By Asmieu Bah
They were under no illusion when in 1814 the Christian Missionary Society established a Christian institution in the Village of Leicester which later became Fourah Bay College in 1827. The Christian Missionary Society established the first institution of higher learning in Sub Saharan Africa. Fourah Bay College as it was later called became a centre of academia in the sub-region. It was as a result of this solid foundation in academia that Freetown was called the Athens of West Africa or the Mother of British West Africa. All these apt descriptions and metaphors were testimony to the significance of the City of Freetown, a city that served as the citadel and epicentre of civilization and academia in West Africa.
From Freetown, as it was in Greece, the light of excellence in academia shone beyond its borders. It was in Athens that philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Herodotus and Thucydides were born. Men whose theories are still being read about in universities all over the
world. For instance anybody who has read anything about Political Science is familiar with Plato’s Philosopher King theory that talks about leadership in society. The Pythagoras theory in mathematics is also well known in college classrooms. Athens was a centre of excellence for literature and art. Works of Athenian philosophers were read all over Europe and beyond. Their literature and arts were watched and acted in many European cities.
After the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, when Freetown became the head of the British Naval Squadron, the city attracted many freed slaves hence the name Freetown. Freetown became a melting pot.
The instruments that the colonial masters used to build the new community that they wanted were education and Christianity. The colonial masters opened up schools and churches to teach the ‘’savage’’ people a new religion and a formal education. Fourah Bay College was born and became the first college in West Africa. Freetown then started playing host to many from all over the world especially West Africa who converged here to acquire university education in medicine, law, liberal arts and theology. Even some people in England preferred sending their kids to Freetown to acquire education.
Fourah Bay College like Athens in Greece has a proud and enviable history that will not be effaced so easily in the annals of history. But like FBC today, which has had to send its students on an unprecedented 6-month-long holiday – a sign of how things have plummeted – Athens is also going through terrible times with even money to run the city and the country coming from abroad.
The economic meltdown hitting Greece has witnessed the ugliest of times in the country's recent history. Just as things are looking for FBC. The college has witnessed a terrible learning environment such as insufficient lecture rooms, obsolete text books, lecturers downing tools in every semester, under-staffing among other things are just few of the things that are still continuing to hinder the academic calendar. It is despicable, to say the least, that when I was a student there just a few years ago, we sat to exams in the open Adjai Crowther Amphitheatre in the hot burning sun to take lectures not out of pleasure or fun but because there were not enough lecture rooms. We had to scramble and run all around campus to see where an empty classroom was.
Fourah Bay College is amongst few universities, if there is any other, where in every semester students will stand in long queues just to collect or register a course form. Sometimes we spent days to get such a form signed.
As a student who spent four years at FBC I paid for computer but never touched a computer keypad.
Like in Athens, at Fourah Bay College hardly an academic year passes without lecturers downing their tools or junior workers closing the classrooms depriving students of lectures. We have seen the economic crunch in Greece that has led to many street battles between the police and ordinary Greek who are angry at the way their country has been battered. The austerity measures have been opposed by the populace putting the government between the rock and a hard place.
Last year was recorded as the worst academic year. For the first time in the history of the college graduation was held three months after its traditional December date. It was also for the first time that examination was postponed on the grounds there was not enough exam papers. It was also for the first time that students hostels were close down for this long and those students who became squatters were asked out. When they refused they faced the music of rustication.
Like the European Union bailout package for Greece, the Islamic Development Bank has signed millions of dollars agreement to renovate FBC – to construct hostels and new buildings including classrooms, lecturers’ quarters and other offices.
The question that is on many people's minds is what drove Fourah Bay College to this brink of a near collapse from a college that has a proud heritage and yet cannot be rated amongst the best fifty universities on the continent. A college that once attracted citizens from all over Africa now finding it difficult to even attract Sierra Leoneans who only go there because of the lack of a viable
alternative. A college that was on the vanguard of research and debate but has now been reduced to student election violence where human faeces are splashed at the doors of opposing colleagues. A college where the speaking of good, quality English was the hallmark has now been reduced to the speaking of Krio and other local languages.
Let me hasten to state that despite all these challenges there is still some pride in me for having attended FBC. I am sanguine that as our proud history teaches us we will surely build on the heritage of our great fore fathers like Dr Davidson Nicol and Adjai Crowther. Their blood is in our veins and we will not let them down. With radical change, transformation and depoliticising of the college I am sure the future will be bright. Politics should be divorced from the college.
I see no need why we should not compete with other colleges in Africa. In 2007 I was interviewed by an Austrian journalist at the British Council she was impressed that I almost taught her about her country’s history and that of France and USA. After the interview she asked: what college did you attend? I proudly said Fourah Bay College. Needless to say that she was pleased.
Asmieu Bah is a broadcast journalist working for the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation
