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CHAPTER 1
Afropublican Commons: Conceptual Groundings
Edward Wilmot Blyden has sought for more than a quarter of a century to reveal everywhere the African unto himself; to fix his attention upon original ideas and conceptions as to his place in the economy of the world; to point out to him his work as a race among the races of men; lastly and most importantly of all, to lead him back unto self-respect.
— Joseph Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound
Blyden's birthplace was the island of St. Thomas, now a part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was, however, born during the period when the island was a part of the Danish crown's colonies. His rights as a free person under the Danish Crown were therefore enshrined in a document promulgated by King Frederick V of Denmark in 1755. The "Reglement for Slaverne" referred to the emancipation of the Danish West Indies' enslaved Africans, stating that "the freed are to enjoy all rights on par with the freeborn and are to be esteemed and respected in all regards equally with the free-born subjects of the crown." Frederick V's successor, Christian VII, also enacted a "local and émigré" ordinance in 1776, which further protected Blyden's rights as a freeborn person, particularly the immigrant standing of his parents, who had come to the island from St. Eustatius.
By 1830, two years before Blyden's birth, a population of freed men and women in the Danish West Indies forced the governor of the islands, Peter von Scholten, to draft a report that granted free blacks full equality before the law. Blyden was, therefore, born as an Afro-Danish subject. Blyden eventually became a citizen of Liberia, an English-speaking West African country with a considerable black American immigrant population with cultural and political influence. Blyden thus transitioned from an Afro-Danish subject to a West African in a nation of Anglo-American persuasion. Blyden's crisscrossing of these various African and African diasporic communities is evidence of the dynamic connection between Africa and the African diaspora. Blyden's influence in these global circuits of blackness was the catalyst to his becoming a globally acclaimed black intellectual.
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BLYDEN AND AFROPUBLICANISM
The use of Afropublican and Afropublicanism in this work is a reconceptualization of ideas in contemporary discourse on African globalization. It draws mainly on the ideas of global Africa and diasporic Africa. Ruth Simms Hamilton defines global Africa as "the geographically and socio-culturally diverse people of Africa and its Diaspora ... linked through complex networks of social relationships and processes." Michael Gomez similarly defines diasporic Africa as the inextricable link between the "histories, cultures, and communities of Africa" and its diaspora. Blyden's embodiment of Afropublicanism emerged in these "complex networks" as he navigated several public spheres of global Africa: Afro-Islam, the Mediterranean, Black Atlantic, West Africa, and the West Indies.
Afropublicanism is, therefore, to be viewed as an analytic practice or paradigm used by Blyden and the African cadre of nineteenth-century West African intellectuals to challenge Afro-pessimistic discourse and to pursue Pan-African schemes. As such, their engagement of various spheres in the Global public arena was centered on or rooted in the African experience.
This book's central emphasis is therefore on Blyden's public intellectualism and his rootedness in the African historical experience. Less a social biography than an intellectual biography, it highlights the specific historical circumstances that influenced the scholarship he produced about the black world. It stresses the importance of Blyden's lived experience in Africa as one of the transformative stages of his career. While noting his initial Ethiopianist sense of superiority over indigenous African peoples and how this attitude eventually evolved to a greater appreciation for African customs and traditions, I focus on his Afropublicanism, centered on the African experience, and his articulation of an Afro-positivist perspective to advance a Pan-African agenda. Blyden was very clear about an experiential and observed understanding of Africa. As will be shown in more detail later, Blyden critiqued his friend and interlocutor Herbert Spencer for his second-hand accounts of Africa and reliance on European travelogues.
Blyden's Afropublican career evolved while he traversed the cosmopolitan and "local" worlds of the Middle East, Europe, and West Africa arguing for an observation-based and ethical approach to the study of African aesthetics, history, and religions. As a result, another consideration of this text is its view of a cosmopolitan African way of life lived abroad — that is, outside of Africa. It does not view cosmopolitanism in Africa or African cosmopolitanism abroad as novel because an African-centered cosmopolitanism is evinced in the rhetorical practices of African intellectuals as they traveled and exchanged ideas across the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For example, the Igbo-born Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) spent much of his life in the Americas and Europe, and yet the center of all of his known writing was his empirically lived experience in Africa, Igboland, and Esaka. This is also evident in Blyden's globetrotting and politicking from West Africa, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. Even as Blyden advocated a return to Africa for diasporan Africans and engaged with several cultural publics, the center of his analysis was West Africa. The tradition of engaging negative discourse about Africa begins with enslaved Africans who formed African-inspired maroon communities. Their actions are paralleled by Africa-born Atlantic intellectuals like Equiano and Danish West African scholar Christian Protten (1715–1769). Blyden and his peers continued this tradition in the nineteenth century.
Besides, while the idea of a cosmopolitan city is well established in the literature, at its core, it is a Western understanding of a global phenomenon. A cosmopolitan city such as New York or London is conceptualized as not only the locus of global interactions but also the dominion of global enterprise and political power. Cosmopolitanism is consequently conceptualized as only situated in Euro-American global cities. Cities or towns that are not European-American, by definition, fail to meet the test for cosmopolitanism.
On the contrary, Blyden's cosmopolitanism was not restricted to the Atlantic West, and his firsthand understanding of Africa did not arrive exclusively from his experience of cosmopolitan Freetown, Sierra Leone. Freetown comprised descendants of black West Indians, black Americans, European missionaries and colonialists, Muslim intellectuals, and Jewish merchants. On the contrary, his knowledge of Africa also emerged in the simple but equally cosmopolitan towns and cities of Liberia and Sierra Leone's interior, where Blyden's final intellectual transformation occurred.
This book's use of Afropublicanism, therefore, challenges the singularity of cosmopolitan notions as it reconceptualizes our understanding of different historical epochs and notions of "area studies." This complexity is personified in Blyden, who, compared to his contemporaries, was comfortable in both advanced and modest societies and groups. As a result, Blyden had the rare gift of articulating the concerns of these communities to each other. It comes as no surprise, then, that he was able through his direct experiences and studies to appreciate and argue for the integrity of the histories of both the sophisticated and simple societies of Africa. By mapping the unique trajectories, particularities, and historical context of Blyden's ideas, I examine him as representative of a West African intellectual class who also participated in generating the wealth of ideas in the Black Atlantic.
Before we proceed, two terms need further elaboration to contextualize the public sphere terms of reference under which I bring the varied discursive fields and works of Blyden and other African intellectuals: African public intellectuals and public culture. African public intellectuals is used here to describe Africans whose scholarly works were not just present in the nineteenth-century academic sphere (public) but who, through their interaction with other publics, as individuals and as intellectuals, disseminated and debated their ideas on issues concerning Africa. This book defines public culture, inclusive of its literary, political, mass and social media as well as cosmopolitan contexts, as the metadiscursive realm within which global cultural flows occur. These spheres of global intellection include ideas/intellectual culture, institutions, practices, popular arts/entertainment, and public performances (whether religious or secular processes of a public or social kind) in which public opinions and ideas are contested, negotiated, deliberated, and formed. This definition of public culture is not limited to Jurgen Habermas's Public Sphere. It also takes cues from Mary Kupiec Cayton's discussion of public culture in the context of cultural theory, as well as theoretical insights from the seminal contributions of Arjun Appadurai and others in the journal Public Culture.
Few nineteenth-century African intellectuals like Blyden and James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883) have, for example, been specifically discussed as public intellectuals. Yet, several of the thematic or disciplinary areas — Islamic, Atlantic, nationalism, cultural theory — fall within the rubric of African intellectual history, while others do not directly address their African subjects as public intellectuals. However, many of these African intellectuals — be they Islamic; or Atlantic scholars like Blyden; or West African nationalist like Casely Hayford, who founded the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) — were a part of African social and public spheres. They developed intellectual traditions that evaluated the economic, social, political, and technological development of the various African publics with which they were engaged.
Blyden and other African thinkers of the nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries such as Horton and Hayford, like intellectuals elsewhere, could be described as public intellectuals because their scholarly assessments occurred through processes of a public kind wherein their ideas were disputed, exchanged, or shaped. The public herewith used corresponds with public/political gatherings, newspaper articles, historical writings, and social media. The intentional act of writing, which African thinkers like Blyden engaged in on multiple occasions as well as their attempts to influence colonial policy and African cultural practices, to critique Afro-pessimism, and to debate other pertinent issues are all very public actions.
Further, the activities of these thinkers in the various discursive traditions could easily fall under Michael Warner's concept of counterpublics. In contrast to an accepting-without-questioning dominant public, Warner describes counterpublics as "spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesies of scene-making will be transformative, not replicative merely." Texts produced by Blyden and West Africa's cohort of intellectuals were not replicas of false racialist theories, or mimicry of their Western training, as is evident in Appiah's In My Father's House and V. Y. Mudimbe's Invention of Africa. Like these works, this book accounts for the tension between the African identity and the Western training of these African intellectuals but also moves beyond the tensions to address the transformative elements of their thinking as representatives of a counterpublic.
Blyden's advocacy for the indigenous West African church movement following his study of African Islam is a clear example of transformative discourse — that is, an escape from the culture of mimicking European culture. Likewise, the writing of Reindorf, another Danish West African and Blyden's contemporary, who authored G.C.A. Histories, the first historical book of its kind by an African author in the nineteenth century, can be equated to Appadurai's definition of culture-making activities in the public domain. Appadurai writes that "culture making activity includes the conscious writing of national histories, the construction of national and folk symbols and rituals, and the revitalization of various traditional identities." I have argued elsewhere that in his G. C. A. Histories, Reindorf constructs real, imagined, and symbolic histories of various Gold Coast and West African polities. As Cayton further explains:
Counterpublics may form around a variety of foci. If they develop agency in relation to the state, they can be said to be political movements. They may coalesce around texts, codes, styles, or behaviors centered on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any number of categories. These become identity publics. Nothing in one's essence or social location determines membership in such an identity public. Rather, it's one's participation in publics defined by identity-inflected discourse that does so.
As this applies to Blyden and African intellectual history, all of the various nationalisms that arose in Africa in opposition to colonial rule can be described as counterpublics of a political kind. Specific organizations reflecting various ethnic-nationalist movements in Africa, protomodern nationalist or anticolonial movements, such as the Aborigines Rights Protectorate Society in the Gold Coast as well as the NCBWA and the Afropublican intellectuals that constituted them can be described as not only counterpublics of a political kind but also of an identity kind.
While African intellectuals were excluded from the emergent public sphere in European discourse, Blyden as well as other Afro-Danish intellectuals such as Protten in the eighteenth and Reindorf in the nineteenth century had access to various media through which they debated and disseminated their views on a variety of subjects, including European descriptions of African history and culture. Blyden was distinguished from his peers because he was not merely a public intellectual whose work was available to "local" and cosmopolitan Africans but also a Pan-Africanist whose works engaged African, African diaspora, European, Mediterranean, Islamic, and Jewish public spheres. Deploying the term Afropublicanism, therefore, allows one to critically parse Africa's engagement with the world through a subject like Blyden, whose multisitedness in many "local" and cosmopolitan locations in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Victorian England, and North America makes him unique. Afropublicanism also allows us to focus on a transcendent humanistic discourse articulated by West African intellectuals like Blyden rather than on an ethnocentric nativism that is falsely perceived of as Pan-Africanism.
Ultimately, Blyden, as an Afropublican scholar-activist, was part of a global intellectual struggle, emerging in the nineteenth century to vindicate African peoples' contribution to humanity. Blyden was also at the vanguard of critiques of the Eurocentric ideas of African inferiority generated by some European Enlightenment thinkers of the previous epoch. Blyden and his West African peers were also part of what Robert July has called the indigenous African nationalist movement, which produced early historical writing on West Africa. This indigenous African nationalist movement encompassed the late-eighteenth-century writings of black personalities like Protten and Equiano and ended with the activities of the NCBWA in the 1920s. Blyden came to scholarly attention in the latter half of this era, and his writings offer significant social and historical glimpses into the philosophical underpinnings of West African intellectual life.
The discursive fields of African philosophical thought, African Islamic intellectual traditions, modern African thought, African literary and cultural criticism, African religious thought, and African political thought all fall within the general scope of African intellectual history. Due to diverse methodological approaches and disciplinary leanings, these different media of African intellection often appear to be exclusive, when they are often mutually inclusive. In treating Blyden as a public intellectual, this work provides an umbrella under which all the complex subfields of African intellectual history can be treated as one. One can, therefore, examine most of the African intellectuals under any of the named subfields as public intellectuals. Thus, rather than having scattered categories of public intellectualism, we are able to utilize a canon of African public intellection.
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Excerpted from "Edward W. Blyden's Intellectual Transformations"
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Copyright © 2019 Harry N. K. Odamtten.
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