The Athens of West Africa

A History of International Education at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone

Daniel J. Paracka, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135935986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is about Fourah Bay College (FBC) and its role as an institution of higher learning in both its African and international context. The study traces the College's development through periods of missionary education (1816-1876), colonial education (1876-1938), and development education (1938-2001).

PART ONE
Missionary Education, 1787–1875

Christian missionaries of both African and European descent predominated in the development of modern European educational systems in West Africa during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ Freetown, Sierra Leone was founded as the “Province of Freedom” in 1787 by British philanthropists, abolitionists, and African-Americans who had fought on the British side in the American War of Independence. In Sierra Leone, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), originally known as the “Society for Missions to Africa and the East,” founded in England in 1799, took responsibility for establishing schools and hiring instructors. The CMS hired many of Fourah Bay College’s (FBC) early faculty from the United Brethren Mission of Moravia, Germany and the Basel Mission, located in a German speaking region of Switzerland.² European missionaries took responsibility for spreading Western civilization and Christianity. Returned diasporan African missionaries joined them in these endeavors in part to help end the slave trade. The CMS was closely involved with the abolitionist movement. The history of FBC is inextricably bound with that of the CMS.

At the end of the eighteenth century, several different groups of free blacks from Great Britain and the Americas returned to settle in Freetown. They were then joined by large numbers of Africans liberated from slave ships by the British Naval Squadron in the first half of the nineteenth century.³ These groups combined aspects of different African and European cultures into a unique set of customs and culture known today as Krio. More than one hundred years after the founding of Freetown, an American sponsored educational commission described the Krio as “an interesting social group who have exerted considerable influence in the affairs of practically every colony on the West Coast of Africa.”⁴ Their influence has commanded attention and respect far beyond their numerical means. As one scholar has recently concluded:

For the Creoles (descendents of liberated slaves) in particular, the principle of emancipation through education was extremely important in the light of the traumatic experiences of slavery and their determination to rebuild their lives in the “province of freedom” as Freetown came to be known. The Creoles also never lost sight of the fact that the battle against slavery was championed by learned men of the educated and enlightened classes in Britain, or that the eventual abolition of slavery in 1772 was premised on high moral principles and religious convictions and secured through democratic legislation. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the Creoles of the early colonial period manifested an extremely profound and somewhat naive respect for western education and Christian religious values and morality, as well as the democratic process and the rule of law.⁵

The Krio historical perspective, as expressed above, emphasized the role of abolitionists and the importance of education to the development of Sierra Leone.

In the early 1800s, Freetown became a center for the suppression of the slave trade. Abolitionists viewed education and the spread of Christianity as extremely important to ending the slave trade. The abolitionists’ moral arguments for ending the slave trade found support in emerging economic theory that asserted the greater profitability of free labor over slave labor. In addition, the economic interests of the abolitionists themselves had switched from the West Indies to the East Indies.⁶ Skeptics have challenged the motivations of missionaries who were advancing their own moral authority. For example, scholars have noted that although both Sierra Leone and Liberia originated from the philanthropic venture of catering for the welfare of repatriated freed slaves, freed slaves in Europe and America were also viewed as constituting a social problem, hence their emigration back to Africa was encouraged.⁷

Breaking the vicious cycle of violence that had developed through the Atlantic slave trade was no easy undertaking. It took a concerted effort that involved both indigenous and returned diasporan Africans as well as Europeans. The returned diasporan Africans, as former soldiers and seafarers, possessed the awareness and skills needed to help suppress slave trading in the area. They served with the British Naval squadron and even captained some ships.⁸ The Africans rescued by these ships landed in Freetown. Between 1807 and 1840, more than 60,000 Africans arrived in the Liberated African Yard in Freetown.⁹ These “returnees” or “liberated” Africans included people of Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Bambara, Bassa, Congolese, and Ashanti descent. In 1854, German researcher Sigismund Koelle published a collection of vocabularies of some 100 African languages spoken in Freetown.¹⁰ The returned diasporan and European missionary community helped to settle and provide a Western education to these diverse “refugees” of the slave trade.¹¹

Many of the liberated Africans returned to their homelands in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Congo to preach the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Returned diasporan Africans and liberated Africans formed the basis of Krio culture and played an important role in helping indigenous African communities understand the abusive, condescending, and degrading treatment of slaves in the New World. Krio scholar Cream Wright noted: “The existence in colonial Sierra Leone of a group of liberated Africans having unprecedented affinity with British culture provided a platform for cultural penetration, but also acted as a catalyst for the destabilization and rejection of colonial domination.”¹² Another important but less emphasized factor helping to end the slave trade was the significant increase in legitimate trade in products such as palm oil, groundnuts, and ginger.¹³ The role of Africans and liberated African missionaries in ending the slave trade has often taken a back seat to the British explanation that emphasized the role of abolitionists. Owing to its missionary abolitionist roots, FBC faculty, students, and alumni often argued from a moral standpoint. However, the College’s arguments did not always carry sufficient economic or political force to persuade those with power to support its educational mission.

Missionary colonialism was considered a cultural rescue mission.¹⁴ Many of the European missionaries from the Church Missionary Society of England who came to work in West Africa died, primarily due to malaria and often after just a few months stay. According to FBC historian, T.J.Thompson,

The literature dealing with West African problems of undoubted merit, written by West Africans and the popular organ of public opinion in the Settlement in the Seventies [1870s] recognized to the fullest extent, and echoed with genuine admiration the feelings and sentiments of appreciation and gratitude of the West African peoples to the Church Missionary Society for the pre-eminent services it had rendered in the cause of religion, evangelization and education to Liberated Africans and their descendents.¹⁵

Such accolades have been reiterated throughout the history of FBC. For example, Cyril Foray (FBC Principal, 1985–1993) opened his lecture on the sesquincentennial celebration of Fourah Bay College in 1977 by honoring the European missionary role:

It has become fashionable nowadays, particularly among revisionist historians, to make disparaging remarks about the early missionaries and to indulge in the use of the most uncharitable epithets in referring to their plans and policies. For our part we hasten to pay tribute, unqualified and sincere, to the selfless exertions, enterprising zeal, and the noble sacrifices of the Church Missionary Society.¹⁶

In the first half of the 19th century, out of 127 European missionaries sent by the CMS to Sierra Leone, 39 died after an average of two years service, and fifty returned home.¹⁷ From this, we may infer that as many as 38 lived out their lives in Africa, making it their home.

The importance of training Africans who could administer the colonies without succumbing to illness did not go unrecognized by British authorities or Sierra Leoneans interested in increased trade and better employment opportunities. In addition, FBC trained Africans as missionary educators because “interior Chiefs had demonstrated their willingness to be taught, but by members of their race.”¹⁸ Returned African diasporan missionaries did not simply spread Christianity.

Western-educated Africans aided in opening the interior of Africa to European trade. Mission work was as much about developing acceptance for new economic and social organization as it was about religious conversion.¹⁹

Writing in the late twentieth century, American scholar Edward Berman claimed that:

Missionaries, Africans as well as their European mentors, disseminated education neither for its own sake nor to enable Africans to challenge colonial rule. Missionaries established schools because education was deemed indispensable to the main purpose of the Christian denominations—spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ…. The school was used as an inducement to lure Africans into the missionary orbit. Africans were no less averse to using missionaries for their own purposes than the missionaries were for theirs. African reasons for attending mission schools varied, but most were related to well-defined political, social, or economic goals. The recent studies reveal that few Africans attended mission schools for the sake of their eschatological message.²⁰

Christianity like Islam assimilated to the African context.²¹ All of these different perspectives will be examined further throughout Part One.

Chapter One focuses on the role of repatriated diasporan Africans and European missionaries who helped spread Western education and Christianity throughout West Africa. The initial emphasis was on codifying African languages for Bible translations. To accomplish this, linguists codified local languages into Western scripts. The same process had occurred centuries earlier with Arabic. In the early years of the College’s existence, many of the faculty were German missionaries and linguists including John Raban, Frederick Schon, Sigismund Koelle and Charles Reichardt. Reichardt lived and taught at FBC for roughly thirty years. All of the German missionaries made extensive use of African informants for the study of African languages. The College’s first student and graduate, Bishop Samuel Ajai Crowther, exemplified the role. Crowther was a scholar who valued learning and helped establish many schools and churches in Nigeria. He worked closely with all of the German linguists noted above. Crowther, Schon, Koelle, and Reichardt were among the leading linguistic researchers of African languages in the nineteenth century.

In the early 1800’s, diasporan blacks returning to West Africa obtained positions of authority. In Sierra Leone in the 1840’s, they held such positions as Principal of Fourah Bay College and Governor of the Colony. African-American and Afro-Caribbean missionaries who returned to Africa were a force resisting as well as aiding European expansionism. Chapter Two focuses on the role of these diasporan returnees. From 1840 to 1858, an African-American, principal Edward Jones, mentored several outspoken and talented FBC students including James Africanus Horton and James “Holy” Johnson. Horton and Johnson were leading proponents of African self-determination and the need to establish a West African university.

From 1859 to 1864, Fourah Bay College was closed ostensibly due to a lack of qualified students and faculty. Protest over the closing galvanized into public outcry for the development of a West African university. Chapter Three focuses on the West African call for a secular university. The greatest proponent of the West African university was Edward Wilmot Blyden. Originally from the West Indies, Blyden’s views were widely published in West Africa, Great Britain, and the United States. He valued classical education because he felt that it was free of the contemporary “race-poison” that characterized much of the scholarly thinking of the period.²²

A host of Africans educated in Sierra Leone became missionaries, teachers, and clerks employed throughout English speaking West Africa.²³ As noted by one scholar:

Between 1843–1899, the C.M.S. in West Africa was served by 112 “native clergy.” Of these 112 “native clergy,” at least 100 were West Africa-born, and at least 70 were Sierra Leone-born. At least 55, that is roughly one half of all the native clergy, were trained at Fourah Bay…. Of these, at least 55 Fourah Baytrained clergy, at least 40 were Sierra Leone-born…. I...

Table of contents

• AFRICAN STUDIES
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• PART ONE Missionary Education, 1787–1875
• PART TWO Colonial Education, 1876–1937
• PART THREE Development Education, 1938–2001
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index