Africa’s oldest university counts down to 200 years with a procession from its historic Cline Town roots to the heart of Freetown
THE rain came down. It did not matter.
Professors, ministers, lecturers, alumni, students, and well-wishers all refused to yield to the downpour that greeted the morning of Friday, May 23, as Fourah Bay College launched one of the most symbolically charged events in its approaching bicentenary: a grand float parade through the streets of Freetown, retracing the institution’s own historical journey from its origins to its place in the consciousness of a nation and a continent.
The float parade began at the Old Fourah Bay College building in Cline Town the storied waterfront neighbourhood in the east end of Freetown where the institution’s founding story is etched in stone and laterite and wound its way through the capital before concluding at the Siaka Stevens Stadium on Syke Street. The route itself was a statement: a living institution moving through a living city, connecting its past to its present, its founding walls to its future.
The procession carried dignitaries and scholars alongside ordinary alumni and students on floats, a confluence of academic rank and community belonging that captured something essential about what Fourah Bay College has always meant to Sierra Leone. No storm, it seemed, could diminish what nearly two hundred years of history have made self-evident.
The float parade is one of several events building toward the institution’s official bicentenary, which falls on February 18, 2027 two hundred years to the day since the Church Missionary Society opened its doors in Freetown and changed the intellectual map of a continent.
Fourah Bay College was founded on February 18, 1827 by the Church Missionary Society and is recognised as the oldest western-style university in West Africa and the first such institution in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1827, the Anglican Church Missionary Society created a grammar school in Freetown known as The Christian Institution, then developed it into a training centre for ministers. Its name changed to Fourah Bay College when construction of the Cline Town building began in 1845, under the supervision of its first principal, Rev. Edward Jones, an African-American from Charleston. Timber from slave ships was repurposed to form the building’s roof in this way, the journey of the Liberated Africans was represented as a story of resilience and prosperity.
That the float parade chose to begin at the Old Fourah Bay College building in Cline Town was therefore no accident. The original Fourah Bay College building is perhaps the single most influential institution in Africa in accounting for the penetration and acceleration of the spread of Western education on the continent. To begin a countdown procession at that building was to begin at the source.
Fourah Bay College holds the record for being the first Western-style university built in Sub-Saharan Africa, from which the first sets of university graduates in Sub-Saharan Africa emerged. This college contributed immensely to Freetown gaining the nickname “the Athens of West Africa.”
That nickname was hard-earned. The institution acquired such fame for the quality of its graduates serving at home and abroad, and for the professors who sacrificed so much and gave their very best, that even before its affiliation to the University of Durham in England in 1876, Fourah Bay College had been likened to the Academia of Athens in Ancient Greece hence being aptly described as “The Athens of West Africa.”
Its most prominent 19th and early 20th century graduates included Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church; J. E. Casely Hayford, an early advocate of education and self-rule for West Africans; and Henry Rawlingson Carr, a prominent Nigerian educator and administrator. As one of the few places in pre-independence Africa to offer post-secondary education, Fourah Bay College attracted sons and daughters of elite Africans from across the continent.
That legacy stretches deep into the region’s political and intellectual identity graduates of FBC played pivotal roles in the independence movements, civil services, legal professions, and educational systems of Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, and beyond, at a time when the rest of sub-Saharan Africa had no equivalent institution to turn to.
As Fourah Bay College approaches two centuries of academic excellence, the institution remains steadfast in its mission to advance knowledge, research, and innovation in Sierra Leone and beyond. The bicentenary logo, launched at the 198th anniversary celebrations in February 2025, has become the emblem of a two-year countdown that Friday’s float parade has now dramatically elevated in the public imagination.
The bicentenary in 2027 offers both a celebration and a reckoning the milestone invites reflection not only on nearly two centuries of achievement but also on the responsibilities of the next century. The institution that once had six students and a handful of CMS missionaries now sits at the centre of Sierra Leone’s higher education system, carrying the weight of its own reputation as it navigates the pressures of funding, reform, and relevance.
Read Also: 200 Years of Fourah Bay College: What Exactly Are We Celebrating?
But if Friday’s parade proved anything, it is that the attachment between FBC and the people of Sierra Leone students, staff, ministers, professors, alumni decades removed from their graduation, and ordinary citizens who simply know what the name means remains as fierce and as real as ever. The rain fell. The floats kept moving. The Athens endures.
