AMO, WILHELM ANTON

Anton Wilhelm Amo (about 1703-March 3, 1756) achieved fame in Europe as a scholar and philosopher, lecturing at three universities in central Europe.

He was born at a small fishing village near Axim in about 1703. His parents had been converted to Christianity by the Dutch in 1707, when he was four years old. Johannes van der Star, a preacher in the service of the Dutch West Indies Company, offered to send him to Europe to study the principles of Christianity. On Amo’s arrival in Europe, the Dutch company was reluctant to assume responsibility for his upkeep, and he was presented as a gift to Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, a convert to Catholicism, who ruled Brunswick, a state in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany.

Amo’s personal charm, disposition, and remarkable intelligence, evident at that tender age, endeared him to the Brunswick court, then located at Wolfenbuttel, the capital of Brunswick until 1753.The Duke, instead of using Amo as a slave, adopted him as a son. His chief benefactor was the Duke’s son, Augustus Wilhelm, who in 1714 succeeded his father. In 1708 Amo was christened Anton Wilhelm Amo, and was educated at the expense of the royal court.

Between 1727 and 1747, the records of three leading universities in what is now the German Democratic Republic – Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena – showed Amo as both a student and a professor. He was proficient in Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and German, and was considered a scholar and philosopher. He took as his own motto a quotation from Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the first century AD: “He that accommodates himself to necessity is a wise man, and he has an inkling of the divine.” In his philosophy, he followed the principles of the great metaphysical rationalist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), whom he had met as a boy.

In 1729, at the University of Halle, he publicly defended his dissertation, De Jure Maurorum in Europa (“On the Law of the Moors in Europe”), in which he argued that as African kings had been vassals of Rome, and had been given royal patents by the Roman emperors, they had inherited legal rights which made the enslavement of Africans by European Christians illegal.  At Wittenberg, where he became a Master of Philosophy, his doctoral dissertation, published in Latin, was entitled “Inaugural Philosophic Dissertation on the Apathy of the Human Mind, or the Absence of Feeling and the Faculty of Feeling in the Human Mind, and the Presence of Them in our Organic Living Body.”

Following the successful public disputation, in 1734, of his thesis, which maintained that sensation was not a mental faculty, Amo’s fame as an African scholar spread throughout academic circles in the Europe of his day. But, judging from his Latin manuscripts, which were copied and brought to Ghana in 1962, his intellectual qualities have been exaggerated, since his Latin was not up to the high standards of the times, and is often unintelligible. In 1738 he completed his principal work, a dissertation on logic and metaphysics. In 1739 he began to teach at Jena.

One of his many friends in Europe was Professor Johannes Petrus von Ludwig, a renowned 18th-century Prussian philosopher and ambassador, who exercised considerable influence on Amo in later years. The distinguished company of this scholar and statesman won for Amo a position as a councillor in the Prussian court, to which, from 1735 onwards, Brunswick was bound by treaty and family ties. He was also a member of several learned academies in Europe, one of which was the Academy of Vlissingen (Flushing) in the Netherlands. Records show that his university lectures covered the subjects of logic, metaphysics, physiology, geomancy, astronomy, the theory of codes, and palmistry.

On the death of Professor von Ludwig in 1743, Amo seemed to lose interest in life in Europe. In 1753 he returned to West Africa, and settled first of all at his village near Axim. Later he went to Shama, further eastward along the coast, where he was joined by his aged father and his sister. When Amo arrived home, there was no institution of higher learning at which he could continue his academic work. He therefore learned the art of goldsmithing in order to earn a living. He died in 1756, three years after his return from Europe, and was buried at Shama.

Amo’s fame in 18th-century Europe was rare for an African. By his achievements as an educator, he helped to arouse interest in Africa among the learned circles of the Europe of his time. In all official records and at public meetings he was always described in Europe as “Amo the African.”

K.A. BRITWUM