Edward Blyden: EIE with an accent on LII

 "The fate of the Negro is the romance of our age." 

Edward Blyden (1832 – 1912) is not known much popularly, but he's well known to scholars of Liberia and African-American political thought. Many of them had trouble pinning him down: Pan-Africanist or imperialist toady? Cosmopolitan or nationalist? Conservative or progressive? Ascetic or voluptuary? Man of letters or politician? A biographer summarized his life as ending in the condition of a man "misunderstood and misunderstanding," who had died embittered by the gap between his vision and the world's response to it. All this fits  EIE with a strong intellectual accent drawing on LII — strong semi-dual accents are quite uncommon, overall.

The starting point is the fixed emotional-historical mission that organizing everything else around it across his sixty years of writing. Blyden arrived in Liberia in 1851 as a nineteen-year-old who had just been turned away from three American theological seminaries on account of his race. The seminaries' refusal was, inadvertently, the founding act of Pan-Africanism. Redirected to West Africa by his mentor Reverend Knox, he would spend the next sixty years vindicating and elevating the African people. Everything surrounding that mission shifted — the religious positions, the political alignments, the assessment of whether colonialism was a tool or an enemy, the question of whether Christianity or Islam or indigenous tradition best served the cause. Blyden's seeming inconsistency was actually the opposite: a fidelity so absolute to his central historical conviction that any framework became expendable the moment it stopped serving it. EIE's Fe-leading structure works exactly this way — the conviction is the fixed point, the arguments orbit it, and when an argument has done its work or outlived its usefulness, another takes its place without the type experiencing this as contradiction, as long as it serves underlying mission that creative-Ni provides (and it's exactly creative Ni - leading Ni, being a function of passive contemplation, isn't particularly inclined to a single-minded vision). In fact, Blyden's future-minded rationality, was, if anything, slightly increased relative to the average for EIE.

The word "romance" from the leading quote is the key: not merely a political problem to be solved in a Te-efficient way or even a historical injustice to be rectified, but a drama of civilizational destiny with the emotional charge and historical grandeur that EIE characteristically applies to the things. For Blyden, the African race was a protagonist in world history, uniquely constituted by its nature and its suffering, destined to make a contribution to civilization that no other race could make. "Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world. When the civilised nations, in consequence of their wonderful material development, shall have had their spiritual susceptibilities blunted... it may be, that they will have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith." This is the Ni-colored historical vision that the EIE type, in its intellectual-political form, produces: the long temporal arc in which present suffering is transfigured by future global purpose.

The intellectual Alpha NT accent appears in how the mission was pursued. Blyden was self-taught in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic; he mastered classical scholarship, comparative religion, sociology, history, and linguistics through independent auto-didact study. The Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race of 1887 — the work that made his international reputation — is not simply passionate preaching, but a systematic comparative analysis of how two religious systems function differently in the African social context (which requires a reasonably strong Ti). The prose is still described as "stylish and erudite, widely informed on current events and literature, garnished with references from Blyden's broad reading in original sources." 

The term "African Personality" — coined in a Freetown lecture in 1893 — sounds like the kind of concept that might have emerged from a 1960s university seminar, but nope! It emerged from a man who had spent forty years watching what European civilization did to Africans who tried to inhabit it on its own terms, and who concluded that the problem was African self-abandonment. Each race, Blyden argued, had been given by God a distinct character and destiny: not superior, not inferior, but irreducibly different, and irreplaceable. The African's particular endowment — communal, anti-individualist, spiritually attuned, anti-materialistic — was a gift that European civilization, in its arrogance, had spent centuries trying to suppress. "If you are not yourself," he wrote, "if you surrender your personality, you have nothing left to give the world". While quite inspiring, it doesn't take that rich of an imagination to see how this concept can go bad. Some Talanov followers associated such "separate multiculturalism" with a flavor of Aristocratic dichotomy, and you can see why.

In an interesting historical parrallel, he visited Jerusalem in 1866, stood at the Western Wall, and returned convinced that the Zionist project of return offered the correct model for African redemption. He praised Theodor Herzl (someone who seems to be close to him in type and accent in his intellectual romantic nationalism) as expressing ideas that had "given such an impetus to the real work of the Jews."

The Liberia College episode, documented by Hollis Lynch's biography, reveals the shadow side of his rather prickly type (a combination of Talanov-style Qe with Qi results in quite a special snowflake). As president of the college from 1880 to 1884, Blyden constantly quarreled with staff, regarding himself, in Lynch's phrase, as the "Providential Agent" of the Negro race. When two members of his staff offered alternative perspectives on how the college should function, the protracted wrangling ended with his resignation in 1884. He returned in 1900, only to be forced out within six months for teaching students that polygamy and Islam were preferable to monogamy and Christianity. 

The bitterness of his final years reflects the feelings of someone who achieved a great deal that was then taken up by others in ways that felt like a distortion rather than a continuation.