James Africanus Horton
(1835-1883)

Died aged c. 48

Africanus Horton (1835–1883), also known as James Beale, was a Krio African nationalist writer and an esteemed medical surgeon in the British Army from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Africanus Horton was a surgeon, scientist, soldier, and a political thinker who worked toward African independence a century before it occurred. In his varied career, he served as a physician, an officer in the British Army, a banker, and a mining entrepreneur. In addition, he wrote a number of books and essays, the most widely remembered of which is his 1868 Vindication of the African Race, an answer to the white racist authors emerging in Europe. His writings look ahead to African self-government, anticipating many events of the 1950s and 1960s, and Horton is often seen as one of the founders of African nationalism and has been called "the father of modern African political thought". He wrote a book entitled West African Countries and Peoples (1868). A crater on Mercury is named after him.

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