By Princewill Ubani · Published
Research ID: PA-ART-fourah-bay-college-freetown-oldest-university-west-africa
Fourah Bay College: The School That Made Freetown 'the Athens of West Africa'
Fourah Bay College opened its doors in Freetown’s Clinetown neighborhood on Feb. 18, 1827, with six students, five of them Sierra Leonean and one a foreigner who arrived after being freed from a slave ship. The Church Missionary Society founded the school, with backing from Sierra Leone’s governor, Charles MacCarthy, to train teachers and clergy for Britain’s West African colony.
That one foreign student, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, went on to become the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa, translating the Bible into Yoruba and helping establish missions along the Niger River, work that, decades later, saw him held hostage during an 1867 mission crisis. His name, by tradition the first ever entered in the college’s admission register, made him a symbol of what the school would become: a training ground for a generation of West African clergy, teachers and civil servants who fanned out across the region.
The college’s reputation grew fast enough that, decades before any formal outside affiliation, people were already comparing it to the Academy of Athens, and Freetown picked up the nickname “the Athens of West Africa.” That comparison gained institutional weight in 1876, when Fourah Bay College affiliated with Durham University in England, chosen over Cambridge and London partly for its strong theology program. Students began sitting the same examinations as their counterparts in Durham and earning recognized British degrees, and the curriculum expanded well beyond religious training into the arts and sciences.
The Durham affiliation lasted until 1967, by which point the college, relocated since 1945 to its hilltop campus on Mount Aureol, had long since earned its standing as the first Western-style university built anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. It continues today as a constituent college of the University of Sierra Leone, still perched above the city whose reputation it helped build.
Sources
- “Fourah Bay College”, African Education.
- “What You do Not Know About Fourah Bay College”, SierraLoaded.
Books & Further Reading
Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford University Press, 1962, ISBN 9780198216131)