Linguistist

12 October 2026

The Banjo He Never Played

Fourah Bay College opened in Freetown in 1827, and the first student through the door was a Yoruba boy who had been freed off a slave ship at twelve and baptised Samuel Crowther. He learned Latin and Greek there, and Temne, and then he spent his life writing his own language down. He became the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa. That is the school at its best. It took a person the sea had thrown away and made him the most educated man in the region.

In 1873, one of its sons went to the source of the Greek.

Christian Frederick Cole was from Waterloo, near Freetown, the grandson of a slave. He enrolled at Oxford and studied classics. He was the first Black student at the university. He came with no college to take him, so he went in as an unattached student and paid his way by coaching other men through Responsions, one of the exams you had to pass for a degree, and his classes were popular. He taught music too. When his uncle died and the money ran out, the men around him, the Master of his college among them, put in and helped him.

That is one Oxford. There is another one in the papers.

The cartoonists drew him playing a banjo. He played and taught the piano. They called him King Cole, which reads like affection until you hear the undergraduates say it, and then it is a costume they put on a man from Freetown so they could keep knowing him.

He answered them in print. In 1879 he brought out a pamphlet on the Zulu war, signed by a Negro, B.A., of University College, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, and inside it a poem:

Ye white men of England Oh tell, tell, I pray, If the curse of your land, Is not, day after day, To increase your possessions With reckless delight, To subdue many nations, And show them your might.

He took a fourth-class degree in 1876. He went home to Freetown in 1880 looking for work, found none, and went back to England to read law. The Inner Temple took him in 1883. He became the first Black African to practise in the English courts. He went out to Zanzibar to work. He died there of smallpox in 1885. He was thirty-three.

In October 2017 a plaque went up on the outside wall of University College, in Logic Lane, across from the law library. One hundred and thirty-seven years after he left.

I keep coming back to the banjo. Everything else they could shut, the colleges, the court, the door he had to teach his way through. They could not shut him out of the room, so in the drawing they handed him the wrong instrument instead.

A hundred and thirty-seven years to put up a plaque. I would have started with the piano.