ABSTRACT
James Africanus Beale Horton, physician, scientist, historian, writer and Pan-Africanist has been called ‘the father of modern African political thought’.
James Horton was born in the village of Gloucester, near Freetown, in the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1835. He was the seventh of eight children born to James Horton, a carpenter, and his wife Nancy and the only child who survived infancy. Horton’s parents were both ‘recaptives’, enslaved Igbos (from what is now eastern Nigeria), who had been liberated by the British anti-slavery squadron and released in Sierra Leone. Like many freed slaves in Sierra Leone they had taken an English name; the original Horton was an English missionary who had visited Sierra Leone from 1816-21.
