Edward and his sister Amina were raised by their mother, Isa Cleopatra Blyden and their Liberian grandmother, Anna Espadon Erskine,[1] who were both headmistresses of primary schools in the Muslim communities of Foulah Town and Fourah Bay, even though the family were active members of the Zion Methodist Church, Wilberforce Street.

After the Second World War, Blyden, was invited to continue his education at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in the United States where his grandfather had received an honorary doctorate.

Promoting the view that a newly independent Sierra Leone would not be well served by the fractious nature of party politics, he galvanised his followers with the Movement's signature call and response: "What's the Word?

He argued with considerable vigour and wit that the country was not ripe for party politics and it was in this faith that he created the officially 'non-party' Sierra Leone Independence Movement.

It is improbable, however that this interminable monologuist, whom the Vanguard saluted ironically on his departure for trying to teach a country politics by the book will receive any acclaim from the hard-bitten realists who have now joined together.

Blyden was able to expose the student body to a wide spectrum of international scholars, including William Leo Hansberry, Arnold Toynbee, Basil Davidson, Leopold Senghor and others.

At the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1966, Blyden and his family moved to Freetown, where he became Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Director of African studies at Fourah Bay College (the University of Sierra Leone).

First and foremost, Blyden considered himself a teacher, and strove to imbue a generation of bright young men and women with the knowledge, principles and self-confidence needed to guide Africa in a Post-Colonial world.

Among them are essays by such distinguished authorities as Edward Blyden III, Jane Degras, Herbert Dinerstein, Rupert Emerson, Walter Laqueur, Choh-Ming Li, and Richard Löwenthal.

Leading students like Padmore, Shepperson, Fyfe, Hargreaves, and Dike have been unanimous in pointing to an intimate interconnection between the ideas of pan-Africanism and African neutralism and non-alignment.

Under the presidency of Siaka Stevens, Blyden was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from Sierra Leone to the Soviet Union, and accredited to Romania, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Another surprise for Blyden was his meeting with former Harvard classmate, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, during President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to Moscow; both of them now on the world stage.

While accredited to Eastern Europe, he orchestrated three successful state visits to Sierra Leone by Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Premier Alexei Kosygin of the Soviet Union, and Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania.

[14][15] On his return from the UN, Blyden served as Special Adviser to the President, and played an active role during the 1980 OAU Summit in Sierra Leone, at which he was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal by the visiting U.N. Secretary General.