by Shae Omonijo
What happens when the pursuit of freedom intertwines with the allure of empire? This question lies at the heart of the complex legacy of Edward Wilmot Blyden who, as a politician and intellectual, has been called the “Father of Pan-Africanism.” From Uday Singh Mehta to Duncan Bell, many scholars have rightly emphasized the dominance of liberal thought in fueling European expansion into Africa and Asia throughout the nineteenth century. They recognize the profound consequences of this ideological commitment, which haughtily claimed: Liberal European states not only have the right but also the duty to colonize and “civilize” distant lands in order for uncivilized peoples to, one day, obtain freedom. However, if one looks beyond the European presence in Africa to the freed Black presence in West Africa, liberalism alone cannot explain the creation of Africa’s first independent republic: Liberia. Instead, Blyden relied on liberal and republican concepts of freedom to rationalize the existence of, and expansion into, the territory that would become Liberia.
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Many concepts of freedom circulated in the nineteenth century due in large part to the Age of Revolutions that swept across the United States, France, and Haiti. How to interpret what freedom has historically meant in republican thought has, in turn, been an ongoing source of debate amongst political theorists, most notably Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. For Skinner, the republican concept of freedom was negative, meaning freedom from “interference” and “domination.” Such an interpretation, Skinner believed, crucially distinguished the republican concept of freedom from emergent mid-to-late nineteenth-century liberal concepts of freedom. Pettit, however, urges theorists to view domination as the foremost concern of republican thought. The problem of interference was of a lesser concern. Freedom for Petit is, in other words, simply defined as non-domination.
This is a subtle, but important difference. Blyden, for example, was less concerned with the British Empire commercially and militarily interfering in the affairs of West African territories, so long as African customs and culture were preserved. Blyden placed greater emphasis on providing refuge for those escaping the system of racial domination in the United States. Thus, Pettit’s interpretation of the republican concept of freedom as simply non-domination proves the most apt lens for analyzing Blyden’s republican thought since the problem of racial domination constituted his principal concern.
The influence of republican ideology on the meaning of freedom in nineteenth-century Black political thought prior to the Reconstruction Era, however, remains quite understudied. As Carl Patrick Burrowes aptly remarks, “In the vast literature on blacks in the nineteenth century, a glaring and paradoxical feature is the relative lack of attention given to how slaves understood ‘freedom’ and to the impact of contemporaneous revolutionary ideologies, particularly republicanism, on their understanding” (32).
As early as 1773, for instance, enslaved individuals petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for freedom in exchange for relocating to Africa, thereby highlighting an early Black republican vision of escaping forms of racial domination in the United States. Following Haiti’s 1791–1804 Revolution, fueled by Black republican ideology, notable figures like Paul Cuffe began exploring the possibilities of African colonization. Cuffe’s 1811 visit to Sierra Leone—a British colony, home to formerly enslaved people—exemplifies the growing interest in establishing a Black republic, in Cuffe’s words, under the guidance of a “civilized” power. However, as best evidenced by nineteenth-century Liberia, Black republican thought rationalized not just an individual solution but a collective solution to the problem of racial domination.
Liberia was founded as a republic by freed and formerly enslaved Black people under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS, formed in 1816 by Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey seeking to address the “problem” of a growing free Black population in the United States, advocated for resettling these individuals in Africa. Liberia subsequently became a full-fledged experiment in Black republicanism, where an educated class of Black settlers—known as Americo-Liberians—arrived, eventually assumed political power, and transformed ACS settlements into the independent Commonwealth of Liberia by 1847.
When it comes to governing based on republican principles, Carl Patrick Burrowes helpfully comments that “a financially independent and educated citizenry would pursue the interest of the commonwealth rather than self-interest” (32). The republican concept of freedom is, therefore, not just about freedom from domination but freedom from domination enacted by, and largely for, an educated and elite citizenry. The 1847 Liberian Constitution clearly outlined who would enjoy the newfound freedom in the Liberian Republic. Article 5, Section 13 of the Constitution reads: “The great object of forming these Colonies, being to provide a home for the dispersed and oppressed children of Africa, and to regenerate and enlighten this benighted continent, none but persons of color shall be admitted to citizenship in this Republic.” The irony of this republican project remains unstated. Black Southerners comprised 4,963 out of the 5,602 settlers in Liberia in 1847 and provided eleven out of the twelve delegates to the Liberian Constitutional Convention. Such a composition replicated the very exclusionary practices of classical republican intellectuals and politicians like Thomas Jefferson in the United States. While Black Americans sought freedom and self-determination in Liberia, the native populations were systematically excluded from citizenship and thus became, in the words of the historian James Ciment, “strangers in their own land.”
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It is within this historical context that one must understand the intellectual formation of Edward Wilmot Blyden. Blyden was born free on the West Indian island of St. Thomas in 1832. His mentor—Reverend John P. Knox, an active member of the Dutch Reformed Church of St. Thomas—encouraged Blyden to journey to the United States and study theology at Rutgers Theological Seminary. Due to racial prejudice, he was denied admission. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 quickly meant that Blyden’s freedom would be constantly under threat if he remained in the United States. Moses N. Moore Jr. argues that this early experience led Blyden to set sail for a small West African settlement called Monrovia, the capital of a burgeoning Liberia.
Influenced by the ACS and the Presbyterian Church, Blyden initially embraced the liberal idea regarding the need to “civilize” the native populations of Africa. That is, Blyden advanced similar concepts of freedom as contemporaries like the liberal thinker John Stuart Mill. Prior to the publication of On Liberty in 1859, Mill, for one, put forth a liberal concept of freedom for African-descended people in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica. Mill’s debates with Thomas Carlyle in the early 1850s on the “Negro Question” were grounded in the belief that “civilized” people shouldered a moral obligation to uplift “uncivilized” people to enjoy the “natural freedoms” boasted by “civilized nations.” The freedom to govern oneself was not a foregone right, but an earned privilege. In other words, liberalism supposed that Black people could not govern themselves until they became civilized enough to enjoy and appreciate the freedom it entailed.
Republicanism, however, purported that the republic—the state—is the very means by which freedom is realized. Taking Blyden seriously as a republican and liberal thinker requires examining the tensions in how both conceptions of freedom undergird Blyden’s participation in the young Liberian Republic. Blyden’s early experiences in Liberia and his involvement in military expeditions against various native populations, for example, gradually shifted his perspective as he saw the native populations were not merely “uncivilized,” but culturally different. According to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, some empires employed what they call the “politics of difference” to govern disparate populations, which meant “recognizing the multiplicity of peoples and their varied customs as an ordinary fact of life” (12). For Blyden, the Liberian republic was a means to establishing a uniquely African Empire. He, therefore, sought to justify Liberia’s expanding settlements and arrogation of native territories as the means to govern based on this “politics of difference” vis-à-vis a republican exclusion of the native population and a liberal mission of “civilizing” the native population.
While the Secretary of State for Liberia, Blyden declared in an 1865 Liberian Independence Day address: “We are laying the foundations of empire on this coast.” Blyden, thus, signals a departure from the purely liberal rhetoric of civilizing toward a more republican vision of Liberia’s right to govern and defend its settlements from British and French colonial territorial encroachments. He also offers this rallying cry: “We have the germ of an African Empire. Let us, fellow citizens, guard the trust committed to our hands. The tribes in the distant interior are waiting for us.” Drawing a contrast between citizen and native, these respective statements encapsulate the dual impulses of Blyden’s thought—the liberal desire to civilize and the republican drive to ensure freedom as non-domination from European empires, even if it meant dominating a native population in the process.
The exclusionary nature of the early Liberian Republic further aligns with Blyden’s distinct interpretation of classical republican thought when he lays out:
A correct republicanism does not claim that all men are intellectually and morally equal; on the contrary, it teaches that only men of merit should be elevated, and in proportion of their merit. But all men have not merit, nor do those who have, possesses it in the same degree–hence inequality; and a true republicanism is discriminating.
Blyden’s expression of republicanism ironically resembles many of the paradoxes of republican thought in the early United States. Although motivated by the pursuit of worthwhile ideals like freedom from domination and access to citizenship, Blyden’s re-articulation of republicanism simultaneously denied indigenous populations those same ideals in order for a quasi-vanguardist group to establish and lead a republic. At the same time, the liberal side of Blyden’s speech suggests that the “tribes in the distant interior” still await to be “civilized” in hopes of one day securing their own elevation. A speech like this demonstrates not only the nuance required to assess Blyden’s contributions to the history of political thought on the African continent and in the diaspora but also how liberal thought was not the only ideology that drove the colonization of West Africa in the nineteenth century.
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While liberalism would continue to buttress European expansion into Africa, republican ideas like freedom as non-domination alongside national self-determination would become a tool to advocate for African independence in the twentieth century. Pan-Africanists, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Kwame Nkrumah, would hold Liberia as an exemplar of Black freedom and independence even as Liberia’s sovereignty—and, thus, freedom—would come under scrutiny by the international community due to the ongoing presence of slavery within its borders during the early part of the twentieth century. Given the positioning of Blyden as the Father of Pan-Africanism, one must interrogate how Blyden’s republican thought, in addition to his liberal thought, comprise a critical part of the genealogy of self-determination in the twentieth century, which the political theorist Adom Getachew raises in Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019).
The problems encountered by Liberia in the twentieth century reveal the contradictions embedded in the republican concept and application of freedom in the nineteenth century. Freedom meant freedom from oppressive governments and empires as well as the right to establish a republic to defend that freedom. It is these dual objectives of freedom that lie at the heart of the founding of the Liberian Republic and the exclusion and domination of native populations. A republic that models itself and its constitution after the republic in the United States is, thus, bound by the constraints and failures of the republicanism that inspired American independence—rampant inequality, exclusionary citizenship, and racial domination. As Blyden voiced in his 1865 speech: True republicanism is indeed discriminatory.
Freedom and how it has been conceived in Western political thought has, therefore, possessed inherent limitations in historical practice. Only once intellectual historians grapple with these limits in non-European contexts like Liberia might we develop a historical genealogy and conceptual understanding of freedom that moves beyond the current state of political thought and helps imagine a new concept of freedom for a world, ostensibly, after empire.
Shae Omonijo is a multidisciplinary scholar and doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her work broadly centers on categories of belonging and the exclusion of people and objects. Her historical research explores the relationship between exile, nationalism(s), and identity formation of marginalized communities in the British Empire.
Edited by Tomi Onabanjo.
Featured image: [Liberian senate] / drawn by Robert K. Griffin, Monrovia, ca, 1856, via Library of Congress.
