Creole Society
Creole society by mid-century had largely superseded the earlier settler-recaptive division. The ethnic units within the society remained intact, however, so that more than a century later some people could still identify themselves by their pre-Creole ethnic origins. This was particularly true of such groups as the Yoruba and Ashanti, who had reestablished ties with their homelands.
The great majority of the Creole community was strongly Christian, although the forms their Christianity took sometimes clearly showed an African influence. The society’s British origin was reflected in the dominance of Anglican and Methodist churches. Small Roman Catholic and smaller Muslim communities existed within the society, living peacefully intermingled with the Protestant majority. Although there were other Muslims, the notable Muslim community was entirely Yoruba. Single villages and later town wards were frequently composed of people who shared both ethnic and religious affiliation since the recaptives had joined with others of their own background and organized themselves around the mission and school of a particular church.
Among the Protestants the replacement of the European clergy occurred rapidly as the educational levels of the Creoles rose. The Anglicans formally withdrew their foreign clergy in 1861 and were replaced by an entirely Creole priesthood. A recaptive, Samuel A. Crowther, became the first bishop three years later. Creoles had already graduated from English law and medical schools, the first entering those professions in the 1850s. The emphasis placed on education in the settler and later in the Creole society was so great that by the 1860s the colony had a greater percentage of children attending school than did Great Britain. Aided in part by their high educational level as well as by the reluctance of Englishmen to come to what they considered a “white man’s graveyard," the Creoles had begun by the 1830s to occupy increasingly important posts in the colonial civil service throughout West Africa, although executive posts in their own government continued to be denied to them. This fact had already helped to determine the Colony’s economic pattern. Far from the agricultural community that its founders had expected it to become, the Colony’s citizens had come to be a society of shopkeepers and public servants.
The entry of settlers into the Colony’s government remained restricted until 1863. Several black Englishmen — that is, the sons of British officials and African mothers who were assimilated into the British rather than the settler, West Indian, Creole, or African society — had served on the governor’s council in the early years. A black West Indian became queen’s advocate (attorney general) in 1840, and in 1844 William Fergusson, another black West Indian but one with long experience in Sierra Leone, was appointed governor.
Agitation for a new representative constitution became lively in the 1850s. Newspapers, reportedly well-written and openly political, were being published. The Colony’s first newspaper, started by the Sierra Leone Company in 1801, had ceased regular publication in the late 1820s, although it continued to appear or special occasions. In 1842 a private publisher brought out a second newspaper, the Sierra Leone Watchman. Pressured into closing because of its politics in 1846, it was replaced in 1855 by two newspapers.
A committee of correspondence was formed in 1853 to urge Creole representation in the government, and other politically minded associations were soon formed. In 1858 the Merchants' Association, the only body with some influence outside the Colony, requested that the British grant the Colony an elected legislature.
The response came in 1863 and, though a step forward, was discouraging to the Creole cause. The secretary of state for the colonies ordered a reorganization but deliberately excluded any features that might be construed as popular representation. A legislative council — composed of the members of the governor’s council, all of whom were officials, and four private individuals appointed by the governor — was added to the existing governor’s council. Only one Creole was appointed in 1863 and a second in 1869. Not until 1872 was a Creole, Sir Samuel Lewis, who served as queen’s advocate, seated on the executive council.
The period from the early 1860s until the late 1890s was the heyday of Creole society. Ability, ambition, and opportunity combined to give the leading Creoles roles in their own Colony and throughout West Africa in government service, trade, the church, and the judici- ary. Still largely excluded from the highest posts in their own Colony, they nevertheless sat on the executive councils in The Gambia, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana a Creole served as acting governor, and others sat on the supreme courts in all three countries. Even outside the British areas Creoles made their mark: several became prominent in French African colonies; one became mayor of Monrovia, Liberia, and another, Charles D. B. King, was elected president of Liberia.
This flow of leaders to the rest of Africa and the superior educational resources of Freetown caused the Colony to be regarded as the Athens of West Africa, according to the Freetown newspapers of the day. The high intellectual achievements of its citizens and residents seemed to support its right to the title. Bishop Crowther was noted as an ethnolinguist who had published important works, as had J.C.Taylor and P.J.Williams. Samuel Johnson and A.B.C. Sibthorpe were early historians of Africa along with James Africanus Horton. Horton was also a noted authority on tropical medicine, as were J.F.Easmon and Oguntola Sapara.
The noted modern African historian J.B.Webster described the major reason for the Creoles' success as their ability to fill a buffer role in Great Britain's advance into Africa. They were the "interpreters of Western culture to Africans and African culture to Europeans.” When changing European attitudes ended this role, the importance of their remarkable society declined rapidly, although individual Creoles continued to achieve prominence for many decades.
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