USA Africa Dialogue Series - To Dr. Tracy Flemming , re- “Edward Wilmot Blyden's Travels in Africa”

Dear Tracy,

Your manuscript in motion "Edward Wilmot Blyden's Travels in Africa"
is undoubtedly going to be blessed with a wide readership once it gets
published.

Inevitably, the generation which knew Edward Wilmot Blyden - the
generation on whom his influence was strongest and the generation
immediately after him has largely passed away, but there are genetic
and ideological descendants of the great man, even today in Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, the Gambia, the Caribbean, the Africa
Diaspora West in general....

I met the charismatic Edward Blyden III a couple of times – and
Babatunde Edward Blyden IV who is still with us and very much of a
Christian gentleman was the president of the Excelsior Fraternity to
which I was nominated by Amir Bahloo, an Indian student of Economics
from Kenya and so became a member in my freshman year. ( Amir thought
that I would be something because at the beginning of term Student
debate I had championed the cause that university rules should be
permissive and not compulsory. He himself was a strict disciplinarian
and I suspect that he thought that Excelsior would have some benign
disciplinary influence on me. However, I did succeed in bringing about
the abolition of the hundred year old tradition of wearing academic
gowns to lectures and dinner jackets to Friday dinners, and this was
accomplished during my very first term. Where there is a will there is
a way, and of course, the pen is mightier than the sword, once you put
your mind to it.)

When I last met Babatunde (in 1966) he was still a very charismatic
orator, perhaps a genetic transmission of the type that we find in
Middle Eastern & North African dictatorships in which the
presidency tends to be transmitted, genetically, from farther to son
and if it's a long unbroken line, from great grandfather to son. There
are also those ( like my good friend George Preston ( African Art) who
gladly respond to the title "Papa Doc," after acquiring a reputable
Ph.D. in the given subject.

Babatunde Edward Blyden is currently living in London, is one of my
facebook friends and I'm going to call him up and present him with the
proposition of linking up with , if you think that it's a good idea.
I'm sure that he must have some thoughts about Edward Wilmot Blyden
I's journeys in Africa, and this is whether you have finished writing
the book or not ….if you haven't yet put on the finishing touches to
it, I'm sure that Babatunde would have an idea or two about his
progenitor's travels in Africa....

Best Regards,

Cornelius Hamelberg

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