited by Nnamdi Azikiwe to help build the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where he established the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy and the Department of African Studies.

He was Dean of Faculties but made his most lasting impact on a generation of West Africans as the University Public Orator.

Blyden was able to expose the student body to a wide spectrum of international scholars, including William Leo Hansberry, Arnold Toynbee, Basil Davidson, Leopold Senghor and others.

At the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1966, he and his family moved to Freetown where he became Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Director of African studies at Fourah Bay College (the University of Sierra Leone).

First and foremost, Blyden considered himself a teacher, and strove to imbue a generation of bright young men and women with the knowledge, principles and self-confidence needed to guide Africa in a Post-Colonial world.

The careers of notable Africans such as Peter Onu, James Jonah and others he taught or mentored are testament to his success.

Blyden was a first-hand observer and participant at many key events that would shape the geopolitics in the second half-of the 20th Century.

Under the auspices of Harvard University, he was a student observer at the Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended World War II.

He toured Asian and Far Eastern Universities as a visiting lecturer, coming in contact with intellectuals involved in Asian independence struggles.