Tibebu aims to examine Blyden as ‘a seminal figure in the history of black racial nationalism’ (p. 7). Blyden certainly warrants renewed attention; Hollis Lynch's biography of him is over forty years old. Blyden, writing over some six decades before his death in 1912, thoroughly engaged many of the themes running through modern African and diasporan intellectual history. Tibebu lays out Blyden's writing around selected themes to reveal a brilliant mind engaged with enduring and profound intellectual problems: how to confront the burdens of prejudice and Western hubris that had so disadvantaged Africa; how to establish African claims to justice and equality in the world. Blyden challenged the monopoly of white voices in the invention of Africa, marshalling persuasive arguments based on his travels, reading and public service. He endeavoured to define an ‘African personality’, a vantage point from which to criticize the alienating effects of European culture. He challenged the complacency of missionaries in Africa, arguing that African societies might be better served by Islam. Facing in his lifetime an ever-expanding array of Western power, Blyden spent much ink and effort seeking a means by which Africans could adapt these powers for their own needs, even as such powers were deployed against Africans. He expounded two arguments central to later pan-Africanism: that African Americans should lead Africa's uplift, and that Africans should look within their continent for inspiration. But Blyden was also a man of the nineteenth century. He believed unshakeably that race was a meaningful category, and indeed expressed his hostility to ‘mulattoes’ in racist terms (although this was largely confined to private correspondence).

Exploring Blyden's beliefs, Tibebu develops the thesis that they contain numerous ‘incurable contradictions’ (p. 36). Blyden asserted that Africa lacked the elements of progress (which African American returnees would need to provide), and that Africans needed to root their modernity in native cultures. He held that true Christianity was essential for progress, yet argued that Africans should adopt Islam. He promoted pan-African connections, yet virulently opposed the leadership of Africans of mixed parentage, who comprise a substantial part of the diaspora. Indeed, Tibebu concludes that Blyden ‘is too complex, too contradictory, and too stretched out in many directions to be wrapped in a single package’ (p. 9). Here Tibebu himself moves in two directions, against his claim that ‘Blyden is to modern African thought what Hegel is to modern Western thought’. If his aim is to establish Blyden as an ‘ancestor’ to be ‘revered’ (p. 172), Tibebu needs to do more to explain why Blyden held such contrary positions, and indeed he needs to seek the solid foundation that might lie beneath superficial confusions.

A more nuanced context for Blyden's ideas would help. Tibebu sets Blyden's efforts against a very broadly conceived nemesis of ‘Western hegemony’ (p. 172). He treats almost sixty years of writing by theme rather than chronology, and pays minimal attention to differences of audience, ambiance and agenda that informed Blyden at different moments. Even within this era of slavery, scientific racism and imperial expansion, the contours of Western power and the fight against it varied. Indeed, Blyden's last major work, African Life and Customs (1908), took inspiration from a profound shift he detected in European thinking about Africa in the preceding half century.

Blyden began his career from New World roots, at a time when colonial partition seemed unlikely and social Darwinism was new. He ended his career thoroughly informed by British and West African thinking about African problems, when the crises of partition had given way to crises of colonial administration, and ideas of racial hierarchy were being challenged. Blyden was aware of all these changes, and in fact contributed to some through his critical engagements with British, American and African interlocutors. If we distinguish between early and late Blyden, some of his contradictions become less stark. It is arguable that his insistence on injecting African American leaders into Africa, and his insistence that Africans should shape their future according to African values, are not deeply contradictory. Rather, by 1908, when Blyden offered his most explicit defence of the second position, African empowerment could be sought by different means than in the 1860s. Tibebu almost wholly ignores the historical shape of Blyden's thought as a means of resolving tensions within it.

By stressing Blyden's ‘contradictions and paradoxes’ (p. 16), Tibebu makes it more difficult to discern the enduring foundations that he claims Blyden laid. The epilogue steps back from strong assertions that many later thinkers ‘claim allegiance to the footsteps of Blyden’ (p. 147), instead merely highlighting how Blyden's themes recur. But there is a tradition of ‘modern transnational African thought’ (p. 1), connected by the need to locate and define Africa's place in the modern world, which has neither been resolved nor stopped shifting shape since Blyden's time. The story of how Blyden's quest unfolded through changing circumstances would be a lasting legacy from which his heirs today could learn.