ABSTRACT
THE precise date when James Johnson was brought into this world may never be known. This may seem strange to scholars familiar with the impressive and considerably detailed documentary materials on the Waterloo District of the Sierra Leone Colony. where he was born, among which marriage licences provide some clue to the birthdate of many contemporaries older than he.1 But there is nothing unusual about the absence from the records of any account concerning his birth. However it has one significance: it indicates the nature of his origins. For had his parents been literate or people of substance. in close contact with the C.M.S. or Wesleyan missionaries. the journal-makers of those days. or had he been born in the coastal area of Freetown which was under the close surveillance of the Colonial Government. his birth might have received attention. But both his father and mother were obscure. unlettered, poor and inconsequential frontier settlers, a class of people incapable of appreciating the necessity for birthrecording.
