Edward Wilmot Blyden III (19 May 1918 – 10 October 2010) was a diplomat, political scientist and educator born in Freetown Sierra Leone Protectorate. He distinguished himself as an educator and contributor to post-colonial discourse on African self-government, and Third World non-alignment. He was the grandson of Edward Wilmot Blyden. Early years Edward Wilmot Blyden III was born Edward Wilmot Abioseh Blyden-Taylor on 19 May 1918, to Isa Cleopatra Blyden and Joseph Ravensburg Taylor, a Creole, in the "Baimbrace" neighbourhood of Freetown. As an infant, he suffered the effects of rickets brought on by malnutrition in the wake of the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic. While this affected his ability to walk in early childhood it was not a lasting disability. Edward and his sister Amina were raised by their mother, Isa Cleopatra Blyden and their Liberian grandmother, Anna Espadon Erskine, 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. He attended the Ebenezer Amalgamated Primary School. He attended the Wesleyan Methodist Boys High School and, after graduating, matriculated at Fourah Bay College. He worked as a teacher and briefly for the Sierra Leone Railway during the early 1940s. His earliest published essays on African education and colonialism date back to these years. Student years in America 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. He graduated from Lincoln in 1948 with an A.B. degree and matriculated at Harvard University, where he earned M.A., MEd degrees in Education and began research for a PhD in Political Science. The subject of his doctoral thesis was the pattern of constitutional change and emergence of African political thought in the twentieth century. During this period, he met with Edith Holden granddaughter of John Pray Knox with whom Blyden's family had longstanding historical connections and with whom he later worked on the definitive biography of his grandfather Edward Wilmot Blyden. In 1950 he met and married Amelia Elizabeth Kendrick a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Boston University. Politics and the Sierra Leone Independence Movement Blyden interrupted his graduate studies in 1954 to return to Sierra Leone where he took up a position as head of Extra Mural Studies at Fourah