African Life and Customs

by Edward Wilmot Blyden

In African Life and Customs, Blyden examined the culture of "pure" Africans-- those untouched by European and Asiatic influences. He identified the family as the basic unit in African society and polygamy as the foundation of African families. He described African social systems as cooperative; everyone worked for each other. No one went without work, food, or clothing. Blyden challenged white racial theorists who held Africans were inferior and whose arguments supported their preconceived ideas. He assumed Africans to be "distinct" rather than inferior, and he analyzed African culture within the context of African social experiences.

Genres: Africa

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Edward Wilmot Blyden was an educator, writer, diplomat, and politician primarily in Liberia.

Reviews

[Da1tonthegreat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Wilmot Blyden describes natural African culture without viewing it through the lens of European culture or attempting to conform to it in the procrustean manner of missionaries, imperialists, and multiculturalists. This culture is tropical, tribal, animist, polygamous, and primal. Blyden declares that the indigenous African has not underachieved compared to the European in creating a civilization perfectly suited to his environment and characteristics. Indeed, looking at the poverty, crime, and decay of the post-Industrial Revolution West, one could argue the reverse. It is plain from looking at modern Africa and its diaspora that forcibly westernizing them has not only utterly failed, but done immeasurable damage. Blyden opposes the foolish universalism of Christian Europeans who naively believed they could convert and assimilate the whole world to their society. No more than the African could succeed in the temperate climes of Europe, white men struggled to survive in the malarial heat of the tropics in which the blacks thrived. Unfortunately, this book is overly brief, refuses to engage with biological essentialism, generalizes West African conditions to apply to all of sub-Saharan Africa, and perhaps takes a too rosy view of the 'noble savage.' In spite of those flaws, this is an excellent and too obscure work highly relevant to the clash of civilizations, multipolarity, Spenglerism, orientalism, postcolonialism, third-worldism, and of course black nationalism.