ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH James Johnson in 1910 had exceeded the Biblical life span of seventy years his physical energy and mental vigour seemed those of a youth. He was endowed with a hard body. His health was ever splendid and but for the British winter that sent him to a hospital in early 1887 he was never prostrated by illness. He had his own recipe for sound health and long life; he considered both hygiene and regular physical exercise to be very important. The hardness of life in traditional African society, he said, was responsible for the superior physique and relatively long life enjoyed by Africans who had not come in contact with the comfort and ease of European civilisation.1 Educated Africans of the second and third generations who were observed to be dying in their forties, he said, owed this to the ease and comfort of the Europeanised enclaves on the Atlantic seaboard. Consequently he was a consistent advocate of physical exercise being introduced into West African schools. He himself led a hard life, abstemious in matters of liquor, women and luxuries. He trekked a lot, along tortuous paths in Yorubaland and travelled extensively in canoes in the pestiferous mosaic of creeks in the Niger Delta. In 1878 he completed a manuscript on physiology. Intended mainly for schools its aims, declared James Johnson, were to persuade Africans to correct "their habitual and general violations of the very elementary laws of health and [prevent] the injury to the country and race thereby".2
