Africanus Horton

Africanus Horton

Africanus Horton
Born James Beale Horton
1835
Gloucester Village, Sierra Leone
Died 1883
Nationality Sierra Leonean
Period 19th Century
Literary movement African Nationalism, Pan-Africanism

Africanus Horton (1835–1883), also known as James Beale, was a Creole African nationalist writer and an esteemed medical surgeon in the British Army from Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Africanus Horton was a surgeon, scientist, soldier, and a political thinker who worked toward African independence a century before it occurred. In his varied career, he served as a physician, an officer in the British Army, a banker, and a mining entrepreneur. In addition, he wrote a number of books and essays, the most widely remembered of which is his 1868 Vindication of the African Race, an answer to the white racist authors emerging in Europe. His writings look ahead to African self-government, anticipating many events of the 1950s and 1960s, and Horton is often seen as one of the founders of African nationalism.

He wrote a book entitled West African Countries and Peoples (1868). A crater on Mercury is named after him.

Life

Horton was born in the village of Gloucester, close to Freetown in Sierra Leone. He was born James Horton[1] in 1935 to the family James Horton; his father was a recaptive slave of Igbo ancestry. Horton began his studies at a local school in Gloucester and in 1845, he was recruited by Reverend James Beale to attend CMS Grammar School.[2] Thereafter, he moved to Fourah Bay Institution (later Fourah Bay College)[3] to study divinity in the hope of becoming a clergyman.[4] In 1855, along with William Davies and Samuel Campbell and he received a British War Office scholarship to study medicine in Great Britain. He studied at King's College London and Edinburgh University, qualifying as a medical doctor in 1859. While a student, he took the name "Africanus" as an emblem of pride in his African homeland.[5] He published his dissertation, The Medical Topography of the West Coast of Africa in 1858. Upon completion of his studies at Edinburgh, he was commissioned as an officer in the British Army and was made a Staff Assistant Surgeon becoming one of the earliest Africans in the officer cadre of the British Army. When he returned to Sierra Leone, he was posted to service in Ghana in the West India Regiment. In his army career he was posted to various locations within the British colony, including Lagos, the Gambia, Sierra Leone and Ghana.[6]

Politics and writings

Horton's first two publications: the Political Economy of British West Africa:with the Requirements of Several Colonies and Settlements and West African Countries and Peoples was a defense of Africans against racist views of some European anthropologists that Africans were a physically and intellectually inferior people whose development stopped centuries ago.[7] He argued that all races have the faculty to acquire knowledge about philosophy, science and technologies that civilizations have developed over the ages.[8] In another of his publications, a compilation of letters called Letters of the Political Condition of the Gold Coast since the exchange of territory, Horton wrote about hostilities between ethnic groups in the Gold Coast and offered his views about solving the hostilities including the continuation of education in Africa.

Horton was one of the first West Africans to demand the establishment of a medical school and higher institution in the region. In 1861, he wrote a letter to the War Office in London, stating the need of a tropical medical school in the region.[9]

After his retirement from the army, Horton stated a finance institution called the Commercial Bank of West Africa.

Personal life

Horton married on two different occasions while living in Freetown; he first married Fanny Marietta Pratt, daughter of the prominent Pratt family of Igbo origin. Marietta died at age twenty two and Horton then on May 29, 1875, went on to marry Selina Beatrice Elliot (1851–1910) daughter of John Bucknor Elliot who was the manager of the Western Area of Freetown. The Elliots were a Nova Scotian settler family of African-American descent.

References

  1. ↑ Adi (2003), pp. 86.
  2. ↑ Adi (2003), pp. 86.
  3. ↑ Edwards, Paul; Paul Geoffrey Edwards; David Dabydeen (1991). Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890: An Anthology. Edinburgh University Press. p. 185. ISBN 0-7486-0327-1.
  4. ↑ Adi (2003), pp. 86.
  5. ↑ Nwauwa, Apollos (1999). "Far Ahead of his Time: James Africanus Horton's Initiatives for a West African University and his Frustration". Cahiers d'Études Africaines 39 (153): 107–121. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  6. ↑ Adi (2003), pp. 87.
  7. ↑ Adeloye (1976), pp. 4.
  8. ↑ Martin, Guy. African Political Thought. New York, US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 April 2016. P. 48
  9. ↑ Adeloye (1976), pp. 4.

Sources


Further reading

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