MACFOY, SOLOMON BENJAMIN AUGUSTUS

Solomon Benjamin Augustus Macfoy (circa 1843-January 16, 1893) was a Sierra Leone Krio (Creole) who for several years dominated the Sherbro country of Sierra Leone. He came originally from Kent village, south of Free-town. The story is that as a boy he was thrown overboard from a canoe off Sherbro Island, swam ashore to Jamaica Point, and determined to stay there and make his fortune. Within 20 years he had established himself as a powerful trader, trading on his own, and as agent for a British export firm in Manchester which was sending him annually some €40,000 worth of goods in return for produce.

Small and unimpressive-looking, with little formal education, he was a man of wide ambitions. Hardworking himself, he demanded hard work from others, carrying out his plans with ruthless determination. He extended his business to the mainland, buying up the European and Krio trading establishments along the Sherbro rivers, and building his own bonded warehouse at Bonthe, the main trading center. He had a cargo steamship of his own built for him in England, naming it with his own nickname, Sherbro Monarch.

Perceiving that economic control of the country demanded political activity, he extended his influence over the still-independent Sherbro rulers. Here he was able to take advantage of a legal anomaly which made some of the Sherbro mainland technically part of the Colony of Sierra Leone, even though no British jurisdiction was exercised there.

Acting within the letter of the law, he lent money to some of the rulers of Imperi, on the mainland opposite Sherbro Island, in return for mortgages on their territories. In 1885 he foreclosed on the defaulting Ka Tegbe of Gendama and began assuming sovereign rights in his country. When Ka Tegbe complained to the British authorities they would do nothing to help him, as they did not want to raise publicly the complicated issues involved.

Macfoy’s business declined during the late 1880s, and he mortgaged ten of his trading establishments for £6,534 to a Liverpool firm. Instead, he turned to farming, employing labor on a large scale to grow coffee, cocoa, and other plantation produce, first on Sherbro Island, then in Imperi, which he now virtually controlled. When villages stood in the way of his schemes, he evicted the inhabitants and demolished their homes. When the British authorities tried to stop him, he warned them that he had legal rights to the land and that if they objected they must take him to court, knowing well that they were not going to risk a law case over the status of Imperi.

Eventually a newly-appointed British official, George H. Garrett, determined to put him down, and suspecting him of being implicated in an outbreak of leopard murders in Imperi, proposed he be detained as a political prisoner. Macfoy retained as his legal adviser the leading Freetown lawyer, Sir Samuel Lewis, who was able to convince the government that no case could be brought against him.

Macfoy died on January 16, 1893, at the age of 50, after a paralytic stroke which had suddenly struck him down. He was brought first to Freetown to be treated by Dr. Davies, but, discouraged by the prolonged treatment, his relatives later took him to a country doctor in Grassfields, around Brookfields in western Freetown. It was there that the ‘Sherbro Monarch’ ended his days, a man who had inspired fear rather than love even in his admirers, an outstanding, if ruthless, example of Krio drive and energy.

CHRISTOPHER FYFE