SOURCE: Mudimbe, V. Y. “E. W. Blyden's Legacy and Questions.” In The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, pp. 98-134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

In the following excerpt, Mudimbe considers the claim that the West Indian writer and thinker Edward Wilmot Blyden, who settled in West Africa in 1851, was the precursor of Négritude, and analyzes Blyden's ideas on colonization, Western ideology, European attitudes toward Blacks, Islam, Pan-Africanism, and the condition and character of Africans.

The Ambiguities of an Ideological Alternative

Toute ma vie, politiquement, je me suis fait de la bile. J'en induis que le seul Père que j'ai connu (que je me suis donné) a été le Père politique.

Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes.

In his foreword to Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden (1978) collected by Hollis R. Lynch, L. S. Senghor celebrates Blyden as the “foremost precursor both of...