west african countries and peoples

Contents

Introduction page [ vit J

WEST AFRICAN COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES Preface PART I. The Negro’s Place in nature

Description of the Original and Uncivilized State of the Native Tribes

PART II. African Nationality

General Observations : Self-government of the Gambia Self-government of Sierra Leone : Kingdom of Sierra Leone Self-government of the Gold Coast

Self-government of the Gold Coast : Kingdom of Fantee Self-government of the Gold Coast : Republic of Accra

Self-government of Lagos and its Interior Countries ; Kingdom of the Akus

Empire of the Eboes [v]

ay}

65 81 96 113

138 154

14 15 16

CONTENTS

PART III. Reguirements of the Various Colonies and Settlements Requirements of Sierra Leone

Requirements of Lagos; Some Remarks on the Republic of Liberia

Concluding Remarks; Advice to the Rising Generation in West Africa.

Portrait of Horton, facing iii. Map, at end.

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GEORGE SHEPPERSON

1. Reasons for Reprinting

Why does James Africanus Beale Horton’s West African Countries and Peoples deserve to be reprinted and read a century after it was written? Why should it not be left to rest, the casual observer might say, with the other literary ephemera of the Victorian age; to be disturbed, if at all, only by the occasional historical researcher?

The immediate rejoinder that can be made to these questions is that the book can be included amongst literary ephemera only by those who are unaware of, or hostile to, Africa and its history. For over three generations of West African intellectuals, Horton’s work has been a classic, hard to come by,-which speaks to them in no uncertain terms of their past, present and future. And, indeed, even if it could be called ephemeral, it should still commend itself to the modern vogue of Victorian studies, for its author was that rare creature, a literate, black Victorian, moving between the two worlds of the old, agrarian Africa and the new, brassy Britain of triumphant industrialism. Furthermore, if for no other reason, West African Countries and Peoples deserves to be reprinted because, at a time of a pronounced acceleration of interest in African studies, it is sought after by very much more than the occasional historical researcher.

There are, however, other and better reasons for drawing the attention of the modern reader to this book. Above all, it is the major work of a highly interesting human being. It is a source-book of West African history rivalled only on the contemporary scene by the writings of Horton’s friend, Edward Blyden.t And West African Countries and Peoples is acontribution to African political science — or, if it is preferred, to political science for Africa; and, as its subtitle ‘A Vindication of the African Race’ indicates, Horton’s book is a spirited reply to the conceptualization of white supremacy and to racist theories of society.

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2. Life and Work

James Africanus Beale Horton was born on ist June, 1835, at Gloucester village, near Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the colony for freed slaves which the British had established on the West African coast in 1787. Twenty years later, Great Britain had made the slave trade illegal for British subjects. The result was a hectic chase by the Navy to liberate Negroes who had been thrust on to slave ships for the humiliating ‘Middle Passage’ across the Atlantic Ocean to the plantations of the New World. Horton’s father was one of these black men who had been snatched from slavery. He came originally, as so many of the slaves did, from the Ibo country of West Africa; and, like many of them, was brought to Sierra Leone for liberation. He became a staunch convert to Christianity, set to work as a carpenter and took the _ name of ‘Horton’ from a British Christian missionary. His son James was named after him.

To James Africanus Beale Horton, the liberated African settlers of Sierra Leone were the salt of the earth; and he quoted approvingly in his major work (p. 193) the remarks of the great British missionary, Henry Venn, to whom it was dedicated, that, to their industry and enterprise, Sierra Leone and other parts of the West African coast were deeply indebted.

Industry and enterprise were certainly characteristics of Horton’s own life. He took full advantage of the educational system which the Church Missionary Society, the Wesleyans and men like Henry Venn were creating in Sierra Leone. It was a system that seems meagre by modern standards; but, before Horton was born, it had established in the new British West African possession the structure of an educational progression from elementary to secondary school and college which probably gave bright children of the poor greater opportunities than in contemporary England. The young James Horton climbed all the rungs of this Sierre Leonean educational ladder.

He went first to the village school in Gloucester, where he attracted the notice of an English missionary, the Reverend James Beale, whose name as well as advice James Horton followed. Through Beale’s help, he went in 1847 to the Church Missionary Society Grammar School in Freetown where he spent four years following its curriculum which included Greek, Latin, mathematics, geography, the Bible, English history, astronomy and music*® —a mélange of subjects which is reflected in the miscellaneous learning that Horton displayed in West African

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Countries and Peoples, a feature of which is the assurance with which he handles classical quotations. In 1851, James Beale Horton was transferred to the Fourah Bay Institution in Freetown to study for the Christian ministry. It was this Institution that was subsequently to become the Fourah Bay College and the University of Sierra Leone: a transition to which Horton himself was to make a notable contribution.

He spent two years at the Fourah Bay Institution. And then came the great moment in his life which was to affect not only his personal future but also that of the embryonic nationalism of West Africa: he was sent to Britain to be trained as a doctor of medicine.

The mid-nineteenth century, in spite of all the confident European belief in Progress, was the period of the ‘white man’s grave’ in West Africa. The death rate amongst European doctors on the Coast determined the British War Office to train suitable Africans as Medical Officers to serve with the Imperial garrisons in West Africa. Three young Africans who had just completed their courses at the Fourah Bay Institution were selected for this purpose; and Horton was one of them. Hesailed to Britain tospend five years at King’s College, London, where he took his MRCS in 1858, and a year at Edinburgh University where he graduated MD on Ist August, 1859.4

To spend five years as an African student in the capitals of England and Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century must have been a sobering as well as a stimulating experience. There were few Africans studying in Britain at that time, although there were a number of black American expatriates in British schools and colleges. Those who were not lionized by hostesses of British society as representatives of the down-trodden slaves of the United States-—a process which was prompted as much by upper-class anti-Americanism as by sympathy with the blacks — were left severely alone. Or, if they were disturbed they were seized on by the emerging white, ‘scientific’ racists as the exceptions that proved the rule that, as the Edinburgh anatomist, Robert Knox, put it, ‘the true black or negro race seems to have attained its ultimatum centuries ago’.® How Horton fared in this overseas society can only be inferred from his writings, for few records remain of his five years in Britain.

After he had graduated at Edinburgh, Horton went back home towards the end of 1859 and was commissioned in the Army for service in West Africa only, with the rank of Staff Assistant Surgeon. His first post was at Anamboe in the Gold Coast. In his twenty years with the

Army medical service, from which he retired with the rank of Lieutenant-General, Horton worked not only in the Gold Coast but also in most parts of British West Africa from the Senegal boundary to the Bight of Benin. He thus became one of the first African doctors and one of the first regular Army officers—a singular distinction, for Britain was to commission very few Africans indeed in the next eighty years. Horton’s was a busy and tiring life. He was moved from station to station on the West Coast with bewildering rapidity. It has been suggested that the reason for this was the prejudice which the presence of a highly educated and talented black man evoked amongst the small and introverted groups of whites at or near his various stations.®

Frequent changes of climate and condition, stress and overwork did not leave Horton untouched; and he died on 15th October, 1882, at the early age of 48. And yet, in the twenty-three years after his return from Britain, Horton found time not only to do his full military duty—and he made contributions to the administration and defence of Britain’s growing empire in West Africa as well as to its medical services—but also to write seven books and pamphlets, and numerous articles and letters to the papers; to press for a university for British West Africa; to toy with politics; to marry two wives; to visit London again twice; and, in the last eighteen months of his life, to enter business in the hope of founding a commercial bank in West Africa and of developing gold-mining concessions.

The bewildering range of Horton’s activities reflects itself in the extent and character of his writings. His first book was the publication of his Edinburgh MD thesis: The Medical Topography of the West Coast of Africa; with sketches of its botany (London, 1859). It was the prelude to three other medical studies: Physical and medical climate and meteorology of the West Coast of Africa (London, 1867); Guinea worm, or dracunculus, its symptoms and progress, causes, pathological anatomy, results and radical cure (London, 1868); and The diseases of tropical climate and their treatment (London, 1874).

Horton’s first book, however, contains political as well as medical elements; and it indicates that political ideas about the future of West Africa had been infusing his thought as he wrote his thesis at Edinburgh. These were to be developed further in a pamphlet entitled Political Economy of British Western Africa; with the requirements of the several colonies and settlements (the African view of the Negro’s place in nature). Being an address to the African Aid Society (London, 1865): in West African Countries and Peoples (London, 1868): and in Letters on the Political Condition of the Gold Coast since the exchange of territory between the English and Dutch Governments on Fanuary 1, 1868, together with a short account of the Ashantee War, 1862-4, and the Awoonah War, 1866 ; addressed to the Right Hon. E. Cardwell, D.C.L., Secretary of State for War; and the Right Hon. Earl Granville, K.G., D.C.L., Secretary of State for the Colonies (London, 1870).

Horton’s pamphlet of 1865, Political Economy of British Western Africa, is the sketch that, in an expanded form, became three years later West African Countries and Peoples. Much of it appears, word for word, in the larger work. An interesting dissertation could be written on the manner in which Horton incorporated the pamphlet into the book: what he took literally from it; what he abbreviated: and what he added. Two of the most interesting additions which appear in West African Countries and Peoples, sandwiched between verbatim extracts from the pamphlet, support Horton’s growing feelings about European injustice to Africans and his belief that most of their shortcomings in the scale of universal values were due to environmental influences. The first (p. 24) he had acquired from a study of the career of the pioneer British abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson. It was the declaration of the Emperor of Russia that ‘Africa ought to be allowed a fair chance of raising her character in the scale of the civilized world’, a quotation of which Horton thought so highly that he put it on the title-page of his book, where it stands as the /ezt-motiv of his whole study. And the second addition was Horton’s use of pro-African quotations (pp. 45, 47, 58 and 60) from the remarkable book on the black man’s potentialities by the Leeds abolitionist, Wilson Armistead, A Tribute for the Negro: being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Coloured Portion of Mankind; with Particular Reference to the African Race (Manchester, 1848). Horton seems to have become aware of Armistead’s work after he had written Political Economy of British Western Africa; and it is likely that its subtitle supplied him with the inspiration for his own subtitle, ‘A Vindication of the African Race’. Strangely enough, there are no references in Horton’s pamphlet to British abolitionists such as Clarkson and Armistead, which makes one wonder whether Horton never had the time to look at their writings during his college days in Britain because he was working so hard at his medical studies—it is claimed that he worked fourteen hours a day when he was a student at Edinburgh’ —and in the early part of his Army career. It is, incidentally, a piece of circumstantial evidence which suggests that Horton never came under abolitionist influences in Britain,

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although his student days were in the years just before the American Civil War when anti-slavery agitations were the vogue.

This is only one of the many intriguing little mysteries about the relationship between Horton’s Political Economy of British Western Africa and his West African Countries and Peoples. What, however, is far less intriguing about their relationship is that, broadly speaking, by arranging the book around much of the text of the pamphlet, there is frequently a scissors-and-paste air about it; and sometimes the threads of quotations which are held in the pamphlet are lost in the book. The result can often be confusing; and West African Countries and Peoples frequently bears the character of a series of notes or of a report drawn up hurriedly and in staccato fashion.

But there are compensating features: Horton’s human sympathies; his fascinating idiosyncracies; the range of his information and recommendations; and, at times, his style.

Horton’s style is compounded of the mode of expression of the military report, the politician, the after-dinner speaker, the businessman and the belletrist: all of these features, of course, reflecting his complex career; so that, of James Africanus Beale Horton, it may be said without exaggeration, the style was the man.

3. West African Source-book

It is against this background of Horton the man that the undoubted value of West African Countries and Peoples as a source-book of West African history must be estimated. Horton was aware of his talents and capabilities; but he was equally conscious of the forces of white prejudice, colonialism and African underdevelopment which held back their full realization. And yet, as he wrote his pamphlet, The Political Economy of British Western Africa, and went on to publish his book on West Africa, he had been encouraged by an event which seemed to promise greater prospects for men like him and their countries. This was the publication in 1865 of the recommendations of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Africa (Western Coast) which declared that the object of British policy in West Africa ‘should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to transfer to them the administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate withdrawal from all, except, probably, Sierra Leone’. So long as trade could operate without impediment in the area, the British Government saw no reason fomict for the expensive extension of the Empire in West Africa. It was a situation which filled Horton with hope; and he believed that it ‘ought to form an important step in the advance of African history’ (p. 20). Had he lived even a few years beyond his early death in 1882, he would have witnessed the partition of Africa amongst the Powers of Europe and a reversal of the recommendations of the Select Committee. But, in the period of Horton’s life, apart from the British acquisition of the old Dutch forts on the Gold Coast in 1871, little happened to change his opinion that British rule was a beneficent force, preparing to bestow upon the Africans under its charge, relatively rapidly, the blessings of self-government.

With this prospect in mind, Horton set out to describe the political, economic and social situations of those areas of the West African coast which had come under British rule or influence. His picture of them had its limitations. It did not reach far into the hinterland; and Horton was, consequently, uncertain when dealing with questions of Islamic civilization in the interior. To him, civilization was the application to West Africa of European learning, technology and religion. Unlike Edward Blyden, Horton did not see Islam as a civilizing factor. There was even something of the contemporary Euro-American ‘ Dark Continent’ perspective in his view of Africa beyond the coast; and, when it seemed necessary to him, Horton was prepared to suggest to a future African coastal monarch annexation of neighbouring territory (p. 90). Furthermore, there was little cultural relativism in Horton’s appreciation of the local mores; and he subscribed to the conventional, rigid Victorian code of morals which often rendered him incapable of appreciating the functional social context of African marital and sexual customs (pp. 52, 100).

But, in spite of these limitations, Horton’s description of the West Africa he knew in the second and third parts of his book is important for all students of African history. It is based on the observations of an educated and sensitive man whose profession forced him to travel widely in the Gambia, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Lagos regions. And where his knowledge was the weakest (in, for example, the Niger regions) he could draw upon the experience of his fellow educated Sierra Leoneans who, like himself, were scattered across West Africa in important positions in the Church, the Army, trade and education.

Horton’s description of West Africa was the basis for his elaborate schemes for the extension of local self-government and the achievement of national independence across English-speaking West Africa. They

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were proposals which captured the imagination of African nationalists of his day and later, and of which modern historians, white as well as black, have spoken with respect and admiration.*®

Their strength, however, lay as much in Horton’s immediate, local knowledge as in his long-range political vision. And from both of these elements comes the documentary value of his book for modern students of Africa who can find in it material not only for detailed local history but also for the appreciation of the beginnings of modern political thought in Africa.

4. Horton’s Political Science

The fascination and power of the idea of nationality and the nation-state dominated the political thinking of white men in the mid-nineteenth century; and it is not surprising that black men who wished to hold their heads up in the world should be similarly obsessed by these conceptions. As that remarkable black American visitor to West Africa who signed a treaty with the Egba chiefs in 1859, Dr Martin Robison Delany, declared, ‘The claims of no people are respected until they are presented in a national capacity’.® James Africanus Beale Horton agreed heartily with this sentiment; and in his West African Countries and Peoples there is an extended and discursive essay on nationality and the nation-state in Africa, particularly the West Coast.

He set out his aims clearly in his first chapter: ‘to prove the capability of the African for possessing a real political government and national independence’ (p. 3); and ‘to develop amongst these different nationalities a true political science’ (p. 4). Although Horton was trained primarily in medicine, he was well qualified for such an exercise. The Sierra Leone educational environment of his day produced political thinkers: one of Horton’s schoolmates, for example, was the pioneer West African nationalist, Bishop James Johnson of the Niger Delta Pastorate.1° Horton was aware of other African nationalist thinkers such as the great Edward Blyden; and his contributions to, and connections with, the pro-African newspaper produced in Britain, The African Times, and its lively editor, Ferdinand Fitzgerald, stimulated his political thinking. Horton travelled widely, across several distinct African cultures; and he read widely, as the disparate sources quoted in his book indicate. It was good equipment and experience for an early exercise in African political science.

Although Horton’s theorization often has to be extracted from his

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descriptive or exhortatory prose, it runs throughout his book. A refreshing feature of it is Horton’s refusal to be bound by the rigid dichotomy of nation and tribe, nationalism and tribalism, which has dominated and distorted so much modern political thought on Africa, by blacks as well as whites, in the immediate post-colonial period. The ascription of ‘tribe’ rather than ‘nation’ to large groups of African peoples, with complex political and social institutions, such as the Yoruba or the Ibo, was foreign to Horton’s way of thinking. He appreciated that West Africa before the coming of the European was ‘not a frontierless society’.1! To Horton, it was ‘composed of a number of political communities, each ruled by a national government, formed in many cases of distinct nationalities occupying determined territory’ (p. 4).

In neglecting the indiscriminate use of the term ‘tribe’ for African societies which might more appropriately be called ‘nations’, Horton did not fall into the counter-fallacy of the invariable use of the term ‘nation’. He would, when it suited his purpose, employ the word ‘tribe’. When referring, for example, to those West African peoples who would be called today the Yoruba, Horton writes (p. 146) that ‘the tribes included within this territorial definition, although they differ from one another in interest and religion, form one nation, speaking the same language, having identical customs and usages’. Or, to give another example, Horton writes (p. 172), when speaking of those peoples who would be designated today the Ibo, ‘the Egboe nationality is divided into numerous independent tribes, governed by their own laws, but having one national sentiment’.

Recognizing the complexity, the diversity as well as the unity amongst West African peoples under the influence of English-speaking countries, Horton’s problem—granted his premise that they ought to move towards national independence in the modern, ‘civilized’ worldwas to sort them out into effective political units. For this purpose, he was not restricted by the modern vogue for republicanism and by a horror of the term ‘empire’; but he felt free, when it suited him, to suggest monarchical as well as republican forms of government, and to use the word ‘empire’ for those African societies for which it seemed valid.

Horton believed that the path to national independence in West Africa would be made easier by improving the administration of the black American Republic of Liberia, ‘now recognized by the great Republic of America as an independent nationality’ (p. 244), and by the establishment of six self-governing countries: ‘a native self-sup-

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porting government’ (p. 73) in the Gambia regions; the Kingdom of Sierra Leone; the Kingdom of Fantee and the Republic of Accra in the area of the Gold Coast; the Kingdom of the Akus (Yoruba) and the Empire of the Eboes (Ibo). It was a blue-print for national independence which was not to be completely realized in the future, as a result of the growth of British administration over the Gold Coast and what came to be called Nigeria, and by the retention of the British boundary-lines when these countries, as Ghana and the Federation of Nigeria, became independent in the twentieth century.

But the importance of Horton’s political ideas for West Africa is not in dispute. In the history of his own country of Sierra Leone, he holds a place of honour. Horton was ‘the first to voice national aspirations in the Gold Coast’.1? And, although his ideas did not come to full fruition in Nigeria, he occupies a pioneering position in the origins of its nationalism; and, in spite of the claim that his knowledge of the Ibo was ‘restricted’,!4 it could be argued that, if his proposals for a separate Ibo State had been accepted, much bloodshed and suffering might have been spared in the future.

Horton’s political vision, however, was not confined to West Africa: it has an all-African relevance; and he has a place in the history of pan- Africanism which it is easy to overlook. It is too commonly supposed that, because the first so-called Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900, was organized by black men from America and the West Indies, pan-Africanism was the exclusive creation of Negroes from beyond Africa. But indigenous Africans, half a century before, had also been thinking of the problems of black Africa. Edward Blyden was one; Horton was another.

His pan-Africanism was undoubtedly stimulated, if not created, by his five years abroad as a student. A long period of residence, particularly as a student, away from one’s own country often has the effect of emphasizing its unities rather than its differences; and this may have happened to Horton in his conception of the African and Africa. It appears that, during his stay in Great Britain, he began to call himself ‘Africanus’, not only adding this to his two other first names but also, on occasion, using it in place of them. It is clear from the meagre records that survive of his Scottish student days that Horton had begun to call himself ‘Africanus’ by the time he reached Edinburgh. In both the Matriculation Book of the University and the title-page of his MD thesis he declared himself as ‘James Africanus Beale Horton’; and, as if to emphasize his pride in his African origins, Horton added after his

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name at the front of his thesis ‘native of West Africa’. This Africanist spirit was revealed further in the preface to his published thesis in which he wrote ‘that this Publication may be the means of exciting some interest. . . on behalf of Africa is the sincere wish of AFRICANUS HORTON’.?§ And it will be noted that, while the title page of West African Countries and Peoples bears his full name, Horton signed the preface, as he had done in his Political Economy pamphlet and as he was to do in subsequent writings, simply as ‘Africanus Horton’.

What may have influenced Horton’s pan-African thought more than anything else during his student days in Britain and, certainly, after his return home, was the emergence of pseudo-scientific thought in Europe and America which interpreted society in terms of fixed racial categories in which the Negro was assigned a very lowly place; and its concomitant of Euro-American racial prejudice towards the black man, of which Horton had plenty of experience when he went back to Africa as a fully-qualified doctor and Army officer, and which he might well have had to endure, at least occasionally, during his student days in England and Scotland. That he was familiar with the writings of most of the racially prejudiced nineteenth-century thinkers is clear from the references in his Political Economy of British Western Africa and his West African Countries and Peoples—although it is curious that Joseph Arthur Gobineau’s influential essay on the inequaliyt of human races, a substantial part of which was available in English translation in 1856, is not mentioned by Horton. To the belief of such thinkers that the genius of a race is innate and depends little on environment and period, Horton was utterly opposed. He put forth all his knowledge and powers of persuasion in West African Countries and Peoples to destroy the deeply entrenched idea that the black man was an inferior creature. Horton’s book, indeed, was correctly subtitled ‘A Vindication of the African Race’, for such a vindication was—and is—the essential prerequisite to any effective pan-African movement. To those thinkers such as Robert Knox who envisaged with equanimity the ultimate disappearance of African peoples in the face of white power, Horton declared proudly, ‘We find that wherever the African race has been carried to, except, perhaps, the East Indies, they increase, no matter under what depressing and burdensome yoke they may suffer; from which it may be safely inferred that the African people is a permanent and enduring people; and the fancies of those who had determined their destruction will go in the same limbo as the now almost defunct American slavery’ (p. 69).

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Horton’s greatest contribution to emerging pan-Africanism was, perhaps, his attempt to demonstrate that ‘the African people is a permanent and enduring people’. But he made other contributions to pan-Africanism. While he most certainly did not emphasize the ideas of an African heritage and an African personality as much as Edward Blyden in his attack on the belief that the African was a man with a negligible past, a characterless creature on whom any personality pattern could be stamped by his conquerors, Horton did not neglect these ideas, as the readers of pages 59 to 61 in West African Countries and Peoples will discover.1? And whilst Horton did not share Blyden’s entire antipathy to the mulattoes of Africa, he clearly stressed the enduring power of the unadulterated, indigenous African strains. The intermingling of these strains was the force that would strengthen Africa. An example of this belief is to be found in Horton’s Edinburgh MD thesis, where he wrote, ‘Iboes, Yorubas, Mandingoes, Soosoos, Joloofs, or Yoloohs, Timnehs, Krew and Dahomians .. . by their intermarriages are destined to produce the finest race in Africa’.1®

In spite of all the continent-wide elements in Horton’s proto-pan- Africanism, it is likely, as this quotation suggests, that, had he lived in the period of post-colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century, Horton would have supported that group of pan-Africanists who lay initial emphasis not on the impressing of unity from the top downwards but who believe that enduring concord amongst African peoples can best be built up by the achievement of unity on a regional basis first of all. Into this framework, perhaps, can be fitted Horton’s work for a Fanti Confederation in the Gold Coast, and his proposals for a bank and university for West Africa.