James Africanus Beale Horton

James Africanus Beale Horton was born around 1835 in Gloucester, a village near Freetown, to Igbo parents freed from a slave ship. A pupil at the Grammar School and then at Fourah Bay College, he received in 1855 a scholarship from the British War Office to study medicine at King's College, London, and then at Edinburgh, and served for twenty years as a medical officer on the coast, taking part in the Ashanti wars. Retiring at forty-five, he settled in Freetown, founded a bank and invested in gold mines, which made him one of the richest men in Africa. He died in Freetown in 1883.

In the catalogue 1

• EssayWest African Countries and PeoplesJames Africanus Beale Horton · 1868Literature