Was Fourah Bay College Founded in 1827?
Mohamed Gibril Sesay
The approaching bicentenary of Fourah Bay College (FBC), marked from the year 1827, invites celebration. Yet it also invites sociological and historical questioning. What exactly happened in 1827? Was Fourah Bay College “founded” in that year in the straightforward sense in which institutions are normally born? Or does 1827 represent what may be called a narrative clean-up date: a date retrospectively elevated into symbolic certainty in order to tidy up the far messier, unstable, and borku-borku rope-rope draw-draw story of the institution’s emergence?
The wahala here is hardly about whether 1827 matters. It clearly does. The gist is whether 1827 exhausts the story of the institution’s origins. The historical accounts themselves box-up such certainty. The founding of FBC appears less like a singular birth moment and more like a long, unstable, fragmented, and fankadama process involving closures, relocations, missionary failures, colonial ambitions, liberated Africans, diasporan returnees, and shifting educational visions. The closer one looks, the less the neatness of 1827 holds.
. The Christian Institution, which would slowly acquire the name Fourah Bay College, existed long before 1827. A reconstruction of the sources tells us that the CMS founded the Christian Institution in 1814 as a residential school for liberated boys and girls. Small beginnings and by 1816, this cross between a primary school and an adult literacy center was operational under Reverend Leopold Butscher.
This immediately raises a foundational problem. If the Christian Institution was already functioning between 1814 and 1816, then what precisely happened in 1827 that justifies the designation of FBC’s founding?
Okay, look at this other moment. In 1818, Governor MacCarthy proposed converting the Institution into a college devoted to the classics, Arabic and other languages. Yes Arabic, because it was most important language of literacy and scholarship in the West African region in that Era. Alright, 1818, the Governor advised that the school at Leicester separate the boys from the men, and the men moved to Regent in 1820. So, the separation in 1818 could be seen – as one of the sources say – as the moment that the institution “passed into a college.” If so, then why is 1818 not treated as the founding date? Or is the moment actually in 1820, when the men moved Regent? Yes, men. For over more than half its life, Fourah Bay College was an ‘only men” space. And for nearly all its life it has been overwhelmingly male. Well save for the moments after the Rebel War, when women began attending in high numbers, and currently most disciplines and equal or more women than men in them. Though hmmmm, lecturers continue to be overwhelmingly male.
But let’s go back to dates – 1818, 1820. But then, in 1826, the institution effectively collapsed after Governor Neil Campbell abolished the support system sustaining liberated African students. No more grant in aid, like the situation presently.
That collapse of 1826 is crucial. How does an institution founded in 1827 emerge from an institution that had effectively closed in 1826? Was 1827 a founding, a resuscitation, a relocation, a renaming, or a retrospective administrative stabilization of a much older and far more unstable educational experiment?
The answer appears to be all of these simultaneously. The arrival of Reverend Charles Haensel in 1827 marked an effort to resuscitate the Christian Institution. Haensel himself reportedly viewed the institution as a continuation rather than an entirely new creation. In his reports Haensel referred to the establishment as the “Christian Institution at Fourah Bay.”
That building at Fourah Bay has a history that tells a lot about Salone history. Before it became associated with education, it stood within the world of the Atlantic slave trade as a slave factory, a term whose original meaning referred to a trading post managed by factors, the commercial agents who facilitated exchange. But this site once connected to the trafficking of enslaved Africans became the home of the Christian Institution, purchased for £335. The grounds travelled from one economy to another: from a place implicated in the export of human beings to a place dedicated to the cultivation of minds.
The building’s subsequent journey continued to mirror the wider fortunes of Sierra Leone. During the Second World War, the British authorities requisitioned it for military purposes, forcing the college to relocate to Mabang. Later, with the construction of Water Quay, the property passed into the ownership of the Sierra Leone Ports Authority and gradually ceased to function as an educational space. Various port-related offices occupied the premises, including those of the Dock Workers’ Union, while parts of the structure fell into disuse. During the civil war, the building entered yet another chapter, becoming a refuge for displaced civilians fleeing violence and insecurity. The transformation was telling: a structure that had once facilitated commerce, then nurtured education, and later supported the routines of port administration, became a sanctuary for those uprooted by conflict. The fire that eventually gutted the building only deepened its status as a historical witness. Few structures in Sierra Leone embody so many layers of the country’s past: slavery and emancipation, education and administration, war and displacement.
But which strand (or strands) tend to be the stable one in particular eras, or before particular audiences. Which one do people like to talk about? The politics of this stabilization becomes even more visible when one interrogates the spatial history of the institution.
“Fourah Bay College” is itself a geographical claim. The institution, as seen above, has occupied multiple locations across its existence, adapting to war, administrative decisions, and changing circumstances. Yet only one place, Fourah Bay, survived as its official symbolic identity. Leicester remains in the historical record but only faintly in institutional memory. Regent is remembered but occupies a secondary position. Mabang, despite hosting the college during the Second World War, scarcely features in narratives, well, except perhaps in the autobiographical of Professor Eldred Jones, The Freetown Bond. Even Mount Aureol, the institution’s current home, remains unofficial as a name – students and alumni often referring to the college simply as “Aureol,” and to themselves as Aurolites or Aureol men and women
There is an irony here. The institution is officially named not for the mountain on which it now stands, but for a bay and wharf area below, at the lower elevations of the city. It is named for down while residing up. The symbolism becomes even more interesting when one considers that another famous “Bay” in Freetown – Susan’s Bay, now often simply called “Bay”. It occupies a similarly low-lying coastal space and has become one of the city’s most studied sites of poverty, precarity, and contradiction. Students, commenting on periods of decline or institutional crisis at Fourah Bay College, have sometimes jokingly remarked that “all bay na bay,” collapsing Fourah Bay and Susan’s Bay into a single ironic commentary on deterioration, neglect, and diminished fortunes.
“Fourah Bay” has therefore become more than a geographical description. It is a symbolic identity. It conceals the institution’s long spatial mobility while simultaneously accumulating meanings far beyond geography itself.
So, just as 1827 stabilizes chronology, “Fourah Bay” stabilizes geography. One fixes a beginning. The other fixes a place. The same retrospective stabilization can be seen in another important milestone. Fourah Bay College is often celebrated as the first Western-style university institution in sub-Saharan Africa, yet it only acquired the authority to award degrees through its affiliation with Durham University in 1876. Even this development emerged from debate rather than inevitability. Discussions reportedly considered whether the institution should affiliate with Oxford, Cambridge or Durham. The missionaries eventually favoured Durham because of its stronger religious orientation and its compatibility with the college’s Christian mission. Yet the decision was not universally welcomed in England itself. Some residents of Durham viewed the prospect of awarding degrees to Africans with deep unease. One disgruntled correspondent wrote to a local newspaper suggesting that, at this rate, degrees might soon be awarded to monkeys. The remark, intended as an insult, reveals much about the racial assumptions of the period and the anxieties generated when educational privileges previously reserved for Europeans appeared to be extending beyond imperial boundaries.
There is a certain historical irony here. The affiliation later became a source of enormous pride for Fourah Bay College and for Sierra Leone, like Salone people highing up the country with the ambiguous epithet of ‘Athens of West Africa.’ Or when older folks who entered the college before its separation with Durham to become the University of Sierra Leone in 1967 refer to themselves as the Durham breed. But some inhabitants of the English university town regarded the union in 1876 with apprehension and even ridicule. One is reminded, too, of nearby Leicester, Regent, Motomeh, Gloucester, Barthurst general area and the chimpanzee sanctuary at Tacugama – in older times affectonately nicknamed “Babu College”. There is a further irony here. Today, the passport with which we travel carries the image of a chimpanzee. In Krio, many people casually refer to a chimpanzee as babu -baboon – even though, as zoology insists, it is no such thing. Rather it belongs to the most endangered subspecies, the Western Chimpazeee or Pan troglodytes verus. So be it. The mix-up box-up survives. This too is Sierra Leone, if u say u go beat babu for e worwor, u go kill am . But babu mama lek e babu pikin no matter what. Language, humour, affection, and classification often travel different roads. It is difficult not to smile at the strange historical convergence: a nineteenth-century English commentator worrying that African students might soon receive university degrees alongside monkeys; a modern Sierra Leone proudly displaying a chimpanzee on its passport; and a Baboon College in the shadow of Fourah Bay College itself. Racism, pride, humour, official symbolism, and everyday language all become curiously entangled in the same historical thread.
But let’s return to gist about dates. It is the date that we celebrate, not the geography. Yet this date issue is larger than Fourah Bay College. It touches on how historical memory works. Indeed, the privileging of precise dates is itself only but a particular way of remembering the past. It is far from universal. Across Sierra Leone, especially among older generations, people have often located life events not through calendar dates but through memorable happenings. A mother might recall a birth not by citing a day, month, and year, but by saying it occurred “the week the Queen visited,” “when they started ploughing the fields across the river,” “during the year of the big flood,” or “just after your grandmother died.” Personal biographies were anchored to social events, agricultural cycles, deaths, migrations, epidemics, political transitions, and other occurrences that left a mark on collective memory. Time was remembered through events rather than through Gregorian numbers like 1827, 19 zote or 20 whatever.
Institutions, however, tend to operate differently. They often prefer singular dates because dates simplify narratives. A neat beginning permits anniversary rituals, commemorative branding, heritage claims, alumni pride, and national symbolism. Complexity is administratively inconvenient. The event-centred memory of communities is therefore frequently replaced by the date-centred memory of institutions. What may originally have been a fankadama process becomes compressed into a single commemorative marker.
But even within this chronological date centeredness, there are also what we may refer to as narrative clean up dates. They smooth ruptures, conceal discontinuities, stabilize identity, and create the impression of linear institutional becoming.
1827 appears to function precisely in this way. It acts less as a pure point of origin and more as a commemorative clean-up mechanism. The date tidies overlapping institutional histories into a manageable storyline. It privileges Haensel’s revival effort, the movement toward Fourah Bay itself, and the consolidation of the institution into a recognizable proto-college structure. But this selection simultaneously obscures earlier histories: the Christian Institution of 1814–1816, the educational experiments at Leicester, the transitional seminary phase, the institutional discontinuities of the 1820s, and the role of liberated Africans whose labor and experiences sustained the institution long before its commemorative stabilization.
In this sense, founding dates often involve acts of selective remembering and selective forgetting. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into symbolic power become useful here. Institutions possess the power to consecrate particular versions of history as legitimate. Through repetition, ceremonies, plaques, speeches, prospectuses, archives, and anniversaries, one version of the past becomes naturalized. What was once contestable hardens into common sense. Foundational myths ossify into “facts.”
This does not necessarily mean the facts are false. Rather, it means they are socially stabilized interpretations. The story becomes even more complicated when one examines the wider historical ecology from which the institution emerged. Fourah Bay College did not arise in isolation. It emerged from the violent afterlife of the Atlantic slave trade, British abolitionism, missionary expansion, colonial governance, liberated African resettlement, and experiments in racialized civilization.
The educational project itself was deeply entangled with imperial ambitions. The Christian Institution sought simultaneously to “civilize,” evangelize, discipline, linguistically standardize, and produce African intermediaries useful to colonial administration. Governor MacCarthy emphasized teaching recaptives “to earn a living and, above all, teach them loyalty.” Thus, even the institution’s “founding” cannot be separated from broader projects of colonial ordering.
Thus, the story of the founding invites what may be called a contrapuntal reading of the institution’s origins. Borrowing loosely from Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal analysis, the history of Fourah Bay College may be read through multiple overlapping and partially conflicting historical melodies rather than through a singular triumphant narrative. The official story now points up 1827, missionary initiative, institutional continuity, and educational trailblazer. Running alongside it, however, is another story: one of liberated Africans, displaced peoples, coerced mobility, survival, translation, negotiation, and African intellectual viability. The matter is therefore more borku-borku, rope-rope, draw-draw than our commemorative rituals sometimes allow. The real wahala, therefore, is not whether 1827 matters. It clearly does. But whether it represents a founding in the strict historical sense, or whether it functions as a narrative clean-up date that tidies a far more, fankadama process of emergence into a single, convenient point of origin