Review of Christopher Fyfe's "Africanus Horton"

by

Paul Conton

Apart from his seminal works (A History of Sierra Leone and Sierra Leone Inheritance) this was Fyfe's only other book on Sierra Leone and probably his least known. His subject too is not well known in the pantheon of Sierra Leone Krio heroes. Peters, Crowther, Ezzidio, Lewis, to name but a few all have commanded far more attention in the popular imagination. A writer and historian of Fyfe's quality must have seen something special in his story.

As one would expect, the story (for in Fyfe's style, this is what it is, as much as a history) is meticulously researched. As he gives us Horton's early background and environment, Fyfe summarizes, in a few sentences for each, the life and work of all the people who had an early influence on the young boy from Gloucester village in the mountains above Freetown. From his father to his village pastor to his teachers and principal at the CMS Grammar School, not forgetting the Chief Justice who awarded Freetown boys, including Horton, scholarships, on to his lecturers and principal at the Fourah Bay Christian Institution, forerunner of Fourah Bay College, not forgetting the Governors who ruled during this period, on to his lecturers at medical college and the CMS Honorary Secretary in London, who took Horton under his wing, Fyfe knows them all and reveals in brief, casual asides what we need to know to fully understand Horton's story. The early chapters of this book reveal Fyfe at his best, and one suspects at his most comfortable, not just as a historian but as a storyteller, a sociologist and a psychologist. Not to downplay the fact that he has a pretty good turn of phrase into the bargain!

As we follow Horton through his primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, Fyfe dissects the quality of education he receives, particularly examining the credentials of the teachers and lecturers providing that education and the reputation and quality of the institutions themselves. Throughout he finds educators of quality. Missionaries at Gloucester, where Horton did his primary schooling, during the 1830s included the Reverend James Schon and the Reverend C. F. Schlenker, "distinguished pioneers in African linguistic research." Horton's secondary schooling at the CMS Grammar School in Freetown was guided by the Principal, Reverend James Peyton, "deeply concerned with character-training and with supervising the boys' behaviour" and "two very competent Creole teachers", Daniel Carroll and James Quaker.  After the Grammar School, at the CMS Fourah Bay Institution (later Fourah Bay College), "Horton just missed being taught by Sigismund Koelle, one of the most famous of all African language scholars". At King's College in London, where Horton began his medical training, several of his teachers were "men of some medical distinction" and again at Edinburgh, where Horton did his doctorate his professors were "men of some distinction" including "Sir James Young Simpson, who laid the foundation of modern gynaecology and was the first surgeon to use chloroform in operations."  In all of this Fyfe is addressing an unspoken question: Was Horton's success mere white tokenism? Was he merely pushed up the ladder of medical professional advancement to pay lip service to the idea of black equality perhaps or perhaps simply to save the high costs of recruiting British doctors to work in West Africa and the high associated mortality? Could this son of a recaptive, dragged naked from the African hinterland and replanted in the bush high above Freetown, illiterate and destitute, could this young man really have been competent enough to sit in medical school with the elite of Kings College, Britain, the then center of world learning and power?

Horton graduated with an MD from Edinburgh in 1859 and in that same year he was commissioned, together with his colleague and fellow Krio, William Broughton-Davies, into the British Army. Writing about the prejudice and resentment Horton faced during his career in the army, Fyfe is fearless in his criticism of the white British establishment. On page 42 he blasts his country: "An axiom of the European empires of race in Africa (and the British Empire during the nineteenth century grew steadily more race-conscious) was the belief that only a white man could command respect from non-white subordinates" and a page later he is equally scathing about the religious establishment, "Here spoke another missionary voice...determined to keep in lowly places those they were purporting to raise."  The reviewer can not help but wonder about Fyfe himself. What resentment might he have faced from the establishment for being so forthright in his assessments? How might this have affected his later career? After all, the historian depends greatly on the goodwill of the very same establishment for access to research materials  and, sometimes, research funding. Although he is reported to have maintained a close interest in Sierra Leone until his death, disappointingly this was Fyfe's last book on Sierra Leone, an area in which he had a vast reservoir of knowledge. It was published in 1972 and he lived till 2008. Could he perhaps have been frustrated by a resentful establishment in subsequent publishing efforts?

Fyfe has been accused of being a Krio-phile. In truth, he could more accurately be regarded as an African cheer leader, deeply sceptical of his fellow Britons' motives in West Africa. He is rarely critical of his African subjects, even when, as frequently happens, he is constrained to report that they were spending most of their time fighting each other. Upon commissioning into the British Army, Horton is posted first to the Gold Coast, where he ultimately spends most of his career, and then to other stations in British West Africa. He becomes a senior figure within the British colonial service in West Africa. We follow Horton on his postings in the Gambia and Ghana, where as a senior military officer and sometimes commandant, he is active in pacifying internecine African conflicts. In describing British interventions in Africa, Fyfe occasionally allows his liberalism to get the better of him, as when he comments (p. 129)

Notwithstanding the occasional subjectivity, Fyfe is all-encompassing in his investigations of his subject. Did  he buy a house? Check among the dusty old files in the registrar-general's office in Freetown. His name should show up in the book of conveyances there. Did he marry? Again the registrar-general should have a record of it. Did he leave a will? Perhaps in England, where he had property. The book of Wills in London should show it. Now where was he buried? Circular Road Cemetery? Let's take a look and see if we can find him there. Aha, and who is this lying beside him? What can we find out about her?

The middle part of the book is taken up by Horton's writings. By the time he was forty he had eight published works to his credit. This would be noteworthy from any individual let alone one who had such humble origins. Fyfe finds much merit in his writing and spends considerable time discussing it. Inevitably, much of Horton's writing has lost its relevance. He was forced to spend time repudiating racist theories that had then taken hold in Europe. His medical work was based on the knowledge of the day, some of which was mistaken, and all of which has been greatly expanded today. Even Fyfe, in discussing Horton's 1874 book, The Diseases of Tropical Climates and Their Treatment, is forced to concede (p. 123), "Horton had produced a practical comprehensive work. No doubt it was of value to contemporary practitioners. But its theoretical assumptions were soon outdated. Within a few decades...his contributions - his correlation of soil, climate and disease, or his ozone theory - would appear irrelevant, if not laughable, to a generation that no longer believed malaria and cholera were caused by bad air." But, Fyfe argues, the mere fact of a black African in the 1870s, son of slaves, researching these topics, consulting all the known authorities of the day, drawing on his own professional experience and then putting his knowledge in print in a detailed, systematic way was revolutionary and illuminating.

Horton's writings were not confined to medical topics. He had a bold vision for the development of his region, West Africa. In his political treatise, West African Countries and Peoples, he proposed structures for the advancement and self-government of the West Coast of Africa. He envisaged independent states in Sierra Leone, the Gambia, the Gold Coast and Nigeria, albeit in the fragmented, abridged forms corresponding to the actual territories over which Britain then held sway. This was in the wake of the 1865 UK parliamentary recommendations to dispose of the UK's West African territiories with the possible exception of Sierra Leone.  He spent much time in the Gold Coast and worked closely with the Fanti Confederation to devise a Constitution and political structure for the coastal areas of the country. All Horton's political work came to nought, though, as the 1865 recommendations were eventually forgotten, and the British government eventually moved in the opposite direction, consolidating its colonies for the next eighty or ninety years rather than relinquishing them. Fyfe argues that he was a pioneer of West African nationalism, even though history has tended to neglect this side of him.

Also interested in geology, Horton spends time investigating the mineralogy of parts of the Gold Coast and subsequently acquires numerous  mining concessions  and land upon which to  build a  railway for transport of minerals.

Notwithstanding his other interests, Horton's medical career continues apace. He eventually spends twenty years in the British Army, rises to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and becomes head of the Army Medical Department in the Gold Coast. He eventually takes early retirement (along with his colleague Broughton-Davis) in 1880 and returns to Freetown to pursue business activities which include establishing and managing a commercial bank. By this time, after substantial remunerations from his medical career, he is a wealthy man. He and his family live in a mansion, Horton Hall, "a centre of Freetown society",  and he returns from a trip to England with an English maid. The end, however, is tragic. Death strikes suddenly and early, at 48, in his prime. His will reveals great wealth, but it slowly dissipates through legal tussles, business downturns and a lack of established heirs in Freetown. In life he was dedicated to his country and his region, but in death his surviviors, his wife and daughters, eventually move away to other regions. Horton Hall is sold to the government.

Fyfe brings to light a remarkable story of accomplishment from the humblest of beginnings. As he knew all too well, it demolishes the narrative of white supremacy that was to later take hold within  the colonial government, epitomized by the creation of a separate African Medical Service for blacks in 1902, and that retarded West African progress by fifty or sixty years.