The riddle: A question or a problem?
What should one call a riddle: A question or a problem? According to Holly Case, there is a difference when one sees a “question-to-be-answered” or a “problem-to-be-solved.”Footnote 1 This difference is of serious enough import that one must attend closely to how historical actors have responded to the riddles of their day. Perhaps the most well-known riddle in recorded history is the Riddle of the Sphinx. Many have found it a useful rhetorical device.Footnote 2 One such figure was Edward Wilmot Blyden. Sometime between 20 May and 30 May 1880, Blyden stood amid an audience at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Madison, Wisconsin. According to the Reverend John P. Knox, there was “much interest in Blyden” and, unsurprisingly, he did not disappoint.Footnote 3 As warmly recalled by Knox: “Blyden preached a noble sermon.”Footnote 4
Blyden would include a version of this lecture in his renowned 1887 collection Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Entitled “Ethiopia stretching out her hands unto God; or, Africa’s Service to the World” (1880), this piece employs a now-familiar style of writing by early pan-Africanists.Footnote 5 Blyden synthesizes biblical ethnography, classical studies, and even an early iteration of dependency theory to prove how Africa has historically contributed and, most crucially, will “contribute towards the development of modern civilization.”Footnote 6 The climax of this text comes with a stirring exhortation:
No; if we are to gather an analogy to Africa from ancient fable, the Sphinx supplies us with a truer symbol. The Sphinx was said to sit in the road side, and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. Has not Africa been, through the ages, sitting on the highway of the world? There she is, south of Europe, with but a lake between, joined on to Asia, with the most frequented oceans on the east and west of her – accessible to all the races, and yet her secret is unknown. She has swallowed up her thousands. The Sphinx must solve [emphasis added] her own riddle at last. The opening up of Africa is to be the work of Africans.Footnote 7
Here, one quickly discerns whether Blyden sees the Riddle as a question-to-be-answered or a problem-to-be-solved. The Sphinx, with its mighty but enigmatic nature, symbolizes Africa in toto. Situated on “the highway of the world,” many have traversed the continent. Yet, none of these unsuited travelers – “English, German, Belgian, French and American expeditions” – have been able to resolve the supposed mysteries of the land.Footnote 8 These outsiders have been unable to make the continent knowable in the most recognizable form of the day. They have been unable to establish a modern civilization. And so, like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, the Sphinx remains inert; a stolid reminder of a bygone age.Footnote 9 But, for Blyden, the solution to this problem is obvious. This responsibility, this “great and glorious work is reserved for the Negro.”Footnote 10
This passage affords a rich entry point to discuss some of the most pressing issues faced by Blyden and many African and African-diasporic intellectuals of the mid-to-late nineteenth century: How does one reckon with a history seemingly absented of civilizational dignity? How should one negotiate the subordinate position of Africa and African-descended people on the world stage?Footnote 11 What is the destiny of “the Negro Race” on the continent and in the diaspora? Blyden’s proposed solution to this constellation of problems was often indexed to one recurring phrase: “Africa’s regeneration.”Footnote 12
I recognize the temptation, from our postcolonial vantage point, to dismiss the accommodationist attitudes and reformist politics of “the educated elite” in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century West Africa. However, one can neither ignore nor deny the historical importance of their ideas and actions.Footnote 13 In other words, their writings still warrant critical consideration, or, as Jeanne-Marie Jackson remarks when reading J. E. Casely Hayford, “they deserve serious reckoning with their texts as texts, and with their ideas on their own terms.”Footnote 14
In this article, I position myself in conversation with Jackson and her approach to African intellectual history. I turn to Edward Wilmot Blyden and his invocation of this idea of “Africa’s regeneration.”Footnote 15 However, I differ with Jackson, and other scholars who have examined the historical circulation and articulation of this idea within West Africa and within Blyden’s writings, by explicitly heeding Dominick LaCapra’s appeal for a renewed Quellenkritik.Footnote 16 That is to say, I analyze this idea primarily through Blyden’s “canonical” work: Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887).Footnote 17 I devote specific attention to the contextual saliency of “regeneration” in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and how Blyden innovatively invested this idea with rhetorical potency. I subsequently surface Blyden’s “ambivalent Orientalism” and how he leveraged “forms of tropological representation that used the East with the goals of xenophilia as well as xenophobia [emphasis added]” as a complementary proposal for solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and effectuating the regeneration of Africa.Footnote 18
In so doing, I offer three contributions to the study of Blyden and, by extension, African intellectual history. One: I demonstrate, vis-à-vis LaCapra, the methodological utility of criticism for the study of African intellectual history.Footnote 19 Two: I argue for the theoretical, historical, and political value of applying “ambivalent Orientalism” as a lens for analyzing the writings and work of Blyden and other Anglophone West African and African-diasporic intellectuals in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Three: I advance Blyden’s significance not only as a forefather of pan-Africanism but as a critical thinker within the genealogy of Afro-Asian solidarity and global intellectual history writ large.
A context: Degeneration and the Afro-Victorian
Born free on the island of St. Thomas in the former Danish West Indies on 3 August 1832, Blyden came of age in a world defined by an idea of progress.Footnote 20 Like so many intellectuals within this discursive and sociopolitical context, this notion marked his thinking. It marked his thinking none more so than on questions regarding human differences and how these differences related to “degeneration” or “the dark side of progress.”Footnote 21 A call for regeneration – or the resumption of progress – presupposes degeneration, after all.
Blyden, as Simon Gikandi convincingly argues, was an Afro-Victorian. Footnote 22 Even before arriving on Liberian shores on 26 January 1851, while under the auspices of the New York State Colonization Society, he evinced his immersion within a transnational milieu of Anglophone West African and African-diasporic figures who, by virtue of their social background and educational opportunities, absorbed and reproduced some of the cultural affectations and ideological orientations of their global hegemon.Footnote 23 As a result, Blyden inherited a “modern style of reasoning” and, nolens volens, a Victorian “style of writing,” where differences had become attributed to a temporally laden conception of progress.Footnote 24 This conception of progress hinged on a distinct understanding of comparative degeneration, wherein “a certain part of the species [took] a wrong turn,” ultimately getting “knocked off of the established course set out for humanity at the beginning.”Footnote 25 From this perspective, “the more different a given group appear[ed] from Europeans, the more that group may be judged to have degenerated.”Footnote 26
Neither theories of progress nor comparative degeneration began in the nineteenth century. Increasing interactions with non-European peoples had led cumulative generations of European thinkers to task themselves with explaining the reason for difference-as-degeneration. Some arguments shaded scriptural.Footnote 27 Others hewed environmental.Footnote 28 Needless to say, these tensions were not fully resolved.Footnote 29 Yet, by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the central premise underlying these conversations had undoubtedly shifted.Footnote 30 Time – more specifically, unilinear time – had largely assumed epistemic authority.Footnote 31 The scholar T. Carlos Jacques details how an “idea of progress became the basis of a philosophy of history” and the doggedly intertwined strands that comprised prior interpretations of degeneration – such as postlapsarian historicism or environmental determinism – largely coalesced into the modern stadial theory of society.Footnote 32
Sometime in the past, according to these thinkers, African societies lost the requisite traits to progress. At this point of disjuncture, the continent and its people slipped into a morbid stagnancy.Footnote 33 They now remained encased within a temporal plane long passed by the demonstrable advances of European civilization. “On this view Africa was a savage version of Europe,” Jacques writes, “something like what Europe was before [emphasis added] it gained knowledge and became civilized.”Footnote 34 This invention of a degenerated African Other underwrote the self-reflexive construction of a modern European Self.Footnote 35 A discrete pair of asymmetric counterconcepts had emerged.Footnote 36 The necessity to proselytize, to redeem, to regenerate, acquired a level of ethical urgency.Footnote 37
Casting themselves as Prometheus descending Mount Olympus, spark in tow, many of those in the self-professed “civilized world” ventured outwards to instill the vivifying spirit of commerce, Christianity, and civilization upon the primitive African Other.Footnote 38 Only then might progress resume within this disordered plane of temporal stasis. As Jacques concludes: “With Europe’s historical superiority came an ethical obligation … The civilized, adult nations of Europe came to see themselves as in some sense duty bound to care for the infant savages of Africa. Abolitionism thus gained a new theoretical foundation. And colonialism was proposed as an answer to Africa’s retardation.”Footnote 39
As Edward E. Curtis IV explains, “[t]hough it remained submerged in Blyden’s articles, the Victorian context of his arguments was important.”Footnote 40 With that said, one must pause to stress and stress emphatically: Blyden was an Afro-Victorian. His manifold references to extant debates and preeminent thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition often appear analytically overwhelming.Footnote 41 They occasionally engender seemingly contradictory opinions.Footnote 42 Yet, the only element far more overwhelming and far more consistent in Blyden’s writings was his attempt to wield his erudition to challenge the fundamental assumptions regarding Africa and African-descended people within his problem-space.Footnote 43 “The nineteenth [century] was,” as Hollis R. Lynch puts it, “probably the most humiliating century in the history of the Negro race.”Footnote 44 How to solve the problem of Africa’s comparative degeneration, in a manner congenial to the dignity of his race but fully responsive to an observable history of social difference, became his animating intellectual and political concern.
Blyden, alongside other Afro-Victorian intellectuals, ultimately came to practice what Quentin Skinner would label “rhetorical redescription.”Footnote 45 Since these thinkers could not forcibly change the structural parameters of this debate on difference-as-degeneration, they sought to change its constitutive terms. Hence, Blyden’s savvy invocation of regeneration. He, like his contemporaries, seized upon one of the most salient ideas of the modern era.Footnote 46 However, they refashioned – or innovatively emplotted – notions of degeneration into progressive narratives of regeneration in the Romantic mode to vindicate their race, or, as David Scott outlines, advance “narratives of overcoming, often narratives of vindication; [which] have tended to enact a distinctive rhythm and pacing, a distinctive direction, and to tell stories of salvation and redemption.”Footnote 47 When tactically deployed, this idea and accompanying narrative form could not only offer the resumption of progress as an aspirational focus, but it could also cast its African and African-descended addressees as plausible heroes of Romantic proportion, able to enact this resumption themselves. With the reassuring certitude of civilizational progress having been achieved in the past, why could it not occur again in the present or near future?
Blyden’s rhetorical brilliance lay in his insistence on depicting “the Negro Race” as the pre-destined heroes or actors in this world-historical affair and, quite crucially, his ability to craft this counter-narrative with eloquent authority.Footnote 48 He avers:
This seems to be the period of race organization and race consolidation. The races in Europe are striving to group themselves together according to their natural affinities. The concentration and development of the Sclavonic power in deference to this impulse is a menace to other portions of Europe. The Germans are confederated. The Italians are united. Greece is being reconstructed. And so this race impulse has seized the African here. The feeling is in the atmosphere – the plane in which race moves. And there is no people in whom the desire for race integrity and race preservation is stronger than in the Negro.Footnote 49
In terms of rhetorical substance, Herbert Spencer’s organic social thinking and Johann Gottfried Herder’s nationalistic notion of the Volksgeist are on full display.Footnote 50 One should, however, also appreciate Blyden’s rhetorical style and Organicist mode of explanation.Footnote 51 Take, for instance, the series of simply-constructed sentences: “The Germans are …,” “The Italians are …,” “Greece is being ….” By pairing these demonyms with completed actions (in the case of the “Germans” and “Italians”), Blyden conveys a posture of certainty in holistic comparison. Look, he seems to say, other people have already secured their natural prerogatives by consolidating along racial lines and forming a nation. His turn to “Greece” reveals a subtle movement from the past to the present continuous (“is being”). In other words, his audience should take heart: Not only is it not too late to let this spirit of the age – “race impulse” – run its rightful course, but other groups are also in the midst of returning to a former glory. Strung together in percussive succession, these sentences stoke momentum as Blyden finally reaches Africa. He contravenes exclusionary narratives and explicitly lifts up the continent as a complementary site where this presumably universal process of nationalist self-awareness also unfolds (“And so”).Footnote 52 Blyden even goes so far as to suggest that African and African-descended peoples now possess, in comparison to others on the world stage, this “impulse” in unparalleled spades. He, thus, concludes on a reassuring note of implicit inevitability: Africa can be, and will be, next, if “the Negro Race” heeds this call.
This paragraph surfaces how Blyden had conceded to the racial thinking of his time. Innate differences exist between groups of people; such differences had combined with certain historical conditions to leave Africa behind in the civilizational terms of the period. However, Blyden adamantly refused to believe this difference warranted “the Negroes” collective position below other races and that Africa’s regeneration could only proceed under the forced tutelage of “Anglo-Saxon methods.”Footnote 53 Instead, he aspired to demarcate both a contextually appropriate and credibly achievable route for Africa’s progress within this racialized framework.Footnote 54 This route, as other scholars have ably demonstrated, became Blyden’s famed argument for what could be termed “repatriative regeneration.”Footnote 55 Blyden agreed that the solution to the riddle of Africa rested on the colonization of the continent. However, he argued that this colonization should be, and could be, enacted by the uniquely qualified hands of African-descended people.Footnote 56 “From what we have seen,” he stated, “it will appear that Europe must give up the idea of regenerating Africa through colonies of her own subjects … the instruments for the regeneration of this continent are the millions of Africans in the Western hemisphere.”Footnote 57 Pan-Africanism had, in essence, found one of its earliest and most consequential promulgators.
The solutions: Repatriative regeneration and ambivalent orientalism
Blyden demonstrates a modern style of reasoning predicated on a myth of Africa. This myth of difference-as-degeneration posed a problem of utmost importance: How does one acknowledge Africa’s comparative degeneration without submitting to continued racialized domination? For Blyden, the proposed solution to this problem required repatriative regeneration. “The Negro Race” was no less capable of progressing by themselves and for themselves. Restoring Africa’s political, economic, and social progress simply depended on those of African descent returning to their former home, realizing their immanent spirit or “African Personality,” and heroically directing the civilizational qualities that they had gained during their diasporic exile toward facilitating “the spiritual development of humanity as a whole.”Footnote 58 This proposal for temporal transposition – to progress to a point of parity with the modern West – arose from the discursive and social exigencies of Blyden’s problem-space. With coevalness denied, chronocenosis had ensued.Footnote 59 Put differently: To contend with their subordinated position in the Victorian temporal regime, Afro-Victorians rhetorically innovated upon the prevailing ideas of the era and advanced corrective “appeals to and [mythologizing of] its own understanding of past, present, and future.”Footnote 60
With this in mind, we return to the Riddle of the Sphinx. “Afro-Victorian subjects,” Gikandi indicates, “are best understood neither as sycophants nor rebels but as people engaged in a sustained project to appropriate, revise, and sometimes displace Victorian ideas toward what had become, by the end of the nineteenth century, Pan-African goals.”Footnote 61 The Sphinx is invaluable in these “appeals to” revalorize the prevailing myth of Africa. As emblematic of Egyptian civilization – and, therefore, one of the world’s great civilizations – the Sphinx functioned as an effective rhetorical device for reinvesting Africa and African capabilities with the legitimating features of the modern episteme.Footnote 62 The Sphinx, in short, becomes precedent and evidence. Precedence of Africa’s former status as relatively coequal and coeval with European and Asian civilizations; evidence of a “characteristic religious, esthetic, and ethical expression of the Volksgeist” able to reverse a period of sustained degeneration.Footnote 63 The Sphinx, thus, sits as an exceptionally compelling totem within Blyden’s moral vision, as simultaneously a “futures past” and a “futures yet-to-come” for the African Personality on the world stage.Footnote 64
However, one cannot discount the Orientalist inflection of the Sphinx.Footnote 65 Again, although Blyden’s overt familiarity with Herder remains uncertain, his rendering of the Sphinx nevertheless resembles a Herderian interest in the Middle East.Footnote 66 Moreover, Blyden’s allusions to the “cultural repertoire” inherent in Orientalist discourse are hardly limited to the Sphinx.Footnote 67 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) is replete with explicit citations of professional Orientalists, characterizations of “the Holy Land,” and insightful disquisitions on the effect of Islam on the continent. And, herein lies the rub.
Diasporic repatriation serves as the cornerstone of Blyden’s proposed solution for achieving “Africa’s regeneration.” His standing as an Afro-Victorian explains why he arrived at this specific discursive and sociopolitical position. However, I contend that this explanation isn’t enough. As Dominick LaCapra writes, “all forms of historiography might benefit from modes of critical reading premised on the conviction that documents are texts that supplement or rework ‘reality’ and not mere sources that divulge facts about ‘reality.’”Footnote 68 Blyden and Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) occupy a “canonical” status in the study of African history. This “great” text, with its distinct rhetorical moves and consequential gestures, demands the sort of close reading and critical dialogue that recognizes how it served as a “‘sign of the times’” and possessed “transformative relations to [the] phenomena ‘represented’ in [it].”Footnote 69 In short, it’s not enough to explain why Blyden became one of Pan-Africanism’s “most consequential promulgators,” but one must also try to explain how his work did what it did.Footnote 70
Blyden’s broader rhetorical strategy involved emplotting the idea of regeneration in the Romantic mode, wherein African and African-descended people assumed a principal role in the concurrent movements of nationalist “awakening” taking place around the world. Another one of his distinctive rhetorical tactics entailed the redeployment of a Victorian style of writing that proved particularly relevant to West Africa: Orientalism. That is to say, Blyden advanced his proposal for repatriative regeneration in tandem with pointed commentary on Islam in West Africa and, by extension, the Orient’s complementary role in this progressive process. This commentary depended on Orientalist tropes. Blyden, for example, claims:
We are persuaded that, with the book knowledge they already possess, and their love of letters, many of them [West African Muslims] would become ready converts of a religion which brings with it the recommendation of a higher culture and a nobler civilization. And, once brought within the pale of Christianity, these Mohammedans would be a most effective agency for the propagation of the Gospel in remote regions, hitherto impervious to European zeal and enterprise, and the work of African regeneration [emphasis added] would proceed with uninterrupted course and unexampled rapidity.Footnote 71
This Blyden of Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) undoubtedly holds Islam in high regard.Footnote 72 Yet, he does not represent the religion as a belief or practice wholly unto itself. He chiefly looks to the Orient vis-à-vis Islam’s influence on West Africa as a proleptic force or beneficial accelerant for “the Negro Race” to exploit in progressing from a degenerated temporal plane to one in sync with modern Western civilization. This depiction of the transitory quality of Islam parallels a long-standing view held by Orientalists.Footnote 73 Islam effectively becomes a transitional stage through which Africa might conveniently pass en route to its “futures yet-to-come.” Contra Curtis, it becomes quite clear “how Blyden conceived of Islam’s role, if it was to play any, in the redemptive black mission.”Footnote 74 In Blyden’s own words: “We entertain the deliberate conviction – gathered not from reading at home, but from travels among the people – that, whatever it may be in other lands, in Africa the work of Islam is preliminary [emphasis added] and preparatory [emphasis added].”Footnote 75
The Victorian era overlapped with a zenith in Orientalist discourse.Footnote 76 An Orientalist style of reasoning and writing would, understandably, inhere within an Afro-Victorian like Blyden. He, in fact, leveraged his authoritative command of this body of knowledge – and its rhetorical “repertoire” – as an instrument of political power. Footnote 77 As Hollis R. Lynch reveals:
In 1896, as Agent of Native Affairs in Lagos, he [Blyden] had been permitted to start a school at which Muslim youths were sent for “western training”. In 1899 he urged the Colonial Secretary to set up a major educational centre for Muslims in West Africa, so as to provide an “intelligent and efficient corps of co-workers” in the British administration of Northern Nigeria. Impressed with the facility with which Mohammedans travelled about, Blyden suggested that Mohammedans trained in English would spread British influence even beyond the sphere of the Government – a factor that interested him more than it did the British Government.Footnote 78
Orientalism and colonization were the means; progress and civilization remained the ends. With this in mind, one finds it difficult to disagree with Jacob S. Dorman’s conclusion regarding Blyden’s studies and representations of Islam, his expertise in Arabic and Hebrew, and his travels with veritable Orientalists. “In almost every way except for his skin color and his status at birth as a colonial subject,” Dorman writes, “Blyden was not just a nineteenth-century Christian Orientalist but a prototypical one.”Footnote 79
One can, however, disagree with Dorman’s framing. Dorman differentiates his reading of Blyden’s Orientalism from the one presented by Curtis.Footnote 80 One way Dorman marks this difference is by prepending the adjective “Black.” He suitably stresses how this term – “Black Orientalism” – possesses preexisting and divergent meanings.Footnote 81 I, however, propose adopting another heuristic for Blyden altogether: Srinivas Aravamudan’s notion of “ambivalent Orientalism.” Three reasons – and their interwoven theoretical, historical, and political implications – justify my position. One: This term draws the study of how African and African-diasporic actors have leveraged a modified form of the representational tactics of Orientalism into closer – and, ideally, productive – conversation with extant critiques of Said’s theorization of Orientalism. Two: It effectively distills the overlapping problem-spaces for an Afro-Victorian like Blyden and explains why he would specifically turn to the Orient as an effective rhetorical device within West Africa during this period in question. Three: Ambivalent Orientalism links Blyden to contemporaneous movements in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, thereby situating Blyden as a noteworthy figure in the construction of Afro-Asian solidarity and contemporary studies of global intellectual history.
First, to concede: “Black Orientalism” has some descriptive value. The term operates as a self-evident meta-analytical category for describing who has manifested this latent discourse.Footnote 82 However, the underlying nature of how these historical actors have deployed the rhetorical tropes and generic conventions associated with Orientalism remains obscured. In short, such racialized specificity introduces analytical ambiguity.Footnote 83
Aravamudan generatively points to how, pace Said, a noteworthy corpus of Enlightenment-era texts resists the totalizing imposition of a Manichean opposition between Europe and the Orient.Footnote 84 He writes: “Enlightenment interrogation was not innocent – no knowledge ever is – but it was a complex questioning, with multiple objectives and orientations.”Footnote 85 Aravamudan labels this “complex questioning” for what it is: A dynamic and fluid expression of “ambivalence.” “In a previous study titled Tropicopolitans,” he explains, “I named the ambivalent Orientalisms that circulated under the sign of empire levantinizations, or forms of tropological representation that used the East with the goals of xenophilia as well as xenophobia.”Footnote 86
The critiques of Said’s theorization of Orientalism are now legion.Footnote 87 The most relevant critique for scholars of African intellectual history, however, concerns this element of “ambivalence” or the inability to delimit the rhetorical evidence of Orientalism in the writings and perspectives of an Afro-Victorian like Blyden to a dichotomous assessment of “good/bad” or “positive/negative.” Take, for another instance, this passage:
But we do not believe that these tribes are hopelessly inaccessible to the influence of the religion of the Gospel. We believe that ‘when mutual misunderstandings are removed’; when the race is better understood; when the effort at indiscriminate Europeanizing ceases … there will be nothing to prevent Christianity from spreading among the Pagan tribes, and from eventually uprooting the imperfect [emphasis added] Mohammedanism which so extensively prevails. In the meantime [emphasis added], we ought not to grudge the Africans the glimpses of truth which they catch from the Koran; for ‘knowledge of a part is better than ignorance of the whole[.]’Footnote 88
How should one evaluate this statement? One sees an unsubtle critique of European missionaries and their inadequate endeavors on the continent (“indiscriminate Europeanizing”) and an admiration for how Islam has imparted a civilizing effect on the primitive “Pagan tribes.” Yet, Blyden qualifies his language with an instrumentalist hedge. Islam and the “Arab superstructure” might be good, but not perfect. Footnote 89 One cannot underestimate Islam’s value, but only as a solution “in the meantime.” The writing both embraces and rebuffs the religion and what it represents.
It seems best to evaluate the inherent tensions in this descriptive rendering of Islam and the Orient in accordance with Aravamudan: Blyden “demonstrates the ambivalence and the malleability of orientalist tropologies.”Footnote 90 And, upon seeing Blyden’s writings on the Orient as a rhetorical expression of “ambivalence,” the theoretical canvas widens. Ambivalent Orientalism pushes one past parochial categories of analysis, such as race or nationality, to notice questions and connections shared by those in other fields who study a comparable “ambivalence” among their historical actors. For example, it pushes one to consider the relevance of Ussama Makdisi’s scholarship on the “ambivalent relationship between Ottoman rulers and subjects,” or the edited volume by Susannah Heschel and Umar Ryad and their collective attunement to the negotiated usage of Orientalist tropes by those ostensibly of the Orient.Footnote 91 These non-Africanist scholars have also reckoned with the ambivalent relationship between their historical actors and an idea of the Orient, alongside their respective incorporation and “strategic deformation of orientalism’s representational mechanisms.”Footnote 92 In turn, Africanist scholars can only benefit from such points of theoretical alignment and comparative insight, especially when trying to trace the connection between the circulation of this ambivalent discourse and historical processes of racial, ethnic, and national self-identification in West Africa.Footnote 93
Second, ambivalent Orientalism does not sacrifice grounded historical precision for abstract theoretical utility. That is to say, the term not only captures the extensive historical relationship with the Orient in West Africa, alongside a corresponding “set of conventions, narratives, figures, and genres” within the region, but it also captures the multidimensional reasons for why Blyden would invoke the Orient in advancing his arguments for repatriative regeneration.Footnote 94 Put elsewise: The term reflects Blyden’s sense of ambivalence regarding his experiences with Islam in West Africa as an Afro-Victorian, while also reflecting a contextual ambivalence regarding his relationship to West Africa writ large.
West Africa has been a prolific site of discourse about the Orient for centuries.Footnote 95 This makes sense. Scholars have shown how the Sahara constituted a “bridge,” not a “barrier,” and the subsequent spread of Islam facilitated profound social, political, and economic connections between West Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East.Footnote 96 Moreover, Islam in West Africa and the circum-Atlantic had acquired a renewed prominence by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. “The post-slave trade transformations taking place in Africa, Europe, and the Americas,” Sean Hanretta writes, “had created a new discursive space for Muslim scholars seeking to reach out and connect, promoting their own views about culture, civilization, race, and religion.”Footnote 97 This change took place within the wake of a pre-existing Victorian conception of Islam and the Orient as a latent source of “European fear, if not always respect.”Footnote 98 During an era in which those on the African continent and those in the diaspora determinedly sought respect, this legacy of civilizational opposition to the West – and transposing this legacy onto the African continent – could not prove a more fitting rhetorical move.Footnote 99
While remaining engaged with this greater transnational conversation about the East and the West, Blyden would ultimately immerse himself within the local socio-political and discursive context of West Africa.Footnote 100 For instance, he made multiple excursions into the Upper Guinea interior.Footnote 101 Muslim clerics and religious communities warmly received him on his sojourns throughout Liberia.Footnote 102 He fostered scholarly ties and familiar relationships with learned Muslims in Sierra Leone.Footnote 103 Over time and with experience, Blyden’s perspective on Islam and the Orient shifted.Footnote 104 These firsthand interactions conclusively proved Africa’s supposed degeneration was not uniform.Footnote 105 Observable evidence of a past civilization existed in Egypt and the Sphinx, but there also existed present evidence of civilizational refinement through Islam and the resultant transformations of “the more degraded tribes of the African continent.”Footnote 106 Islam had even seemingly performed this “civilizing mission” more effectively than Christian missionaries.Footnote 107 “The Pagan village possessing a Mussulman teacher,” Blyden commented, “is always found to be in advance of its neighbors in all the elements of civilization.”Footnote 108 And Blyden had surprisingly little qualms in letting this opinion be known.Footnote 109
Innovating ideologists must account for the conditional “limits” enforced by historical context and rhetorical expectations for their utterances to have critical purchase.Footnote 110 In Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), Blyden’s authority as an innovating ideologist relies, to a substantial degree, on his expertise on the East and his exposure to Islam in West Africa. By leveraging this knowledge to appeal effectively to his various audiences, Blyden actively shaped a narrative about how Islam and the Orient had played, and could continue to play, a constructive role in Africa’s regeneration. However, the challenge in reading Blyden – and, hence, the aptness of ambivalent Orientalism – emerges in his resistant reconciliation of this evidence with his Victorian biases. Contrary to tales of his conversion to Islam, Blyden mostly maintained a strained but marked vision of Africa’s regeneration as begotten by Christianity-cum-civilization.Footnote 111 As Blyden tellingly reveals in a letter responding to the fallout from the publication of Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887): “No one who knows my habits, tastes and studies or who had carefully read any of my writings, would conclude that I had turned Mohammedan. I believe that the Christian is the highest type of man.”Footnote 112 The irony, of course, lies in the difficulty in disagreeing with those who would have come to such a conclusion.
Ambivalent Orientalism places this interpretative tension front and center. Blyden could look favorably upon Islam and the East when considering its oppositional status to Western civilization and its apparent value in securing Africa’s regeneration. Invoking this history and his own observations in his writings would, thus, have a compelling effect on both a local and transnational audience. However, he remained wedded to Victorian principles and ultimately granted the West and Christianity the superior role in the continent’s eventual regeneration. Again, Islam serves, first and foremost, as the means for Christianity’s purportedly progressive ends.
Ambivalent Orientalism also serves another function. The term not only conveys an ambivalent disposition toward the Orient, but it also speaks implicitly to a historical ambivalence about Africa itself. Similar to other Afro-Victorians, Blyden assailed the adverse effects of “the Negro unconsciously [imbibing] the conviction that to be a great man he must be like the white man,” while simultaneously chiding “Pagan superstitions.”Footnote 113 He praised the spiritual superiority of the African continent and “the Negro Race,” while also chafing at the “primitivity” of “the Shamanism or Fetichism” observed in indigenous African communities.Footnote 114 Accentuating the weighted civilizational legacy of Islam on the continent thereby became a powerful rhetorical mechanism in a local West African problem-space and a broader Afro-Victorian problem-space, where Blyden could confidently reassert Africa’s rightful position “among the great families of man.”Footnote 115 But, in employing this mechanism – let alone, as a preemptive accelerant for repatriative regeneration from the West – Blyden tacitly signifies an ambivalence in which he believes the stimulus for regenerating Africa must still arrive from outside the continent. In an unforgiving sense, Frantz Fanon’s later critique of colonized intellectuals incisively distills why Blyden would rhetorically turn to the East:
But faced with his country’s present-day status, lucidly and “objectively” observing the reality of the continent he would like to claim as his own, the intellectual is terrified by the void, the mindlessness, and the savagery. Yet he feels he must escape this white culture. He must look elsewhere, anywhere; for lack of a cultural stimulus comparable to the glorious panorama flaunted by the colonizer.Footnote 116
This ambivalence did not prevent Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) from becoming a local and regional sensation in West Africa.Footnote 117 Neither did it prevent the work’s international popularity.Footnote 118 The book, as mentioned by Hollis R. Lynch, was “also acclaimed in the Muslim world; the journals and newspapers of Damascus, Constantinople and Beirut, carried highly complimentary reviews of it, and gleefully reported the controversy which the book had generated in the British press.”Footnote 119 Blyden and his work was referenced authoritatively by The Egyptian Gazette. Footnote 120 And, in 1905, Blyden would even receive the Imperial Order of the Medjidie from the Sultan of Turkey “for his services to Islam, by his writings and in other ways.”Footnote 121
I have outlined the theoretical and historical advantages of adopting ambivalent Orientalism as a heuristic for studying how Blyden’s Orientalism related to his arguments for repatriative regeneration. The final reason, and an apt point on which to conclude, foregrounds the political value of this term. Simply put: “Black Orientalism” or, even, Harry Nii Koney Odamtten’s “Africa-centered Orientalist discourse,” constricts the political significance of Blyden’s writings to those on the African continent or members of the African diaspora.Footnote 122 However, Blyden’s work extended further afield. His ambivalent representations of the Orient – in this case, a predominantly “xenophilic” portrayal – struck a chord with those in the Middle East who, in response to the colonial projects of the nineteenth century, were engaged in their own ambivalent negotiations with extant ideas of the Orient. In turn, ambivalent Orientalism connects Blyden to a broader political project of Afro-Asian solidarity and allows us to see his work as a radical act of “worldmaking” at the dawn of formal empire.
By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, those in the Middle East had begun to experience the colonial consequences of European narratives of “oriental despotism” and the region’s professed degeneracy.Footnote 123 Cemil Aydin illuminates how this discourse assumed an ambivalent form in the reformist context of the Ottoman Empire. “In the debate on social Darwinism,” Aydin writes, “Muslim intellectuals conceded that Muslims were underdeveloped and backward, but they denied that this was permanent inferiority. Intellectual elites could intervene with various forms of social engineering and calls for a reawakening to ‘end the decline’ of their racial or religious communities.”Footnote 124 Marwa Elshakry continues in a similar vein. She discusses how writers and intellectuals in the region reconfigured histories derived from European Orientalists – most notably, a historical image where “the modern Orientals were degraded remnants of a former greatness” – and mobilized these narratives for nationalist purposes.Footnote 125 Elshakry describes:
In fact, the idea of a historical [Muslim] golden age gave rise to a uniquely modernist temporal drive: in a sense, modernity was recast as a return to origins, fueling many nationalist and futurist political resurrections in its wake. In contemporary Arabic writings, it led to discussions of the possible revival of a future “golden age” or, in other terms, of an ongoing bid for a civilizational, cultural, or linguistic “awakening” (what many of the late nineteenth-century figures here penned the “Nahda”).Footnote 126
These nineteenth-century intellectuals were not practicing a “Black Orientalism.” They, like Blyden, employed redescriptive tactics based on “[t]he idea that ‘Arab civilization’ played a critical part in the universal progression of knowledge.”Footnote 127 Of course, their redescriptions differed. Blyden still reduced Islam and the Orient as an anticipatory means for Christianity – and, thus, a form of civilization from the West – to regenerate the African continent. Yet, his representations of the Orient also revalued an image of Islamic civilizations, from one petrified in a despotic state to one possessing a reanimating potential. Blyden’s rhetorical ability to balance these tensions and produce a work amenable to those within a nascent “Muslim world” ultimately resulted in a work of global resonance.Footnote 128
Blyden thereby found himself in implicit and explicit dialogue with other mid-to-late nineteenth-century non-European intellectuals who, also displaced temporally by Orientalist discourse, sought to effectuate their respective societies’ regeneration by rhetorically redeploying certain elements of this discourse. The reception of Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) in the Middle East, thus, directs one to see Blyden as engaged with Africa’s regeneration and a far larger project. This project consisted of those in Africa and Asia mutually leveraging narratives of an Oriental “futures past” and a “futures yet-to-come” as a common means for overcoming their shared temporal subordination and colonial domination. This form of discursive solidarity would even be familiar. At the end of the day, “[t]he people of Asia, and the people of Africa,” Blyden writes, “have been in constant intercourse.”Footnote 129
As such, Blyden envisioned a future African civilization where the prior glories of the continent – vis-à-vis the recognition of the contributions from the East and the repatriation of Africans from the West – would resume. Past injustices would be vindicated via this virtuous pursuit of progress, and this new Africa would redound to the redemption of the world.Footnote 130 The work of regenerating Africa, therefore, meant the work of making a new world.
Here, Amia Srinivasan’s definition of “worldmaking” proves instructive. She writes: “To read the Genealogy [Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic] this way is to read it as a guide to what I want to call worldmaking: the transformation of the world through a transformation of our representational practices.”Footnote 131 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) is no mere act of mimicry or pliant submission to the dominant rhetorical practices of the era. Blyden’s capacity to articulate a Romantic vision of Africa engaged with the Orient in the past, present, and future, would serve as an innovative and foundational component in the “political imaginary” of pan-Africanism and its representational practices in the decades following the publication of this canonical text.Footnote 132 Blyden’s pan-African legatees would be the ones to attempt to turn this worldmaking rhetoric into transformative political action, as evidenced by how they constructed and navigated networks of anti-colonial internationalisms and complex Afro-Asian solidarities throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 133 In turn, one can read Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) as resonant with Srinivasan’s demiurgical injunction to try and “exercise our own agential powers to make our representations, and thus our world, anew.”Footnote 134
As David Scott writes, “now, after Bandung, after the dissolution of the project of anti-imperialist sovereignty … we do not inhabit the same political horizons as before; nor do we inhabit the same intellectual and ideological context of options. That dream is over.”Footnote 135 Yes, the visionary ideas and Romantic narratives that propelled such tremendous sociopolitical change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have arguably become “exhausted,” especially in light of the cascading political, environmental, social, and economic crises we face today.Footnote 136 The solutions of the past, such as pan-Africanism or Afro-Asianism, might not serve as the best solutions for the problems of the present.Footnote 137 Yet, returning to Blyden and Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) remains valuable. Examining why arguments of such historical consequence could emerge and, perhaps more importantly, how they could take hold to such great effect, can still help us to think through and develop the appropriate conceptual apparatuses and rhetorical techniques for our unique problem-space, as we try to invest our words and, thus, our worlds with new meaning.Footnote 138 Though undeniably challenging, intellectual historians of Africa should not shy away from this endeavor. For as Blyden himself put it: “She [Africa] has not been petrified with grief; she has not become a stone … It was said of her in the past, and it may be said of her to-day, that she is ever bringing forth something new.”Footnote 139
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone whose input and support throughout this process have ultimately shaped what this article has become. This includes all those who participated in the “How to Do Things with Concepts: Methods in Intellectual History” course at New York University (NYU) in Spring 2023, the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) Graduate Writing Workshop in May 2023, the Afro-Asia Interactions Seminar at NYU in Fall 2023, and the “Pan-Africanism, Politics and Epistemologies of the Global South” session at the 67th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in December 2024. I would like to extend special thanks to Drs. Stefanos Geroulanos, Michael A. Gomez, Shobana Shankar, Monique A. Bedasse, David Ludden, Folarin Ajibade, and, as always, Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
