10 Interesting Facts About Edward Wilmot Blyden, the Father of Pan-Africanism

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Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and writer and historian John Henrik Clarke were influenced by Blyden. They attended meetings of an organization called the Blyden Society for the Study of African History in their early years as Pan-Africanists in Harlem in the 1940s.

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Pan-Africanists and historians, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, also were inspired by the work of Blyden. Garvey said of African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people that if “you do not know anything of your ancestry, it will do you well to read the works of Blyden, one of our historians and chroniclers who has done so much to retrieve the lost prestige of the race.”

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