West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native
And a Vindication of the African Race

A Sierra Leonean doctor's attack on Victorian ideas about race and his call for increased self-rule in West Africa.

James Africanus Beale Horton (Author)

9781108028592, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 June 2011

312 pages, 1 map
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.4 kg

This book, first published in 1868, became the best-known work of medical officer and writer James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883), who was born in Sierra Leone to parents of Igbo descent. He was chosen by the British to train as an army medical officer and attended King's College, London, and Edinburgh University. He returned to West Africa and published his doctoral thesis, which was a medical topography of the region; subsequent works called for health reforms. West African Countries, however, went beyond medicine. In it Horton refutes the derogatory racial theories about Africans rife in Victorian Britain and its empire, and he examines the possibility of self-government and how it might function in Sierra Leone and other territories in West Africa, foreshadowing the decolonisation that took place almost one hundred years later.

Part I. West African Countries and Peoples, and the Negro's Place in Nature: 1. Description of the original and uncivilized state of the native tribes
2. The origin, dangers, and progressive development of the Liberian Republic
3. Exposition of erroneous views respecting the African
4. False theories of modern anthropologists
5. Some anatomical accounts of Negro physique
6. The progressive advancement of the Negro race under civilizing influence
Part II. African Nationality: 7. General observations: self-government of the Gambia
8. Self-government of Sierra Leone: Kingdom of Sierra Leone
9. Self-government of the Gold Coast
10. Self-government of the Gold Coast: Kingdom of Fantee
11. Self-government of the Gold Coast: Republic of Accra
12. Self-government of Lagos and its interior countries: Kingdom of the Akus
13. Empire of the Eboes
Part III. Requirements of the Various Colonies and Settlements: 14. Requirements of Sierra Leone
15. Requirements of the Gambia
16. Requirements of the Gold Coast
17. Requirements of Lagos
Some remarks on the Republic of Liberia
18. Concluding remarks
advice to the rising generation in West Africa
Index.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]