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Date Posted: 20:01:48 11/19/05 Sat
Author: 0 bey
Subject: Part II

To continue to treat Crowther merely as a success story—a slave boy who became a bishop—without probing further to evaluate the greatness of the man and his achievements, is to trivialize the issues involved and fall into the error of the CMS officials who, after the death of Henry Venn in 1872 chose to underestimate Crowther’s tenacity of purpose and attachment to basic principles. On one point I agree with Jesse Page’s assessment: ‘He was no fanatic on the subject of a native ministry, but he was a patriot to the core.’9
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:

In spite of the hazards and difficulties, Crowther accomplished a surprising amount of work on the Niger, making the most detailed observations and reports of his progress on the banks of the Niger. He was interested in the religious ideas and practices of Africans, and he inquired diligently, listened closely, and depicted as accurately as he could what he observed and heard for himself. He was eager to corroborate, test, and confirm for himself, leaving issues of dispute open to opinion. He avoided rushing to judgment. Thus, although he noted somber aspects of their customs and traditional practices, Crowther was nevertheless enthusiastic about what he learnt of religion among the Ibo people, including their ideas about God (Chukwu, Chineke), ethics, and moral conduct. He said he had heard references to such things among the Sierra Leoneans of Ibo background but had refrained from stating them as facts “before I had satisfied myself by inquiring of such as had never had any intercourse with Christians…. Truly God has not left Himself without witness!” The idea that premodern Africa had anticipated in several crucial respects Christian teaching was stated by Crowther with such spontaneous conviction that it marked him as a native mouthpiece, not just as a foreign agent.13
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.

When on his return from the Niger Expedition in 1842 he was recommended for ordination, the Bishop of London after interviewing him briefly is reported to have said: “He will do, but polish him up.” He was admitted in September 1842 to the CMS Training Institution at Islington. At the MayJune examinations, he evidently impressed his examiners. The Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge said he would like to take his answers on Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity” to read to his friends in Trinity College. “If, after hearing that young African’s answers, they still contend that he does not possess a logical faculty, they will tempt us to question whether they do not lack certain other faculties of at least equal importance, such as common fairness of judgment and Christian candor.” Bishop Bloomfield later remarked: “That man is no mean scholar; his examination papers were capital, and his Latin remarkably good.”15
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.

In the 13 years (1844-57) that he was a member of the Yoruba mission, apart from his evangelical and pastoral work at Igbein, he went up the Niger again in 1854 and 1857, building up the experience he needed for his later career. But the most important aspect of his work in those years was his career as a translator. We tend to take this for granted, but look at the record. He published a few extracts in 1848; the Epistle to the Romans in 1850; Luke, Acts, James I and II and Peter in 1851; Genesis and Matthew in 1853; Exodus and the Psalms in 1854; Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in 1856 and revisions of earlier texts. After 1857, he had to work with others. Thomas King had collaborated with him on Matthew in 1853. In 1857-62, they worked on the Epistles—Philippians, I and II Colossians, I and II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, John, Jude and Revelations, thus completing the New Testament in 1865. Schön and Gollmer edited these for linguistic consistency and published a revised new Testament in 1865. In 1867, Genesis to Ruth of the Old Testament was published. Others were brought in, probably because of their proficiency in Hebrew—Hinderer, D. O. Williams, Adolphus Mann, etc. By 1889 the whole Bible was available in Yoruba, though not in a single volume until 1900.16
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 andor 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:

It is in the development of the most important organ of the body—the brain, and its investing parieties—that much stress has been laid to prove the simian or apelike character of the Negro race…. The skull is, as regards the sutures, intimately connected with the brain; in man, we find that the posterior sutures first close, and the frontal and coronal last, but in the anthropoid ape the contrary is the case. Among the Negro race, at least among the thousands that have come under my notice, the posterior sutures first close, then the frontal and coronal, and the contrary has never been observed by me in even a single instance, not even among Negro idiots; and yet M. Gratiolet and Carl Vogt, without an opportunity of investigating the subject to any extent, have unhesitatingly propagated the most absurd and erroneous doctrine—that the closing of the sutures in the Negro follows the siminious or animal arrangement, differing from that already given as the governing condition in man.20
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.

Of late years a society has been formed in England in imitation of the Anthropological Society of Paris, which might be made of great use to science had it not been for the profound prejudice exhibited against the Negro race in their discussions and in their writings. They again revive the old vexed question of race, which the able researches of Blumenbach, Prichard, Pallas, Hunter, Lacépéde, Quatrefages, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and many others had, years ago (as it is thought) settled. They placed the structure of the anthropoid apes before them, and then commenced the discussion of a series of ideal structures of the Negro which only exist in their imagination, and thus endeavour to link the Negro with the brute creation. Some of their statements are so barefacedly false, so utterly the subversion of scientific truth, that they serve to exhibit the writers as perfectly ignorant of the subjects of which they treat. The works of Carl Vogt, ‘Lectures on Man’ of Dr. Hunt, ‘Negro’s Place in Nature’; and of Prunner Bey, ‘Mémoire sur les Nègres,’ 1861, contain, in many respects, tissues of the most deceptive statements, calculated to mislead those who are unacquainted with the African race.22
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.

Africa, in ages past, was the nursery of science and literature; from thence they were taught in Greece and Rome, so that it was said that the ancient Greeks represented their favourite goddess of wisdom—Minerva—as an African princess. Pilgrimages were made to Africa in search of knowledge by such eminent men as Solon, Plato, Pythagoras; and several came to listen to the instructions of the African Euclid, who was at the head of the most celebrated mathematical school in the world and who flourished 300 years before the birth of Christ.23
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 heshe has not consented, in the constitution of which shehe 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.

If this place must ultimately be left to govern itself, a republican form of government should be chosen. An educated native gentleman, of high character and good common sense, who has the welfare of his country at heart…-…should be selected by the Government as a candidate for the presidency, and offered for the votes of the populace in the various districts; and, when once elected, he must be regarded as supreme in everything, and the natural referee in all their quarrels and differences. He should be assisted by counsellors chosen by the people as their representatives. The term of office of the president should not be less than eight years, and he should be eligible for re-election.27
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.

It is on this ground that there is now a loud cry for a codex constitutionuum for the Confederation from the Government of the Coast. It is essential so that every branch of the Government should have its power and limits well-defined, protecting it against aggression, and ‘ascertaining the purposes for which the Government exists,’ and the rights which are guaranteed to it; securing its rights in the various provinces, and restraining it from exercising function which would endanger liberty and justice. The present drooping state of the Confederation can say with great truth, novus rerum nascitur ordo—a new order of things is generated.29
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:

The Author indulges the hope that the principles therein set forth, and the sentiments to which he gives so inadequate an expression, may influence for good, not his contemporaries only, but also—and especially—the members of the rising generation, whose birthright, privilege, duty, destiny and honour it is to usher in an era of Backward Movement, which to all cultured West Africans is synonymous with the highest conception of progress and advancement. Intelligent Retrogression is the only Progression that will save our beloved country. This may sound a perfect paradox, but it is nevertheless, the truth; and if all educated West Africans could be forced by moral suasion and personal conviction to realize that “Back to the Land” signifies a step forward, that “Back to the Simple Life” of our progenitors expresses a burning wish to advance, that the desire to rid ourselves of foreign accretions and excrescences is an indispensable condition of National Resurrection and National Prosperity, we should feel ourselves amply rewarded.30
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:

The first essential prerequisite in the voyage of the discovery of ourselves as a people is the consciousness of ourselves. “I AM” is the keynote to all the harmonies and concords of individual advancement and power. Not “I AM” simply as a psychological abstraction, but the realization of the living personality and all that it denotes and connotes. The first person singular of the verb To Be is, after all, the most formidable word in the vocabulary of human thought and progress…31
He then went on to argue that the individual who affirms “I AM” is the bedrock of all progress and development.

“I AM” and to know it, is the head and front of all true and genuine success in life. It is the fount from which bubble those graces and virtues which minister to the growth of a nation’s vitality and productivity. The horse, the elephant, and the greyhound cannot testify to such consciousness; science may, in its ultimate deductions, credit them with the possession of intuitive faculties marvellously akin to the perfection of instincts on the borderland of human psychology, but the creatures can never know that they know. To save the country, to develop its resources, to maintain its rights and privileges, and to advance its interests in all directions without bungling and blundering and against fearful odds, our young men must “see visions” and “multiply visions;” and this is impossible of accomplishment unless they know themselves.32
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:

[The Youth] should make it their ruling principle to concentrate their mental powers, their powers of observation, reasoning, and memory, on the primary objects of their engagement. ‘Never to observe without a thought; never reason to confident conclusions without a sufficiency of certainly verified facts; never to acquire facts without submitting them to the test of reasoning and, when occasion offers, to the test of experience, as it has been conclusively remarked that observation without thought is a hasty observation, and the experience derived from it wasted; and if we reason without a sufficiency or verification of facts we shall reason into error; and if we remember without comparison the result will be that we shall be a vast storehouse of inconsequential knowledge.33
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.

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