Gentlemen all,

 The precise psychiatric term is echolalia – the gossip that some people read as history or revealed scripture and continue to endlessly regurgitate – as truth - and go on doing so nausea ad infinitum.

I am writing as a Yoruba man and I should like to advise some caution and that we try to be a little extra careful so that as people begin to be too emotional about these matters and tribalism begins to rear its beautiful head again, ethnic chauvinism doesn't get the better of us all.

 Personally, I would much prefer the term "liberated African" to the more derogatory "freed slave" as that expression crops up in this discussion that has just started.

There seems to be  much confusion about the ancestry of some of our liberated African heroes, with the Yoruba  of course and to some extent  the Igbo laying greater claims to greatness  by appropriating  even remote personages  like Olaudah Equiano,  even though sometimes  as in the case of Equiano  the claim is grounded  on  the alleged veracities contained  in his literary remains   - by which I mean  what he is alleged to have himself written,  some of which has been scrutinised and minutely  dissected  and partly revealed  as nothing less than spurious , alleged " autobiographic " or hagiographical accounts. These confusions are less controversial when it comes to the Creoles of Sierra Leone, the Gambia  and Nigeria in particular  - and also the other major Diaspora areas  in West Africa, such as Liberia, coastal and interior Ghana, some parts of the Cameroons,  and what was once known as Fernando Po and is now known as  Equatorial New Guinea.

I was mildly taken aback by the opening assertions (I have read no further), that

"For example the first yoruba lawyer Christopher Alexander Sapara Williams was called to the English Bar in 1879 whilst the first igbo lawyer, Sir Louis Mbanefo, was called to the English bar in 1937. Again the first yoruba medical practitioner, Dr. Nathaniel King, graduated in 1875 from the University of Edinburgh whilst the first igbo medical practitioner, Dr. Akannu Ibiam, graduated from another Scottish" University in 1935"

Moving from  such uncertainties to what is more certain one can only say that even the relativity of these alleged facts of history are at best partisan and if we are more aware of the history and chronology are at most not absolutely true. To give just one example  we  have in the person of Africanus Horton  about whom Dr. Davidson Nicol lectured ( I attended one such in 1966 did converse with Dr. Nicol on several  brief occasions on this topic) and it is evident that Africanus Horton was of Igbo  ancestry and that "He studied at King's College London and Edinburgh University, qualifying as a medical doctor in 1859 "

 There are many more such examples of prominent Sierra Leoneans who are people of incorruptible Yoruba ancestry and people of incontestable Igbo ancestry, to name just a few, such as

John Ezzidio

Edward Wilmot Blyden

Sir Samuel Lewis

John Henry Malamah-Thomas

John Augustus Abayomi-Cole

Sir Ernest Samuel Beoku-Betts

Eustace Henry Taylor Cummings

Lamina Sankoh

And many, many more whose names will surely emerge as this discussion continues, suffice it to say that among the Yoruba Krios there were lawyers galore before 1937 - in fact I have a picture of my grandfather (my mother's father)  Nathanael Boston taken in London in 1919 with other pan-Africanists... available from the journal African Affairs, Volume 88 Number 350, January 1989 and entitled A Memorable Gathering of Sierra Leoneans in London 1919

Sincerely,

We Sweden