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Edward Wilmot Blyden and Fichte’s Nationalist Philosophy of History

  • Zeyad El Nabolsy
Published/Copyright: June 13, 2025

Abstract

Edward Wilmot Blyden’s contributions to Pan-Africanism have been widely recognised. Scholars have noted that Blyden’s conception of what he called the “African Personality” reflects the influence of his reading of Herder, Fichte, and Mazzini. However, there has hitherto been no attempt to identify the precise elements that he borrowed from the aforementioned thinkers. This paper focuses on the potential influence of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation on Blyden’s philosophy of history and his philosophy of education. I argue that while Blyden does not explicitly refer to Fichte, or to Herder for that matter, his philosophy of history as presented in his Islam, Christianity, and the Negro Race, with its emphasis on the existence of racially specific laws of growth, can plausibly be interpreted as having been influenced by Fichte’s philosophy of history. I provide textual and contextual evidence to support this thesis. I show that Fichte’s idea that there is a Bildungsplan for humankind, which requires that each people [Volk] should develop its particularity [Eigenthümlichkeit] provided a suitable framework for Blyden’s defence of a special developmental path for peoples of African descent.


1 A version of this paper was presented to my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at York University, as well as to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. I am grateful for all the feedback provided by the audience. Esther Neuhann also provided me with helpful detailed comments on the final draft. I also benefitted from the conversations I had with Kwesi Thomas over the relationship between German philosophy and Africana philosophy.


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Published Online: 2025-06-13
Published in Print: 2025-06-26

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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