And the revenue from slave trade streamed in steadily. The 25 guns lining Lagos Island to the King’s palace were purchased with slaves’ money. Velvet clothes, royal umbrellas, hats and stylish robes worn by the Obas and chiefs to command respect and admiration amongst their people were bought with slaves’ money. In fact, Oba Kosoko did what others never did. He bought back slaves already established in Bahia, Brazil because he needed their carpentry, masonry and coopering skills to build Brazilian-type houses and produce European items in Lagos.

Meanwhile, as Crowther spoke about the horrors of slavery, a lady minimally dressed and too unassuming to deserve interruption of the narration came in and she listened to him with breathless attention. There was no voice speaking for the slaves in West Africa until the British rescued Crowther, gave him dignity, gave him culture and education and he became a voice; the voice. And when the Prince spread the map on the table wider to see Lagos, it blew out the candle light. As Crowther wrote in his autobiography, the Prince then said, “Will your Majesty kindly bring us a candle from the mantelpiece?” Then it dawned on Crowther the unassuming woman who had joined them earlier on was Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. Wrote Crowther: “On hearing this, I became aware of the person before whom I was all of the time. I trembled from head to foot, and could not open my mouth to answer the questions that followed. Lord Russell and the Prince told me not to be frightened, and the smiles on the face of the good Queen assured me that she was not angry at the liberty I took in speaking so freely before her, and so my fears subsided.” After bringing the candles, the Queen then asked about what she could do about the slave situation in Lagos, Ajayi Crowther said seize Lagos by fire by force. Captain Labulo Davies, the second of the founding fathers, was a lieutenant on HMS Bloodhound, the flagship of the fleet that bombed Lagos.

The belief in fate always set a limit on one’s achievements. What set the founding fathers apart was the shared recognition of moral deficiency in their fellow Africans which made the inflicted cruelties of slavery possible. The founding fathers did not believe that it was the fate of slaves to be slaves and the fate of others to get them chained or be led to the waiting ships; they did not believe that that was how the world was made and there was no reason to change it. They had regard for the humanity of slaves; they had empathy for their sufferings. Slavery was simply man’s deliberate inhumanity to fellow man.

Crowther and his future wife, Asano, met on the same British ship heading to Freetown after his rescue. He was being rescued for the first time, she the second time. The British started the policy of relocating slaves to the missionary-administered Freetown because earlier on when the slaves were handed over to Oba Adele, Eshinlokun, Ghezo or any other monarchies along the coasts of Bight of Benin, they were resold into slavery once the British sailors got back to their ships.

And so British policy shifted to relocation of rescued slaves to Freetown. The settlement proved so successful (boasting the first secondary school, the only tertiary intuition in West Africa, high income from agricultural trade with the British Empire) that when Crowther asked the Queen to bomb Lagos and persuade King Dosumu to relinquish control in 1861, he had Freetown in mind as the model for development.

Sparks flew, the heavens rocked, one thing led to the other, from slave and slave, Ajayi and Asano became man and wife in Freetown. They, their children, their children’s children dedicated themselves to stopping slavery and promoting the principles of civilisation. In August 2014, the family continued the trend when their great-great-great grand daughter, Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh, gave her life to save Nigeria from the spread of Ebola. According to Elebute and Mann, the Crowthers and Davies were the two families which the Royal Navy were given standing order to rescue should there be an eruption of violence and British subjects had to be evacuated. It mattered less if several British servicemen were lost in tracking these Africans down. They must be rescued. And in fact when Crowther was kidnapped for 10 days by Abboko at Idah in 1868, Mr. Fell, the British vice-consul at Lokoja, was shot dead with a poisoned arrow after he led the squad to forcefully rescue Crowther when Crowther insisted that no ransom should be paid on him.

The life of Captain Labulo Davies was too compelling, too needed and too unknown that Adeyemo Elebute, a professor of surgery for 45 years and a foundation staff member of Lagos University College Hospital (LUTH), turned himself into a professional historian at 82 years of age. He travelled far and wide, burrowed into many Nigerian and British archives in order to lock down Davies’ story in this splendid book. Davies was born on 14 August 1828 to former Yoruba slaves whom the British had rescued and resettled in Freetown. His father was from Abeokuta and his mother from Ogbomoso. His parents refused to accept that Africans should be left to their traditions and ways of life after what they had done to them. Their son joined the Royal Navy as a sea cadet in 1849 and later, when he retired began his own shipping line. Being trustworthy, he became a point of contact for many European trading companies in West Africa. He grew rich.

If CMS was the first secondary school in Nigeria that produced some of the greatest Nigerian minds of last century, it was because Captain Davies funded this initiative of Thomas Babington Macaulay (Ajayi Crowther’s son-in-law and Herbert Macaulay’s father). If the Western Region’s premier, Obafemi Awolowo, could afford to use wealth from cocoa to pay for free education, free health for all the residents of the region irrespective of tribe or class, it was because of Davies who brought the cocoa plant and the “gospel of cocoa” to the coast of West Africa, starting from his farm in Ijon village. Intriguingly, when the April 1916 edition of Journal of African Society credited Sir Brandford Griffiths, the British governor of Gold Coast (Ghana) from 1885-1895, for introducing cocoa to West Africa, his son, W.B. Griffiths, who was then the colonial Chief Justice of the same Gold Coast, issued a rebuttal saying it wasn’t his father but their family friend “the late Capt. J.P.L. a well-known native of Lagos”. For 30 years, Davies was the richest man on all the coast of West Africa. At a time when millions of his fellow Africans had never seen a ship before, and those that had seen them thought ships belonged to the white man, Davies owned merchant ships plying the Lokoja, Lagos, Freetown to Plymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton and Liverpool route.

When Madam Tinubu ran into financial difficulties after the new British government in Lagos banned slavery, Davies bailed her out in exchange for some of her juicy landed assets at “Tinubu Square at Oko Faji”. Davies also bought land from Alli Balogun, who, like Madame Tinubu, was an ex-slave merchant turned palm kernel and cotton merchant. On 18 March 1872, Davies mortgaged “fourteen parcels of prime real estate” in exchange for a record-breaking credit of £60,000 a year [1.7 billion naira in today’s value] from Child Mills Company in Manchester. This was over and beyond the record set by his rival Lagos rich man, Taiwo Olowo, who during the Kiriji War (1877-1886) supplied Ibadan with those mighty cannons that gave the war its name. To underscore the partnership between European and African businessmen immediately after the ban on slavery, on 20 February 1867 Taiwo Olowo, according to Mann, received goods and currency on credit from Regis Aine (a French trading company) sufficient to purchase 40,000 gallons of palm oil by mortgaging his 17 properties.

The stellar qualities of Davies, his achievements, his laudable effort at civilising his fellow West Africans in ways of modernity reached the Queen at Buckingham Palace. She summoned her goddaughter, Aina Sarah Forbes Bonetta, and said she should consider having Captain Davies as future husband. Aina was 17 and Captain Davies 33.