By Ari Awagana, Femi Kolapo, Camille Lefebvre and Benedetta Rossi
In the framework of the Langarchiv Project, Ari Awagana, Femi Kolapo, Camille Lefebvre, and Benedetta Rossi have been researching the life and works of Thomas Cole John, the son of two Hausa Liberated Africans, trained at the Freetown Grammar School and at Fourah Bay College, who joined the CMS as a native missionary in Lokoja and became one of the earliest scholars to collect and study the Hausa language.
Ari Awagana, Camille Lefebvre, and Benedetta Rossi first encountered T. C. John in 2018, while looking for missionaries involved in the study of the Hausa and the Kanuri languages at the Cadbury Research Archives of the University of Birmingham. Amongst various well-known missionary linguists such as Sigismund Koelle or James Frederick Schön, they came across the writing of a native missionary who had been working in a station where Hausa was spoken. They decided to make copies of material relating to him, but initially did not know that he had collected and written Hausa texts and played a vital role in the development of Hausa language studies.

A few years later, Ari Awagana, Camille Lefebvre, and Benedetta Rossi developed an MA Seminar course that they taught collectively at the EHESS in Paris in the second semester 2022-2023. The idea of this seminar was to discuss primary sources in Hausa and Kanuri. Indeed, the history of the Central Sahel had been based primarily on sources by the elites of the Sokoto Caliphate, written mainly in Arabic, and on the writings of some European explorers. This jointly taught seminar aimed to introduce alternative sources that had been collected by linguists for the purpose of formalizing the study of Hausa and gave insights in nineteenth century popular culture, but had largely been unused by historians. The course addressed one main question: does using these alternative sources make it possible to write a social history of the Central Sahel?
To select reading material for the course, Ari, Camille and Benedetta re-explored texts that they had already studied, including the classic collection Magana Hausa edited by James Frederick Schön. They realized that many of the texts included in the book had been either written or collected by T. C. John, the missionary that they had first encountered in the CMS Archives, and for which they had identified journals and letters that contained plenty of information on his missionary work. It became clear to them that T. C. John had not only provided a large number of texts in Hausa, but that his linguistic studies could also be contextualized ‘thickly’ and triangulated with a substantial amount of evidence that documented his life and work in the CMS, as well as his relations with other categories of actors in the CMS and in Lokoja.

In the first half of 2023, Ari Awagana, Camille Lefebvre and Benedetta Rossi had been translating in English all the Hausa texts that Schön had received from T. C. John. This work involved days of joint reading, translation, and discussion of the texts in the order in which they were published in Magana Hausa. They had to make choices: how literal would their translation be? Were there Hausa terms that they would not translate, but include in a glossary that would explain their Hausa meaning? What about the punctuation? They were aware that the production of these texts posed many questions. Most of them were originally oral testimonies that had been put into writing, and might have been revised at multiple stages by different persons. But it was also possible that texts sent by T. C. John were only slightly modified before being published. Ari, Camille, and Benedetta chose to adopt a literal translation style as close to the Hausa text as possible, as this facilitated critical reflections on the projects of the authors and transcribers. When they faced doubts they could not solve, they added footnotes.

As They looked for secondary studies on this subject, they came across the contributions of Femi Kolapo, who had been researching the Nupe Emirate since the times of his doctoral studies. He was looking for sources that would shed light on Nupe in the first half of the nineteenth century, a time for which oral sources would not be helpful. He, too, had visited the CMS Archive in Birmingham through a Northern Nigerian Scheme Project coordinated by Paul Lovejoy in the second half of the 1990s. Here, he read material on Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the younger native missionaries who accompanied him in the Niger Mission: T. C. John, Charles Paul, and James Thomas were some of the men who worked together in Lokoja, the southernmost part of the Nupe Emirate, following the missionary vision of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. In his later work, Femi Kolapo continued to explore this network of native missionaries in an effort to understand their perspectives and strategies, and write a missionary history that would not be based solely on the thoughts and actions of European actors. Femi Kolapo published a book on these actors and critical editions of their writings. Ari, Camille, and Benedetta included his works in the historiography recommended to the students who followed their seminar at EHESS and contacted him to join forces and work on T. C. John together.


Now a team of four, they continued to carry out research in multiple archives and locations where traces of T. C. John’s experience could be found. They looked for events in which he was involved that could have influenced his own perceptions of his intellectual, missionary, and linguistic work. They went to Cambridge University Library to search in the archives of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which published Magana Hausa; and visited the Bodleian Library in Oxford to search the archives of the Hausa Association. They also gained access to relevant material from the Kaduna archives in Nigeria thanks to the help of Vincent Hiribarren; and learned about aspects of the life of one of T. C. John’s sons through the help of Michael Odijie. They were introduced to Sierra Leone and its archives by Richard Anderson, Katrina Keefer and Suzanne Schwarz. In July 2024, they travelled to Sierra Leone and visited the places of T. C. John’s early life, including Hastings and Waterloo, the Liberated African villages where he was born and spent his youth; the schools where he studied: the Freetown Grammar School and the Fourah Bay College; and Benguema, where he taught Catechism in 1863-65 before relocating to Lokoja. Ari, Camille, Femi and Benedetta benefited from the support of Professor Ibrahim Abdullah of Sierra Leone University and Mr Albert Moore, Director of the SLNA, and of his team of archivists. They found a plaque dedicated to T. C. John by his children in the Church of St. Thomas in Hastings. And the work has only just begun…

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Camille Lefebvre (24 juillet 2024). On the tracks of Thomas Cole John. Langarchiv. Consulté le 26 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1235p