BLACK HISTORY MONTH
A
CELEBRATION OF THE SMITH SISTERS OF SIERRA LEONE
lectures
by historian and journalist
Adenike Ogunkoya
Hammersmith Town Hall, The
Small Room, Kings Street, Hammersmith W6
Saturday 9th of October 4pm
and Saturday the 23rd of October at 4pm.
In Victorian Britain were five educated, attractive
and accomplished ladies. They were Elizabeth, Hannah, Emma, Adelaide and Annette
Smith. All born in Freetown between 1860-1870, they were the daughters of the
half English and half Fante Civil Servant, William Smith Jnr of Freetown. Their
mother was the Creole and Bambara heiress Mrs Anne Smith a member of the
Spilsbury mercantile family of Freetown.
The Smith sisters were brought up on the Isle of
Jersey in the Channel Islands with their brothers Dr Joseph Smith and their
photographer brother Thomas Smith. The Smith sisters however also spent a large
portion of their lives in Hammersmith, West London and also West Africa having
married successful and influential men from along the coast of West
Africa.
Elizabeth married Dr William Jarvis Awooner Renner,
Assistant Colonial Surgeon who later became the Mayor of Freetown. Hannah
married his brother the barrister Peter Awooner Renner who later became ADC to
the Governor of the Gold Coast. Adelaide married the Gold Coast
nationalist lawyer and writer Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford. Annette known
to all as Nettie married Dr John Farrell Easmon who became Chief Medical Officer
of the Gold Coast. Emma however became the maiden aunt of the
family.
Topics covered in relation to the Smith’s will
include the system of warding in West Africa, the system of the extended family
in West Africa and Britain. Education for women in Sierra Leone in its early
history. Comparisons will be made with other heroines in African and British
culture and literature.
Come and hear about their remarkable and incredible
lives, their contribution towards education, music and public life in general
and how one of the sisters brought up her son to challenge racial discrimination
within the West African Colonial medical Service and how such discrimination
contributed to the fight for independence. Hear how one of them showed the
formidable traits of their great-grandmother the merchant women Betsy Carew.
Hear of how they coped with their Creole, Bambara, English and Fante identity.
Furthemore, the talk will cover their friendship with the composer Samuel
Coleridge Taylor the composer of Hiawatha, a fellow Creole and another Creole,
Queen Victoria’s Goddaughter the Nigerian, Victoria Davies later Mrs
Randle.
As the Smith sisters were children from William
Smith Jnr’s second wife, the Smith sisters had half brothers and sisters from
his marriage to his first wife another half–caste woman Charlotte Macauley, the
daughter of the British Governor of Sierra Leone and a recaptive girl. The older
Smith siblings who were no less accomplished and also great achievers were
Dr William Henry Smith, Dr Robert Smith, Judge Francis Smith of the Gambia, Mrs
Mary Broughton Davies wife of Dr William Broughton Davies, Mrs Phillipa
Spilsbury wife of Dr Thomas Spilsbury who married a relative of her Step-mother,
Anne. Hear about the Smith family in General and their Diaspora along the West
Coast of Africa and why one historian described William Smith Jnr as ‘“the
father of as remarkable a family as this colony has ever known’”
Amongst the many descendants, in-laws and extended
family of the Smith Sisters are the late Dr M C F Easmon, the Awooner Renners,
Hunters, the Wright family. (Three members of the Smith family married into the
Wright family). Also the Clintons, Kponous, the Dillons, Mccarthurs were also
related to them by marriage.
Tickets are £3.00; tel. 01895 274 220 till 25
September; then 0208 344 7783.
The nearest Tube Stations are Hammersmith or
Ravenscourt Park.