Edward Wilmot Blyden's understanding of Christianity and Islam as instruments of black emancipation in West Africa

In the words of Leopold Senghor, Blyden (1832–1912), was ‘le premier et principal précurseur de la Nigritude comme de l‘African Personality’. For sixty years Blyden tried to persuade members of his own race (whom he consistently called Negroes) to exchange what he saw as their permanent subjugation by whites in the Americas for the prospect of liberation in their cultural home, Africa. His campaign prompted him to ask if either of the two major religious systems, Christianity and Islam, could serve the cause of black emancipation. How useful had they been in the past? How useful could they be in the future? Blyden's pragmatic, selective, approach to the two cases of institutionalized religion in West Africa is subjected to scrutiny.