THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 23rd August 1883

Herbert Bankole-Bright, medical doctor, journalist and political activist, was born in Okrika, Nigeria, to Sierra Leonean parents who were descendent of Africans liberated from slavery.

Bankole-Bright was a medical student at Edinburgh University, Scotland, later returning to Freetown, Sierra Leone to set up a medical practice. It was during his student days that his political insight and activism against colonial rule in Africa emerged.

Recognising the press as an effective organ for political agitation, Bankole-Bright established the Aurora newspaper in Sierra Leone in 1918, which he used to overtly criticise the colonial administration.

Together with Thomas Hutton-Mills, J. E. Casely Hayford, Edward Francis Small, F. V. Nanka-Bruce, A. Sawyerr, Kobina Sekyi and others, Bankole-Bright was instrumental in setting up the National Congress of British West Africa in 1920.

In 1925 he inspired and was a founding member of the West African Students Union, led by Ladipo Solanke, when he called for several separate student groups to unite under one banner. In the same year he was one of three Africans elected to the Legislative Council of Sierra Leone. It is worth noting that Kwame Nkrumah became Vice-President of WASU in 1947, ten years before leading Ghana to independence.

In the 1940s, Bankole-Bright founded the National Council of Sierra Leone (NCSL). In 1950 it merged with the West African Youth League, a radical mass based organisation established in Sierra Leone by I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson in 1938. The NCSL became the main opposition party in the Sierra Leonean general election in 1951. However, by 1954 significant political differences had emerged between Bankole-Bright and Wallace-Johnson, leading to the latter abandoning the NCSL to form a separate political party. The NCSL subsequently lost all its seats in the 1957 elections.

Bankole-Bright died on 14th December 1958, less than three years before Sierra Leone gained independence.

Though not specifically about Bankole-Bright and Sierra Leone, the following video highlights the "wind of change" leading to the end of colonialism in Africa. However, the struggle of Africans today is to eradicate the systems of oppression which have replaced it: