The changing face of Samuel Lewis: a personal memoir

Abstract

Preparation for the bicentenary, guided by a constructively importunate editor, has given me the chastening experience of re-reading the brief Life of Sir Samuel Lewis which I published in 1958. This note briefly recalls the conception of a modest early contribution to Sierra Leonean historiography. When I arrived to teach history at Fourah Bay College in 1952 my hope of finding a point of entry into the still largely unknown world of African history was supported only by a somewhat conventional apprenticeship in the Manchester history school. So the development of the Legislative Council seemed a suitable place to start. Sources seemed readily accessible, and there was a possible publication channel in the Nuffield College Studies in Colonial Legislature, which had been inaugurated by Martin Wight's volume of 1946. From the historian's point of view (if not necessarily from that of the contemporary policy-makers) Sierra Leone was the most obvious gap in the series, and Margery Perham gave me cautious encouragement to fill it. Academic incentives apart, constitutional change was in the Freetown air. It was eighteen months since Nkrumah had begun to enter his political kingdom, less than twelve since Sir George Beresford-Stooke had broken the local deadlock by installing the first SLPP Ministers. I was soon pressed to teach constitutional history and theory, to college students of politics as well as to enthusiastic extra-mural classes. The Legislative Council then seemed a more 'relevant' subject of research than the history of African agriculture or the origins of the Oje society. I did not need to read many of the meticulously kept minute books of the nineteenth century before realising that one councillor had been of commanding stature. As a good pupil of Namier I duly compiled cards for Syble Boyle, T. C. Bishop and other Krio worthies; but Samuel Lewis, with his vision that embraced broad issues of principle as well as the finest legal distinctions, had decisively influenced the development of the council as an institution. Having registered this point in an early article, I became increasingly interested in the man, and in the influences which had made him such a skilled and staunch constitutionalist. Evelyn Lewis and his sister, Mrs Richards, received me warmly in their Murray Town home, and gave me a taste of the contemporary flavour of what had once been a distinctively Egba settlement. But they had only childhood memories of their father and produced only a few miscellaneous letters and cuttings; I doubted whether much evidence had survived with which to recreate the context of his early life. However, Christopher Fyfe generously provided me with references and suggested leads from his own omnivorous researches, in a correspondence which I recall as one of the great pleasures of the period. I now wonder whether I could not have made more of the varied data which I gradually accumulated about Lewis's family connections and social activities if I had been more aware of the political ramifications of kinship and clientage in such an African context? What I did in fact perceive,