The West African Methodist Collegiate School, 1911-2021

Book excerpt: The West African Methodist Collegiate School 1911–2021 presents an intricate analysis of challenging missionary work in Sierra Leone and West Africa. In meticulous detail, the book revisits an era that spans the slave trade and the manumission of slaves, and examines the ways that missionaries helped to educate former slaves and free men for a viable form of existence. The checkered history of the school chronicles the adversities, courage, and determination of men who dared to preserve an educational institution that was designed to provide religious and secular education. In more elaborate terms, the book reveals how changing circumstances and conditions of the twenty-first century can obscure a nineteenth-century concept when socioeconomic challenges and the vicissitudes of war and epidemics become too overpowering.