Scholes, Theophilus

c. 1854
c. 1937

Theophilus E. Samuel Scholes was a black Jamaican physician, Christian minister, author, and missionary to Africa. Espousing a strong anti-imperialist and antiracist line of argument, Scholes promoted the idea of absolute political and social equality between Europeans and Africans. He was convinced that the reclamation of ancient African history was the foundation on which continental and diasporic Africans could build toward a future in which they would once again occupy the upper echelons of world civilization. Despite his primary focus on colonized Africans, however, Scholes also demonstrated significant concern for the plight of Indians, Chinese, and aboriginal peoples resulting from European imperial policies. An acknowledged voice within educated black circles in England, Jamaica, and New York, Scholes authored several works, including Sugar and the West Indies (1897), The British Empire and Alliances (1899), Chamberlain and Chamberlainism (under the pseudonym Bartholomew Smith, 1903), and his two-volume opus Glimpses of the Ages, published in 1905 and 1908. In these texts he embarked on a detailed analysis and critique of European (and in particular, British) imperial policies, and the race-based ideology, science, and political economy that sustained them. Though Scholes was highly critical of colonialism and imperialism, he did not advocate its abolishment. Instead, he sought for a more modern arrangement in which a network of nations would work together with mutual respect and in total equality.

Scholes was born in Stewart Town in the northwestern Jamaican parish of Trelawny, and he studied at schools there before leaving Jamaica in 1873. He spent the next several years travelling to South America, Central America, parts of North America, and the Sandwich Islands. He then moved to Great Britain, where he studied theology at the Grattan-Guinness Missionary College in London in 1879. Subsequently, he studied medicine in Edinburgh, earning a licentiate from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1884. After sojourning briefly in the United States and Jamaica, Scholes ventured to Africa in 1886 as the pioneer missionary and physician of the newly formed Missionary Society of the Western Churches, eventually spending a total of seven years there. Within this seven-year period, he journeyed to Belgium where he took another medical degree (at the University of Brussels). He returned to Africa in 1894 to supervise an industrial school run by the Alfred Jones Institute at New Calabar in Nigeria.

Scholes was elected a member of the African Society in 1903 in England, and, after 1911, also became a member of the New York–based Negro Society for Historical Research. Influenced by European nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth, and Giuseppe de Garibaldi, as well as by black Caribbean radicals such as Edward Blyden, Scholes himself exerted some influence on thinkers such as Robert Love, John Edward Bruce, Ras Makonnen, and Jomo Kenyatta. His reception among black intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his early championing of the rights of the colonized majority, and his assault on European racism and imperialism helped establish a discursive anticolonial tradition within the Anglophone black Atlantic.

See also Intellectual Life; Missionary Movements

Bibliography

Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement, translated by Anne Keep. London: Methuen, 1974.

Scholes, Theophilus E. Samuel. Glimpses of the Ages; or, the "Superior" and "Inferior" Races, So-Called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History, vols. 1 and 2. London: John Long, 1905 and 1908.

wigmoore washington adolphus francis (2005)