ABSTRACT
IN a broad sense the year 1890 may be taken as the watershed in James Johnson's career. Up to now the ethereal Ethiopian programme he had announced since his Sierra Leone days had prospects of being implemented ultimately, if not immediately. In the Church, African leadership in local matters became an orthodoxy with all Protestant missions. In the Anglican Communion, the reactionary racism of the local missionaries notwithstanding, the principle of African episcopacy was still to be jettisoned. The liberal spirit of the age was exemplified in the fact that by 1890 Africans were holding the principalship of the three Protestant secondary schools in the Colony of Lagos. In the State the Moloney atmosphere excited hopes of African leadership in the civil service, in which Africans controlled the police, filled the posts of Treasurer and Crown Prosecutor and acted as Queen's Advocate. In commerce and in the professions, such as law, medicine, printing and journalism the capacity of the Negro Race to master the white man's skill was being vindicated. On the whole, although the progress being achieved in all these institutions and walks of life did not go as far and as fast as James Johnson had hoped, yet it was in a spirit of elation and gratification that on 13 March 1889 he paid warm tributes to A. C. Moloney as the ideal governor whose administration "entitles itself to the gratitude of the people".l
the worse, in Afro-European relations. The implication of this new state of affairs for his Ethiopian programme was clear and emphatic; his vision and hopes began to collapse like a house of cards. This was why he bellowed so much when he saw the Sword of Damocles hanging over the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Africa. The "vengeful, destructive and desolating sword of the British", which had begun in the legislative chamber with Carter was the clear sign that African leadership in various departments of public life was becoming a thing of the past, a heresy in the Scramble era.
