PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOUR: AFRICAN APOSTLES OF MODERNITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Five years ago, I published a paper titled “On the Misadventures of National Consciousness: A Retrospect on Frantz Fanon’s Gift of Prophecy”, in which I explored the interface between the biblical idea of prophecy and social science predictions. I said there:

The template constructed there will be deployed here for reasons that will become clear presently. But before I set out those reasons, one additional commonality shared by prophecy and social science must be identified. They both arise often from dissent, from heterodoxy, and they usually come as part of a moral vision that the situation of which the prophecy speaks ought to be altered.

Why Prophecy? Why Now?

We begin from the present. The entire continent of Africa, not unlike other parts of the world, is at the present time one huge workshop of social experiments in politics, economics, religion, culture and myriad other areas of life. One frame within which scholars in almost all disciplines interpret contemporary Africa is that of a dichotomy between Africa’s much-vaunted attachment, one is tempted to say addiction, to tradition and near congenital aversion to what is generally dubbed ‘modernisation’. Those who are familiar with the social science literature in economics, political science and history would easily recall that in the sixties and seventies, African regimes were adjudged successes or failures by how far they had travelled on the road to modernization. Modernisation was understood in near-grotesque terms of increasing Gross Domestic Product, total mileage of macadamized roads, and the like. And when the bottom fell out in the eighties, we were treated to gory accounts of so-called modernisation that went too fast, African traditional institutions that were recalcitrant to the changes enjoined by modernisation efforts, and so on.

There are two major problems with any attempt to explain phenomena in Africa within the ‘traditional versus modern’ schema. The first problem is conceptual: the means, ‘modernisation’, is mistaken for the end, ‘modernity’. This is not a mere verbal point. The end-product, putatively speaking, of all modernization processes must be the transformation of the social organism concerned from a pre-modern or non-modern state to a modern one. Properly understood, this must mean that the organism concerned has had its most dominant institutions bathed in the ether of modernity, the proper name for the outcome of the process in which modernisation is a tool. If this is the case, it is possible to have modernisation, understood as the superficial painting of the social fabric with various markers of modernity without there being the infusion of the elements that constitute the soul, the identifying characteristics of modernity. Japan and South Korea are the most successful examples of this phenomenon. Taiwan and Hong Kong are not far behind. Hence, I am suggesting that whatever was going on in Africa in the sixties and seventies were at best inchoate attempts at becoming modern. So, their failure cannot be used as evidence of the inability of Africans to be modern.

The second problem is historical: contemporary scholars do not evince any awareness of the rich legacy of past attempts at the installation of modernity in some parts of the continent, most notably English-speaking West Africa. Hence, much of the discourse about Africa and modernity at the present time proceeds as if (1) this is a new problem or (2) there are no antecedent African engagements with modernity. The available historical evidence supports neither standpoint.

In the nineteenth century, specifically before the imposition of formal empire on the African continent by various European powers, some parts of Africa were in the beginnings of a transition to modernity. Originally begun under the inspiration of Christianity—taking this seriously is bound to alter our historiography of Christianity and appraisal of its career in Africa—the African apostles of modernity took the movement beyond the confines of the religious to the larger sphere of the secular. I argue that it is time to honour these prophets and adapt their wisdom to the task that is again before us to move Africa towards modernity. But we cannot celebrate them if we don’t know who they are. So one modest aim of this essay is to introduce these prophets of old Africa.

There is an even deeper reason to take them seriously now. I argue that modernity is back on the agenda in Africa, as it is in other areas of the world. It is more insightful, perhaps more correct, to interpret the current experimentation in forms of rule—liberal representative democracy and the rule of law; forms of social living—the ideology of individualism; forms of economic production—capitalism; in Africa and other parts of the world as late transitions to modernity. I am quite aware that what I say risks being appropriated by social evolutionists who would like to make it appear as if Euro-America sits at the apex of the human social ladder with the rest of the world coming up the rear. Anyone who is familiar with the expostulations of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington will see the point clearly.² But we may not refrain from drawing appropriate lessons from history for our own use because some might turn the same results to mischievous ends. It is worth taking the risk involved in this instance because I would like Africa, if its peoples so desire, to engage modernity in a conscious, critical way and embrace or shun it for Africa’s own reasons, not out of ignorance or elemental hostility traceable to the conflicted legacy of its history in the continent.

What Modernity?

We work with a very historicised and, therefore, narrow conception of modernity. Modernity, as it is understood here, refers to that movement of ideas, practices and institutions that originated in Europe the roots of which are generally traced to the Renaissance, moving through the voyages of Discovery, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It gave us such milestones as the English Civil War and Act of Settlement of 1701, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Scientific Revolution as well as Capitalism. But it is modernity’s philosophical discourse that interests us because, ultimately, its most lasting impact has not been that it enabled us to build nuclear weapons or send humans into space. Rather, in creating and widely disseminating a new and radically different view of human nature unique to it, and creating the kinds of values, practices and institutions to enable this specific mode of being human to effloresce, modernity represents an epoch all its own in the history of human evolution.

The relevant elements of the discourse of modernity are the following: the principle of subjectivity and its social concomitant, individualism, the centrality of Reason, autonomy of action, liberal democracy, the Rule of Law, the open future, and an obsession with novelty. This is not the appropriate place to expound upon the meanings and entailments of the various aspects of modernity just iterated. In this section, we give a brief description of each of the features that will be discussed below. For our purposes here, the Rule of Law, autonomy of action, and the question of novelty shall not be considered.

Individualism:

The most important of the above elements to be discussed here is the idea of individualism. No doubt, the idea of individualism predated the modern age. My contention is that (1) the notion of the individual that is dominant in the modern age is without precedent, at least in the Euro-American tradition from which our African prophets extracted it; (2) it is under the modern regime that individualism is anointed as the principle of social ordering and almost everything else is understood in terms of how well or ill it serves the interests of the individual. Thus, although it is true that there was some recognition of the individual in premodern epochs, it is in the modern epoch that the individual is not merely supreme; whatever detracts from the rights of the individual is, precisely for that reason, to be rejected. This notion of the individual took a long time to emerge but it received one of its most dramatic consecrations in the Protestant Reformation when the subject, that is, the individual, was made the centrepiece of Christian soteriology. The subject must win eternity for himself, helped of course by grace. One’s genealogy, status and similar attributes counted for nothing, or at least theoretically ought to count for nothing in the allocation of goods, services, or even recognition. The key element is that of individual striving, what the individual makes of herself and whatever talent she is endowed with by Nature. Here is the source of the Merit Principle, the meritocracy that promises rewards to individuals according as they show themselves worthy by developing their talents. One consequence of the focus on the individual in the modern state is that no longer are individuals’ futures determined by what station they were born into in life. Humans are adjudged capable of moving across status, class, and other boundaries as long as they are willing to improve themselves enough to fit them for whatever station they aspire to occupy.

Our prophets embraced the preceding idea of individualism and made it the cornerstone of their worldview. Whatever other influences they would later derive from their African origins and general milieu, the idea that if they improved themselves sufficiently, they would be rewarded with careers open to talent was appropriated directly from their engagement with modernity. Needless to say, at the core of the individualist orientation is the idea of the person, the self, created by God, saved by grace. In the interim between its creation in sin and its salvation by grace, the self acquires stature by dint of hard work, education, and a little luck. This is the self that is accorded respect and whose well-being is the metric by which to judge forms of social ordering. I am not saying that the kind of rampant individualism that we usually associate with the modern variety would have appealed to any of them. But I definitely would argue that the self—of individuals—and the collective self—of groups—were objects of their solicitation.

The Centrality of Reason

The second tenet of modernity that is of moment to us is the centrality of Reason. Modern society fancies itself as a society of knowledge, one in which the claims of tradition and authority do not mean much and every truth claim must be authenticated by Reason. Whoever can show that she has superior knowledge commands our assent and respect. This is contrasted with the premodern situation where authority went largely unchallenged, tradition reigned supreme and reason was appointed a handmaiden to Revelation. The African prophets adopted this tenet of modernity with aplomb. In their exertions, we can see them working extremely hard to acquire knowledge of not only the new ways of life that their sojourn in the New World of Slavery and the Slave Trade had socialised them into, but also that of their own societies, cultures, and customs. They provided us with our first models of intellectuals under the new dispensation inaugurated by evangelisation and colonisation.

Governance by Consent

Finally, I refer to the central tenet of political theory in the modern age under which no one ought to acknowledge the authority of, or owe an obligation to obey, any government in the constitution of which he or she has played no part. That is, no government is legitimate to which the governed have not consented. When the American revolutionaries first used this principle as their rallying cry in 1776, it was the first culmination of a new principle of legitimacy the philosophical grounds of which had been foreshadowed in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others. From that point on, whether it was in the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the much less abrupt transfer of power from the monarch and the nobility to the House of Commons in Britain, the authority of every ruler by the grace of God or by reason of birth was vulnerable to the challenge posed by the new thinking concerning the issue of who ought to rule when not all can rule. It was this principle that, as we shall see, our prophets adopted in their argument that they must be rulers in their own house and that representative government was not a gift to be bestowed on them by the British, but a right that they had earned because they were citizens of Empire. Our prophets were so enthusiastic about the doctrine of governance by consent that they sought at different times to remake indigenous modes of governance in accordance with its imperatives. Such was the force of the principle that by the third decade of the twentieth century, “no taxation without representation” was a favourite slogan of leaders of the National Congress of British West Africa.³

The Historical Context

In what follows, I shall be arguing that the African apostles of modernity filled the role of prophets in the manner described in section 1. There were two dimensions to their starting point: the first was their experience of having been recaptured from slavers and slavery. As a result, their appreciation of the liberty promised for all under the modern regime was not merely theoretical. Theirs was an unalloyed disavowal of any and every regime that threatened to undermine liberty. The second was their description of the indigenous Africa to which they had returned. Given the approbation that they bestowed upon their new outlook on life, it is no surprise that they held their native counterparts to be backward, sunk in heathenism and requiring redemption through the light of Christianity and (modern) Civilisation. They attributed Africa’s backwardness to the ravages of the Slave Trade and the prevalence of ignorance and superstition. Their preferred solution provides a pointer to their moral vision. They insisted that the future prosperity of their land depended on their taking the best from modern civilisation and combining it with what was best about their indigenous heritage and fashioning a synthesis that would deliver the promise of Christianity and Civilisation to their compatriots.

Let us rewind to the nineteenth century. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery had just been abolished. Many slaves—Recaptives, as they were called—were being taken from their slavers and returned to Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa whence they’d been taken. Others were being repatriated from the United States and the West Indies or Canada—they were called freedmen. But before their return journeys many of them had undergone some fundamental reorientation, sundry life-changing experiences, the most important of which was their becoming Christians. However, to see their becoming Christians only in terms of its religious trappings will be inadequate, perhaps mistaken.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a small group of missionaries and politicians as well as other men and women of affairs, especially humanitarians, who believed that the success of their missionizing activities was to be measured by how quickly they were able to render themselves superfluous to the running of the local Church they had helped establish. Many of them had been active in the humanitarian movement that had spearheaded the struggle for the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery. No doubt, the period witnessed its share of racist apologists who saw Africans as non-human beings or lesser human beings. Their ranks included missionaries and humanitarians. But many in the humanitarian movement saw Africans differently. They believed that the degenerate state of Africans at that time could not be separated from the centuries of degradation that they had suffered under the twin evils of the Slave Trade and Slavery. They contended that if Africans displayed lesser qualities than other humans, this was not because Africans were any less human than their fellows. Rather, the development of Africans had been stunted by historical factors. Thus, the humanitarians regarded the abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery as the absolute prerequisite for the rehabilitation of the Africans and for their restoration to their proper place at humanity’s table. As a result, some missionaries and humanitarians believed that their task was to school Africans in preparation for that time when the latter must assume the basic prerogative of every human being: responsibility for themselves and their posterity. For those missionaries and humanitarians, their task was to create those conditions in which Africans could quickly master, once again, the art of self-government and its attendant responsibilities, and they, as teachers, would take pride in having weaned their heathen wards off any dependency.

A similar current was present among politicians, too. It was articulated for instance by Earl Grey, Colonial Secretary in Lord Russell’s administration, 1846-52, in the following terms: “The real interest of this Country is gradually to train the inhabitants of this part of Africa in the arts of civilization and government, until they shall grow into a nation capable of protecting themselves and of managing their own affairs, so that the interference and assistance of the British Authorities may by degrees be less and less required.”⁴ Another manifestation of it is to be found in the resolution of the Select Committee of the House of Commons in May 1865 which said, inter alia, “that the object of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which may render it possible more and more to transfer to them the administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate withdrawal�”⁵

The sentiment was most pronounced among missionaries. One might argue that there was a convergence of views among the key sectors of nineteenth century West Africa concerning the aim of imperial activities there: freed slaves who had become socialized into a new lifeworld structured by Christianity; government officials who felt that the most economical way to build Empire was to rely on native agency and who saw their duty as making Africans fit for self-government; and missionaries who saw Africans as blighted children of God, no thanks to slavery, but God’s children nonetheless who were capable of redemption and regeneration needing only temporary help from their missionary benefactors. Whether or not the government officials meant what they professed, and whether or not the missionaries were sincere in theirs, the Africans took the charge seriously and proceeded to make themselves worthy of self-government. The conjuncture we have described so far provided the context for the phenomena that we discuss in the rest of this essay.

The most vocal and the most profound missionary at that time was the Very Reverend Henry Venn who served as the Honorary Secretary of the spearhead organisation for the evangelisation activities of the Church of England, the Church Mission Society, from 1841 to 1872. Here is Ade Ajayi’s summary of Venn’s ideas on native Church organisation.

Notice the emphasis on the three selves—self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. This alone is significant. Were we to focus on its implication we would see the secular reach of what goes on within the religious sphere. Self-support means (1) that there is a self whose capacity to act and whose autonomy to do so must not merely be recognised but respected, celebrated even and (2) support cannot but include the creation of material means to ensure that neither Church nor pastor is beggared. Again notice the connections. Only a post-Reformation Christianity could articulate the kind of heterodoxy suggested by Venn. Even in our day, the Catholic Church does not allow anything similar. Venn took seriously the history of the Church of England itself and he was willing to extend the capacity for autochthony to the African Church. He insisted that perpetually feeding the native Church through aid from the coffers of the mother Church would create a dependent and feeble native Church. The mother Church must equip the native Church with the capacity for self-support and must insist on the latter acquiring such capacity in the shortest time possible. Hence, Venn, and others who shared his philosophy, wanted a total remaking of the African world, initially under their direction but quickly turned over to Africans themselves, a development that was to be anchored on the other two Cs—Commerce and Civilisation—that they deemed requisite to the achievement of their primary C, Christianity.

Many Africans took the humanitarian professions of faith in native agency seriously. They set about the task of remaking the African world after the fashion of the world that they had been inducted into, the signal values of which they had come to embrace, and the fruits of which they were earnest to make available to their brethren and sistren who, in their estimation, were still in the grip of heathenism. It is from among their ranks that the prophets that I am speaking of emerged, fully persuaded that a great future for Africa lay in a critical appropriation of what force and Providence had bestowed on them during their time in the Babylon of New World Slavery and the Slave Trade. According to Ajayi,

Ajayi’s description requires us to consider these Africans with greater sophistication and sympathy. In assessing the contributions of this group of African thinkers we must resist the urge to see in them glorified ‘Uncle Toms’. All too often in the apologias of colonial administrators, they are represented as persons who suffered from a dependency complex or a near pathological desire to be ‘white’ or, at least, ‘European’. I suspect that part of the reason that their reflections have not been taken seriously by African scholars in the contemporary period is not unconnected to the fact that it is this picture of them that is present to our contemporary minds every time their names come up. Furthermore, ever since the colonial period and the subsequent hostility that it kindled in nationalistic Africans, those Africans who have deigned to think that indigenising the ways of their European oppressors offered a path to serious progress for their own peoples and lands have always attracted the disapprobation of their fellows. Yet, to think of our prophets as, for the most part, desirous of becoming ‘white’ or ‘European’ is to seriously misconstrue what they were about and who they desired to be. Indeed, a close but unprejudiced analysis of their writings and pronouncements will reveal entirely contrary impulses.

The view of the prophets as bad parodies of their European benefactors can sometimes be traced to their unflattering portrayals of indigenous African practices, institutions, and values, especially when they compared the latter to their newly acquired practices, institutions and values of European provenance. They are thus spoken of as if they found nothing good in African ways of being human and thought everything good about European ways of being human. The problem with this view is that, again, on closer analysis, their standpoints had more nuance than their latter day critics are aware of or willing to acknowledge. Our task is to understand where they were coming from, explore their ideas fully rather than strands taken out of context, and see why they might have appeared as pathological self-haters. I hope that the discussion that follows offers a modest beginning on the path to appreciating their genius.

Unlike the reticence, maybe a profound lack of self-confidence, with which we their progeny now approach modernity and other things ‘Western’, the prophets of old exuded tremendous confidence in their belief that they were destined to be the leaders who would create new forms of social living in Africa be stealing the fire of the ‘West’ and combining it with what was best in their indigenous heritage, and doing all this in partnership with Europeans. Thus we need to investigate their ideas of progress, of the state of Africa during their time, and of how best to fit Africa for its proper place in the concert of nations.

THE PROPHETS

Samuel Ajayi Crowther

The first of the apostles that I wish to present for rather belated honour is the Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891). The contributions of Bishop Crowther have usually been processed through religious lenses. He was “the first non-European to be consecrated a Protestant Bishop since the Reformation.”⁸ The evangelisation of much of present-day Nigeria was prosecuted under his direction. This achievement alone would constitute enough justification for adulating him. But I concur in Ade Ajayi’s judgment:

I would like to add that not only was Crowther a patriot to the core, he was one of the earliest scientists, make that polymath, to emerge from the modern era in Africa. This aspect of his achievements has not been celebrated. Let us examine the evidence.

Crowther epitomised the man of knowledge, par excellence.¹⁰ He was an explorer, a philologist, a theologian, an administrator, an ethnographer, and multilinguist. In all these activities, he evinced an incredible capacity for observation, a gift for seeing what is valuable in indigenous ways of being human so as to adapt the Christian message accordingly and facilitate the creation of an indigenous Church. This he did in spite of his own conviction that his indigenous African cohort were sunk in heathenism and could only be led forth by the light of the Christian faith and of the civilization of which it was an integral part. But one is unlikely to appreciate fully the man’s accomplishments if one is not aware of what road he travelled.

According to Ajayi, the foremost living scholar of Crowther’s life and work, he was born in Yorubaland in about 1806, was rescued by the Naval Squadron in April 1822 off Lagos, and released in Freetown as a freed slave in July. “It is said that he was so eager to learn that he was able to read the New Testament in English within six months.”¹¹ That must have been remarkable enough and it probably impressed his CMS benefactors. By 1828, he had qualified as a teacher and, in 1837, he published an account of his capture and life as a slave in 1821-22. He was part of the Niger Expedition in 1841-42. His journal of that expedition was published as Journals of Schön and Crowther.¹² In a recent evaluation of Crowther’s achievements, Lamine Sanneh remarked as follows:

Sanneh’s assessment illustrates many of the qualities that typify a scientific orientation: the insistence on facts, the suspension of judgment ere the facts are in, etc. Equally important, he did not prejudge the indigenous culture and, on his being acquainted with the facts, he saw evidence that there were nodes in the native culture onto which Christian ideas could be grafted. Thus, in one and the same movement, he grasped the possibility of nativizing Christianity and christianizing indigenous religious antecedents. This was to form the hallmark of his evangelizing activities for the rest of his life. And he did so with a scientific mindset that did not permit any unwarranted a priori privileging of either Christian or native religion. Again, I cite Sanneh. “Crowther was not a mere romantic, bowing to native custom and practice. His natural habit of stringent scrutiny of the evidence he never abandoned to nativistic pride, and so he plunged into remote hinterland districts, grateful for what he discovered of encouragement there, certainly, but resolved also to confront what he judged harmful.”¹⁴

His scientific orientation, his commitment to the study of African life and thought as a basis for determining the shape and direction of the native Church, is part of why I insist that it is way past time to celebrate his genius. And what genius it was! He set about acquiring the necessary tools for the performance of his scientific task.

Even if one were uncharitably to dismiss the effusive praise of his examiners as so much paternalism towards an unusual African, the rest of his life confirmed that the praises were not only well-deserved, but the promise that they all saw in him was fully redeemed.

Having recognized the importance of making native agency the cornerstone of the native Church in Africa, Crowther quickly became a scholar of African indigenous religions and Islam. Most important of all, he became a preeminent philologist of African languages. His achievements in this area cry out for us his successors to celebrate but, at the same time, study his methodology, his results, and so on. Here is the evidence as represented by Ajayi.

By itself, the achievement of the translation of the Bible into any nonoriginal language would be phenomenal. When it is realized that the translation into Yoruba was being done at the same time as the language itself was being newly rendered into written form, the work becomes even more astonishing. Indeed, beyond the importance of translating the Bible into Yoruba, the business of rendering Yoruba into written form must attract greater significance for it made the language immediately available for other than religious theoretical tasks. It is a mark of how little we know, much less appreciate, of Crowther’s philological labours that he is never taught as one of the principal figures of the history of philology, even in Nigeria where he did the bulk of this work. Nor is he taught to history students in Nigeria, at both high school and college levels, as a pioneer linguist, grammarian, ethnographer or theologian of no small repute. Nor is he ever acknowledged as an accomplished explorer in the annals of exploration in Africa.

Yet, he authored the earliest grammar and dictionary of the Yoruba language, Grammar and Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, (London, Seelys, 1852); Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language: Part I—English and Yoruba; Part II—Yoruba and English. To which are prefixed the grammatical elements of the Yoruba Language, (London: CMS, 1843). His labours were not restricted to the Yoruba language or culture. The following works were also attributed to his authorship: Isuama-Ibo Primer, (London: CMS, 1860); Vocabulary of the Ibo Language: Part 2 English-Ibo, (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1883); The Gospel according to St. John: translated into Nupe, (London: CMS, 1877); Nupe Primer, (London: CMS, 1860).

His mettle as an explorer is attested by the following reports that he authored and\or co-authored: Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther, already cited; The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger: Journals and Notices of the Native Missionaries accompanying the Niger Expedition of 1857-1859 by the Rev. Samuel Crowther and the Rev. John Christopher Taylor, (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968); Niger Mission: Bishop Crowther’s Report of the Overland Journey from Lokoja to Bida, on the River Niger; and thence to Lagos, on the sea coast, from November 10th, 1871 to February 8th, 1872, (London: CMS, 1872); Journals and Notices of the Native Missionaries on the River Niger, 1862, (London: CMS, 1863); The River Niger: A Paper Read before the Royal Geographical Society, June 11th, 1877; and a Brief Account of Missionary Operations Carried on Under the Superintendence of Bishop Crowther in the Niger Territory, (London: CMS, 1877); Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers undertaken by Macgregor Laird in connection with the British Government in 1854, (London: CMS, 1855).

I hope that the foregoing discussion gives enough of a foretaste of what is awaiting discovery in the secular exertions of Bishop Crowther. We must not omit to mention that he made all these discoveries in the face of racist opposition from his contemporary and rival, Henry Townsend, and, from 1872 onwards, following upon the death of Henry Venn, the original visionary Secretary of the CMS, a distinctly racist turn both in the CMS and in Europe, generally. The latter development eventually led to his removal from service. But as long as he remained in office, he took seriously the promise of knowledge and sought to strengthen the African self with scientific achievements and scholarly rigour. His travelogues were based on commissions. He collected ethnographies and data on native life generally. He was one of the earliest models of the native intellectual who sought to domesticate what Europe had to offer as a means of advancing the interests and welfare of Africans.

James Africanus Beale Horton

The second of the apostles whose importance I wish to underscore is Dr. James Beale Africanus Horton. Born in Sierra Leone on June 1st, 1835, in Gloucester, near Freetown, Horton’s parents were originally of Ibo extraction. They were repatriates from Trinidad. He went to school in Sierra Leone and for further studies, beginning in 1855, first at King’s College, London, where he trained as a physician, and later at Edinburgh in 1859. “Horton’s career [at King’s College] was brilliant, and he won prizes in Surgery, Physiology and Comparative Anatomy. His knowledge of Anatomy was amply demonstrated in his book West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native � and a Vindication of the African Race in which he challenged physical anthropologists who had asserted that the brain of an African was smaller than that of a European and that he was therefore less intelligent.”¹⁷ He went on to Edinburgh for further studies and in 1859 he obtained a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree. He had earlier in 1858 been admitted to membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (M.R.C.S.), which qualified him to be a doctor. “He joined the Army Medical Service as an Assistant Staff Surgeon in the West African Service and rose to the rank of Surgeon-Major in 1875, later ranking as Lieutenant-Colonel after twenty years’ service and finally retiring on half pay in 1880. He was not the first African doctor, but he was one of the most versatile of his century.”¹⁸ He served many tours of duty in different parts of English-speaking West Africa from Gambia to Ghana.

His initial training as a scientist already makes it easier for us to identify him with the temperament ordinarily associated with doing science. However, Horton’s career was extraordinary enough given his medical and scientific accomplishments. What made his accomplishments even more extraordinary were his writings in government, political theory, ethnography and sundry other areas. As Nicol remarks, “his knowledge of the classics, history, anthropology, science and medicine was remarkable for a man of any race.”¹⁹ Of course, it would be nice if I could explore his prodigious writings in some of these spheres. But such an undertaking is far beyond the scope of the present essay. What I hope to do instead is to present evidence from some of his writings and show how some of his articulations amounted to prophetic insights into times beyond that in which he lived.

As a scientist and man of knowledge, Horton’s writings were prodigious. In language that is anticipatory of some of the contemporary responses to lingering pseudo-scientific racism, Horton used knowledge and scientific research to refute the racism of his time. It is important to comprehend why the appeal to science is as crucial to racists as it is to anti-racists. Modern society, as I have pointed out, requires that whatever is to be accepted as true must either be capable of demonstrative proof of the type to be found in mathematics, especially algebra, or emanate from empirical investigation, possibly experimentation, supported by facts and figures. Additionally, given that appeal to tradition and revelatory authority no longer enjoys any legitimacy, only that claim that withstands or justifies itself to Reason’s scrutiny is deserving of a thinking person’s assent. This was the ground of the modern epoch’s denial of legitimacy to both papal and other types of sacerdotal authority and that of royals by the grace of God. As a credentialed member of that community in which only the authority of Reason and the possession of superior knowledge count, Horton was eager to show that he had the upper hand against the racists of his time. Needless to say, one often is struck by the irony involved in the situation where the self-appointed custodians of Reason and scientific rationality are frequently shown up subverting Reason by the so-called non-possessors of Reason when the former, in the face of facts and other proof, continue irrationally to deny the obvious. Consider the following critique by Horton of the alleged inferiority of the Negro Race:

In the above passage, Horton was not concerned to excoriate his interlocutor for any charge other than that of being a nonscientist or a false one. Nor was he concerned with the morality of his interlocutors or their ideological predilections. Knowledge and its possession or lack thereof was the only at issue as far as he was concerned. Simultaneously, he situated himself on the terrain of superior knowledge and commanded assent as such. The fact that he was doing it as an African was at best an icing on the cake of his epistemic supremacy. In fact, he ridiculed his interlocutor as one to whom, as he, the interlocutor himself confessed, “Race is everything—literature, science, art—in a word civilization depends on it�. With me race or hereditary descent is everything; it stamps the man.”²¹ It is immediately obvious that Dr. Knox’s standpoint is unscientific, not founded on knowledge and, for that reason, unworthy of assent on the part of those for whom the authority of science alone is legitimate. This was exactly the charge that Horton leveled at the then recently chartered Royal Anthropological Society.

Given that his challenge was based on the authority of science and the claim of superior knowledge, it is no surprise that he denigrated the ignorance of his interlocutors. As far he was concerned, he knew what he was talking about; they did not. For that reason, they did not deserve attention. It is noteworthy that in spite of the efforts of thinkers like Horton from Africa and others in Europe and North America, we continue even at the present time to be treated to pseudo-scientific proclamations of the genetic inferiority of peoples of African descent. It is a mark of how little even Africans know of previous scientific refutations of racism by African thinkers that one will be hard put to find contemporary contributions to the debate that show any awareness of the works of Horton in this sphere.

In pursuit of science and of using science for the upliftment of Africa and its peoples, Horton wrote other scientific works, including The Medical Topography of the West Coast of Africa: with Sketches of Its Botany. (Thesis for the Doctorate of Medicine, Edinburgh University.) (London, 1859); Physical and Medical Climate and Meteorology of the West Coast of Africa. With Valuable Hints to Europeans for the Preservation of Health in the Tropics, (London, 1867); Guinea Worm, or Dracunculus: Its Symptoms and Progress, Causes, Pathological Anatomy, Results, and Radical Cure, (London: 1868) and The Diseases of Tropical Climates and their Treatment with Hints for the Preservation of Health in the Tropics, (London, 1874).

His credentials as a Surgeon, Medical Scientist and Epidemiologist are impeccable by any standards. He applied the same scientific orientation to his study of indigenous systems of governance in West Africa. African forms of governance were not to be embraced or condemned until scholars had obtained a good, scientific understanding of them both in terms of their identity and their operating principles. He did his best to study them. As a result, his writings on West African peoples and their customs are even more impressive. Simply put, when we shall have devoted to his political philosophical writings the attention that they deserve, we would have to conclude that Horton was also one of the pioneer political philosophers of the modern age in Africa. The dominant theme in his political writings was the fitness of Africans for self-government and their right to be self-governing under the overall suzerainty of the British monarchy. As I indicated earlier, there was in the mid-nineteenth century ferment in Britain under which politicians and humanitarians alike were convinced that the best colonialism was one that suited the colonial wards for self-rule in the shortest possible time. Hence, given the improvability of human beings through education, the idea that Africans would forever be at the bottom rung of the human ladder was not seriously entertained. Add to that the exigency of high morbidity among European expatriates, there was a widespread feeling that the human costs of empire may be unjustifiably high. However, I think that it is a mistake to hold, as many seem to do, that the exigency just referred to was the only or even the principal reason that the possibility of African self-government was seriously entertained in various circles in mid-nineteenth century Britain and West Africa.

What the motivation was of those who believed in native agency and how sincere they were would not matter, though, once we turn our attention to the natives themselves. That is, once we frame the issue in terms of what some segments of the West African population thought of the possibility and desirability of self-government, their capacity for it, and their reaction to the House of Commons Select Committee Resolution of 1865, we shall find that the Africans elected to take their prospects in hand and they began to present arguments to urge, perhaps force the hand of, the British authorities to extend to them the right of self-governance.

Horton was a principal spokesperson for the movement for self-government. He identified some national groups in West Africa as not only deserving of the right to govern themselves but were even farther along the road for having taken grand initiatives to institute civilized, i.e., modern, forms of government in the areas they inhabited. First, he adopted a tactic that presaged contemporary arguments for African genius. He argued that Africa had not always been voiceless in the concert of humanity.

He went on to argue for the Africanness of ancient Egyptian civilisation. It is a mark of the resilience of global white supremacy that later writers like Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal fought the same battles in the last half of the last century with almost the same language and facts against the propagation of lies about the African past. Horton concluded: “And why should not the same race who governed Egypt, attacked the most famous and flourishing city—Rome, who had her churches, her Universities, and her repositories of learning and science, once more stand on their legs and endeavour to raise their characters in the scale of the civilised world?”²⁴ If it is the case that “Nations rise and fall; the once flourishing and civilized degenerates into a semi-barbarous state; and those who have lived in utter barbarism, after a lapse of time become the standing nation”, Africa’s time was bound to come again. And he argued that he had detected the nodes of such renaissance in some areas of West Africa in all spheres of human achievement. Using knowledge of the African past, he argued for the historicity of the African experience and a basis for future prosperity.

I shall now turn to his specific reflections on government. It is significant that at the present time, many who speak of the dismal prospects of liberal bourgeois democracy in Africa attribute those prospects to the recalcitrance of African traditions to the tenets of modernity. Yet, in the nineteenth century, in West Africa, there were serious and far-reaching experiments in modern liberal democratic government. In fact, Horton argued that the incorporation of modern governance could be used in part to obviate the illegitimacy of an otherwise unjustifiable colonialism. His example was the British annexation of Lagos in 1861. He lauded the Fanti Confederation that wrote for itself one of the earliest instances of a modern Constitution anywhere in the world. This they did between 1868 and 1871. It has been suggested that that Constitution was inspired by Horton’s work, West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native. With the Requirements necessary for Establishing that Self-Government recommended by the Committee of the House of Commons 1865; and a Vindication of the African Race, (London, 1868).²⁵ However that may be, what stands out is that Horton took a decidedly modern view of the appropriate mode of governance for Africa. For example, he embraced the core tenet of modernity in respect of political legitimacy: no one ought to obey any government to which he\she has not consented, in the constitution of which she\he has not had any hand. The most direct way of indicating this consent is through the vote. Hence, the electoral principle is the cornerstone of political legitimacy in the modern age. It was the political theoretical foundation of the demand for self-government by many in nineteenth century West Africa.

In his consideration of what sort of government should be adopted by “the political union of the various kings in the kingdom of Fantee under one political head,” Horton recommended the electoral principle. “A man should be chosen either by universal suffrage, or appointed by the Governor, and sanctioned and received by all the kings and chiefs, and crowned as King of Fantee. He should be a man of great sagacity, good common sense, not easily influenced by party spirit, of a kind and generous disposition, a man of good education, and who had done good service to the Coast government�”²⁶ Meanwhile, in his discussion of what mode of governance was appropriate for Accra, he recommended a republican government.

Whether he was writing about Sierra Leone, Gambia, or Lagos and Abeokuta, he was unwavering in his insistence that only that government was legitimate which received its sanction from the consent of the people expressed through the vote. His inclusion, at some points, of selection of governors should be treated as mere bows in the direction of the reality of a people who were then momentarily humbled by various historical forces and whose elevation was a matter of time and of the hard work of those—the British—who had come to lend the Africans a hand in finding their feet, once again.

Secondly, there was no room in his theory for ascription. The circumstances of one’s birth did not mean anything to him, inheritance ranked nil and tradition was of no moment. Eligibility for office had to be earned—the Merit principle—and even then the people must offer their electoral stamp of approval. This explains his enthusiastic approval of the experiments in new modes of governance that were under way during his life in Ghana—the Fanti Confederation—and Abeokuta—the Egba United Board of Management (EUBM).²⁸

In an appeal to the British colonial authorities to support the Fanti Confederation, what he said as the justification makes clear his conception of modern government and his conviction that what the Fanti were doing amounted to the incorporation of a new order in governance.

The idea that the Fanti confederates were harbingers of a new order, a new way of being human motivated much of the writings of the nineteenth century apostles. In this, they were quintessentially modern. A good part of their claim to novelty is to be found in the idea of the self that they not only embraced but, one could indeed say, they embodied.

Revd. S. R. B. Attoh Ahuma

Another one of the apostles was very clear as to what the idea of the modern self entailed. I refer to Revd. S. R. B. Attoh Ahuma. I conclude my discussion with a brief look at some of his reflections. Attoh Ahuma’s book, The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness is a collection of columns he wrote for the Gold Coast Leader. I was intrigued by the author’s Foreword to the collection part of which goes thus:

What sense is one to make of this strange foreword and its core phrases: “Backward Movement,” “Intelligent Retrogression” which, on the face of it, suggests the opposite of Progress? It is even stranger that those locutions describe the conditio sine qua non of progress. It is easy to read into the foreword the ruminations, perhaps even fears, of a wistful conservative in the grip of nostalgia for a world since lost. Yet when one reads the essays that make up the collection one finds that the author’s deployment of what he called “a perfect paradox” is not meant to be taken at face value. Much of his conservatism was directed at his bid to prove that the peoples of the Gold Coast, regardless of their ethnic affiliations, did constitute a Nation and deserved to be accorded all the dignity and respect due such entities, especially in the context of nineteenth century debates about nationalism. We may not discount the importance of the changed context in which Attoh Ahuma was writing. He wrote much later after the rejection of educated natives by their white tutors. But he was also concerned to combat the excesses of those who thought that their salvation lay in absolute mimicry of European ways. In his view, however, the options for Africans were not limited to total opposition to or mimicry of the European ways of being human. What he advocated was the creative appropriation of indigenous culture and its use as the pivot of the construction of modern societies that would borrow whatever was useful from its European-inspired legacy. The man who seemed to be looking backwards wrote on Progress and the importance of the individual in language that conceded nothing to any modern conceptions of both terms. Quite the contrary, he called on the youth to make self-improvement their vocation, patriotism their cause, and the advancement of Africa their mission. To do all these things he asked youth to (1) take individualism seriously; (2) pursue knowledge and, (3) build the African Nation.

In an essay titled, significantly, ‘I am: I Can: An Appeal to the Rising Generation.’ Ahuma wrote:

He then went on to argue that the individual who affirms “I AM” is the bedrock of all progress and development.

The charge to “know oneself” as the starting point for making an individual fit for her duty to her community or humanity was a sing song in the nineteenth century. Some of its philosophical antecedents are traceable to the philosophy of self-love and the theory of moral sentiments of the eighteenth century. It had some of its most famous proponents in Adam Smith, J. B. Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, David Hume, and the poet Alexander Pope. It is not an accident, therefore, that the essay contained references to Aristotle, Tennyson, Byron, Galileo, Bunyan, Sir Walter Raleigh, Beethoven and Thomas Edison. He wanted young people to cultivate their individuality, to steel themselves each in his own uniqueness for the task of serving humanity. One plausible way of construing Ahuma’s ‘perfect paradox’, then, is to see it as a charge to Africans not to take comfort in blind imitation but to appropriate the wisdom of others and that of their own ancestors through the arduous task of making such wisdom their own. To do the latter they must acquire knowledge of themselves, their heritage, other people’s wisdom and follies, and so on. In other words, they must make of themselves worthy residents of the society of knowledge. Horton, in a similar charge to youth said:

In Lieu of a Conclusion

Crowther, Horton, Ahuma, and several others, were all part of a ferment in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century made up of those who stood for the primacy of native agency, the capacity of Africans for self-government, and the recognition by the rest of humanity of Africa resurgent in the aftermath of the debacle of the Slave Trade and Slavery, all within the boundaries of a deep faith in the promise of modernity especially regarding liberty, equality, and fraternity. If in reading this essay others are challenged to begin to delve into their legacy and situate them properly as precursors for African intellectual discourse at the present time, the modest aim of the current essay will have been more than achieved.

*This is the written version of a presentation under the same title to a special panel on ‘Politics and Prophecy in Africa’ at the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion, Nashville, Tennessee, in November 1999. I am grateful to Simeon Ilesanmi who invited my participation on the panel. A different version of the paper was presented to the Conference on ‘Henry Sylvestre Williams and Pan-Africanism: A Retrospection and Projection’ held at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago, 7th-12th January, 2001. It was also presented to the Conference on ‘Hegel and Africa’ held at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in March 2001. I would like to thank John McCumber and Robert Gooding-Williams who invited me to contribute to that conference. Finally, I did the research and writing of the original draft of the paper during my tenure as a Visiting Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow, at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia in 2000-2001 academic year. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ford Foundation for my stay there. And I thank Reginald Butler and Scot French, Director and Associate Director, respectively, of the Woodson Institute for facilitating my work there during my tenure. [Back]

References

Ajayi, J. F. Ade. ‘Henry Venn and the Policy of Development,’ Toyin Falola, ed., Tradition and Change In Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi, (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000), pp. 59-60.

----------. ‘Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism,’ Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa., p. 73.

----------. ‘Bishop Crowther: A Patriot to the Core,’ Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa, p. 87.

----------. ‘Native Agency in Nineteenth Century West Africa,’ Falola, ed., Tradition and Change in Africa., p. 106.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Gordon, Lewis, T. Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée White, eds., Frantz Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

Huntington, Samuel. ‘If Not Civilizations, What?’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 5 (November/December 1993), pp. 186-194.

------------. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49.

‘Comments,’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4 (September/October 1993), pp. 2-26,

Kimble, David. A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-1928, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).

Nicol, Davidson. ‘Introduction,’ in Nicol, ed. Black Nationalism in Africa 1867: Extracts from the political, educational, scientific and medical writings of Africanus Horton, (New York: Africana, 1969), p. 14.

Sampson, Magnus J. West African Leadership: Public Speeches Delivered by J. E. Casely Hayford (London: Frank Cass, 1969).

Sanneh, Lamine. ‘The CMS and the African Transformation: Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Opening of Nigeria,’ in Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley, eds., The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2000) p. 180.

‘Resolutions of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, 26 June 1865,’ Parliamentary Papers, 1865, v (412) iii,

Wilson, Henry S. ed., Origins of West African Nationalism, (London: Macmillan, 1969).

Taiwo, Olufemi (2001). PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOUR: AFRICAN APOSTLES OF MODERNITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY *. West Africa Review: 3, 1.


	In Lewis Gordon, T. Sharpley-Whiting, and Ren�e White, eds., 1996, p. 256.


	See in general, Francis Fukuyama, 1992); Samuel Huntington, 1993: 22-49 and the ensuing responses in 'Comments,' Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4 (September/October 1993), pp. 2-26, and Huntington's reply, 'If Not Civilizations, What?' Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 5 (November/December 1993), pp. 186-194.


	See in general, Magnus J. Sampson, 1969).


	Cited from Henry S. Wilson, ed., 1969, p. 127.


	'Resolutions of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, 26 June 1865,' Parliamentary Papers, 1865, v (412) iii, cited from Wilson, Origins of West African Nationalism, p. 151.


	J. F. Ade Ajayi, 'Henry Venn, 2000, pp. 59-60.


	Ajayi, 'Nineteenth Century Origins of Nigerian Nationalism,', p. 73.


	Davidson Nicol, 'Introduction,' 1969, p. 14. Hereafter cited as Nicol, Black Nationalism in Africa.


	Ajayi, 'Bishop Crowther, p. 87.


	I was recently trying to describe his achievements to an interviewer. What my interviewer concluded from my iteration of his accomplishments that Crowther "sounds to me (the interviewer, that is) like one of those Victorian era overachievers." I couldn't agree more.


	2nd edition, (London: Frank Cass, 1970).


	Lamine Sanneh, 2000, p. 180. Notes omitted.


	Ajayi, 'Native Agency in Nineteenth Century West Africa,' p. 107.


	Ajayi, 'Bishop Crowther, p. 90.


	Nicol, 'Introduction,' Black Nationalism in Africa., p. 3.


	Nicol, ed., Black Nationalism in Africa, p. 25.


	Dr. Knox, quoted by Horton in Nicol, p. 25.


	Cited from Nicol, p. 25.


	See David Kimble, 1963.


	I have discussed these experiments in another paper titled, 'Two Modern African Constitutions,' forthcoming.


	'Foreword,' The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness, pp. vii-viii.


	Cited from Henry S. Wilson, ed., Origins of West African Nationalism, p. 195.

West Africa Review (2001)

ISSN: 1525-4488

PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOUR: AFRICAN APOSTLES OF MODERNITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*

Introduction