Description:
Life and Work of Thomas Cole John presents a critical edition of the writings of a missionary and Hausa scholar, son of Liberated Africans. Born in 1836 near Freetown to Hausa-speaking 'recaptives', T. C. John trained at Fourah Bay College before working as the lead 'native missionary' in charge of the Church Missionary Society station at Lokoja, on the southern edge of the Sokoto Caliphate, from 1865 until1883. This volume, consisting of the bilingual writings of T.C John in Hausa and English, brings together, for the first time, around fifty of his letters and reports to the CMS alongside an entirely new annotated translation of the Hausa oral texts he worked on with the missionary linguist J. F. Schön. Framed by a general introduction and detailed linguistic analysis, the edition recovers T. C. John's own contribution to the foundations of Hausa studies and offers a richly documented case study in the social, religious and political history of the Niger-Benue confluence. Resisting easy categorisation as slave descendant, Christian convert, translator, interpreter, writer and scholar, T. C. John emerges as a pivotal, previously overlooked figure in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century West Africa.
Brief description: Ari Awagana studied General and African Linguistics at the Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey, Niger, and the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, before obtaining his PhD from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Leipzig. He has been Senior Lecturer in Hausa Language and African Linguistics at the same institute since October 2000. His research focuses on the description of Chadic languages (Hausa, Buduma) and Saharan languages (Kanuri, Tubu) of the Lake Chad region. He is a senior researcher on the ERC-funded LANGARCHIV project (ERC-StG-759390, PI Camille Lefebvre, 2018-2026).