The Saro in the political life of early Port Harcourt, 1913–49

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mac Dixon-Fyle
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
West African ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Petty Bourgeoisie ◽  
Port Harcourt ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
Social Affinity

The western-educated Krio population of Sierra Leone participated in British imperial activity along the West African coast in the nineteenth century. Facing a far more complex ethnic configuration than their counterparts in Yorubaland, the Sierra Leoneans (Saro) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, acquired much influence through the manipulation of class and ethnic relations. Though most Saro here had a modest education and were working-class, a few came to form the cream of the petty-bourgeoisie and were active in economic life and city administration. Potts-Johnson, arguably their most famous member, developed a flair for operating in his middle-class world, and also in the cultural orbit of the local and immigrant working-class. I. B. Johnson, another prominent Saro, lacked this quality. Though presenting a homogenous ethnic front, celebrated in the Sierra Leone Union and in church activity, Saro society was sharply polarized on class lines, a weakness not to be lost on the numerically superior and ambitious indigenous population. Faced with a choice, the indigenes opted for the avuncular Potts-Johnson, for whom they felt a greater social affinity than for the more distant I. B. Johnson. After Potts-Johnson, however, no Saro was to be allowed scope to develop a similar appeal.

The Royal African Company of England's West African Correspondence, 1681-1699

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
General Terms ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

The identity of John Rattray, diatomist and collector on the Buccaneer expedition (1885–1886) to West Africa

Phytotaxa ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 408 (4) ◽  
pp. 296-300
Author(s):  
ESTRELA FIGUEIREDO ◽  
DAVID WILLIAMS ◽  
GIDEON F. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Royal Botanic Garden ◽  
West African ◽  
Botanic Gardens ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Royal Botanic Gardens ◽  
The 19Th Century

Herbarium records show that during the second half of the 19th century John Rattray collected several plant specimens at ports of call along the West African coast (Canary Islands, Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, São Tomé, Príncipe, and Angola). At the herbarium (K) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, four such specimens are databased, three of which can be examined online. At the herbarium (E) of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland, 26 specimens are databased, twenty of which are imaged. All the specimens we examined have printed labels stating ‘Collected by John Rattray, H.M. Challenger Commission, Edinburgh’ with only a handwritten indication of the locality, for example ‘Loanda’ (Luanda, Angola). The collecting date has been omitted from the labels and there are no further details on the specimens. An investigation of the literature revealed that there is some confusion regarding the origin of the material and the identity of John Rattray, the collector.

African perceptions of Europeans in the early period of Portuguese expeditions to West Africa

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Tymowski
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Early Period ◽  
West African ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
The Common ◽  
Distinct Features

The aim to this article is to analyse the judgments and opinions of Africans about Europeans during the early Portuguese expeditions to West Africa in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While opinions of Europeans about Africans are for that period certified by numerous and varied sources, the opinions of Africans are difficult to examine. Cultures of the West African coast in the fifteen and early sixteen century were illiterate. Local oral traditions do not go back – within the scope of this field of interest – to such distant centuries. There are two types of sources: Firstly, African statements written down in European texts, which require a particularly critical approach; secondly, some Africans expressed their opinions about Europeans in works of Art. These include the statues of Europeans from the area of present-day Sierra Leone (the Sapi people), and from the state of Benin (the Edo people). In this article the author examines: 1) the circumstances in which the Africans expressed their opinions (ad hoc meetings, political negotiations, trade, court ceremonies); 2) the authors (individuals or social and ethnic groups), which were attributed the judgments; 3) the content of speeches; and 4) the motives which guided the Africans. Then author compares individual cases, analyses the common characteristics and the distinct features of judgments and opinions known to us, and discusses the possibility of identification of general traits of Africans’ opinions about Europeans.

IV. The Establishment of the Sierra Leone Protectorate and the Insurrection of 1898

1956 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Effective Administration ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Tribal Areas

The Colony of Sierra Leone originated in settlements of freed slaves on the West African coast carried out on the initiative of British philanthropists in the later eighteenth century. For over a century, British responsibility was as far as possible restricted to the small mountainous peninsula on which Freetown stands, and to certain nearby islands; but influence was inevitably obtained over nearby coast and hinterland, and during the nineteenth century some additional territories were incorporated in the Colony, though not always brought under effective administration. In 1896 the remaining regions not conceded to be under French or Liberian influence were proclaimed a British Protectorate; which also included, for administrative purposes, certain chiefdoms formerly part of the Colony. In this period, therefore, the term ‘Colony’ is applied to the peninsula and islands originally settled, with a few predominantly tribal areas around the river Sherbro; the term ‘Protectorate’ to territories the size of Ireland, which form the great bulk of the area marked ‘Sierra Leone’ on a modern map, and whose social organization was at this time exclusively tribal. At the beginning of 1898 British officials began to collect a House Tax which had been imposed on three of the five districts of the Protectorate. In February, resistance to the tax by certain Temne chiefs developed into open warfare in the north, and at the end of April a series of savage attacks took place on British and American subjects, mostly of African birth and descent, among the Mende and Sherbro people further south. These two outbreaks constitute the insurrection to be studied in this paper.

Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Coleman
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West African ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
The World ◽  
African Coast

In 1771 Joseph Banks, John Fothergill and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. The name of this collector was Henry Smeathman, an ingenious and enterprising Yorkshireman keen on improving his position in the world. His expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married several times into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to landlords and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life and his attitudes to slavery, both African and European, as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection forged in this period between science, collecting, and slavery. The book also reproduces and discusses Smeathman’s essay describing his journey on a fully slaved ship from West Africa to Barbados, a unique account because it is written by a passenger unconnected to the slave trade. After four years in the West Indies observing plantation slavery Smeathman returned to England to write his ‘Voyages and Travels’.

Let There Be Light: the Voices of West African Novels

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Barry Riddella
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
West African ◽  
Political Life

The novels of an area tell a tale: Obi Okonkwo's career as a civil servant in Lagos, Kamara's political life in Sierra Leone, and Baako's return to a changed Ghana. But they also say more in that they depict much of the reality of the countries and their peoples, their ideas and goals, and the historical and contemporary forces which influence them. In this way, therefore, the literature contains both fictive and factual essences.

Development and Operation of Ebola Diagnostic Laboratories Led By Public Health England in Sierra Leone during the West African Ebola Outbreak 2013-2015

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bailey ◽  
Jane Shallcross ◽  
Christopher H. Logue ◽  
Simon A. Weller ◽  
Liz Evans ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
The West

Soldiers in Revolt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
West African ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Risky Decision ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Military Studies ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Original Dataset

Soldiers in Revolt examines the understudied phenomenon of military mutinies in Africa. Through interviews with former mutineers in Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and The Gambia, the book provides a unique and intimate perspective on those who take the risky decision to revolt. This view from the lower ranks is key to comprehending the internal struggles that can threaten a military's ability to function effectively. Maggie Dwyer's detailed accounts of specific revolts are complemented by an original dataset of West African mutinies covering more than fifty years, allowing for the identification of trends. Her book shows the complex ways mutineers often formulate and interpret their grievances against a backdrop of domestic and global politics. Just as mutineers have been influenced by the political landscape, so too have they shaped it. Mutinies have challenged political and military leaders, spurred social unrest, led to civilian casualties, threatened peacekeeping efforts and, in extreme cases, resulted in international interventions. Soldiers in Revolt offers a better understanding of West African mutinies and mutinies in general, valuable not only for military studies but for anyone interested in the complex dynamics of African states.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

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