History
Established in 1827 as an Anglican missionary school (by the Church Missionary Society), Fourah Bay College soon became a magnet for Krio and other Africans seeking higher education under the British Empire, especially in the fields of theology and education. It was the first western-style university in West Africa. Under colonialism, Freetown was known as the "Athens of Africa" as an homage to the college.
The first black principal of the university was an African American missionary, Reverend Edward Jones from South Carolina in the United States. Lamina Sankoh was a prominent early academic; Francis Heiser was principal from 1920 to 1922. Abioseh Nicol was the first Sierra Leonean administrator in 1966.
As of 1998/1999, the student enrollment was around 2,000 in four faculties and five institutes. It had consistently expanded the 10 years previous.
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“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)