Athens of West Africa: Fourah Bay College

On 18 February 1827 the Church Missionary Society opened a small school at Fourah Bay, on the eastern edge of Freetown, with the backing of the governor, Charles MacCarthy. Its first student was a young Yoruba man who had been taken as a slave, freed from a slave ship and brought to the colony: Samuel Ajayi Crowther. He went on to lead the translation of the Bible into Yoruba and, in 1864, to become the first African bishop of the Anglican Church.

It was the first Western-style university in sub-Saharan Africa, and for most of the next century it was the only one in West Africa.

A building by the bay

In 1845 Governor William Fergusson laid the foundation stone of a proper college building. The work was overseen by Edward Jones, a Black missionary from South Carolina, who became its first principal. The stone building, with its tall ironwork verandahs, stood near the water in what is now Cline Town. It is the building in the pictures on this page.

Durham degrees in Freetown

In 1876 the college was affiliated to Durham University in England. From then on a student in Freetown could earn a Durham degree without crossing the sea, and students came from Nigeria, the Gold Coast and further along the coast to do it. Their teachers, clergy, lawyers and doctors are much of the reason Freetown was called "the Athens of Africa".

Its graduates filled the history of the country. Lati Hyde-Forster, the college's first woman graduate, became the first African principal of the Annie Walsh Memorial School. Henry Lightfoot Boston became the first Sierra Leonean Governor-General. Clifford Nelson Fyle wrote the words of the national anthem. In 1966 Davidson Nicol became the first Sierra Leonean to lead the college itself.

Up the hill

During the Second World War the college left Freetown for a time, and it never went back to the building by the bay. It found its home on Mount Aureol, high above the city, where it still stands as part of the University of Sierra Leone. The Durham link ended in 1967.

On the hill, the college's Institute of African Studies, begun in 1966, became a centre for the country's own history. Stone tools from the Kamabai rock shelter, whose story is told in Before the Colony, were laid out and photographed there.

The old building in Cline Town became the offices of the Sierra Leone Government Railway, then a magistrates' court. It was declared a National Monument in 1955, was damaged when rebels invaded Freetown in January 1999, and was later gutted by fire. Its walls still stand.

If you studied at Fourah Bay, or your parents did, share a graduation photograph, a hall picture or a story from the hill. The college's history is in its people as much as its buildings.