Sigismund Koelle

[5] "He was a Semitic scholar, and started a Hebrew class at Fourah Bay; and very soon African youths, the children of liberated slaves, could be seen reading the Old Testament in the original.Koelle's major work, Polyglotta Africana (1854), is considered the beginning of the serious study of a large range of African languages by European scholars.One area that was lacking was the Swahili coast of Kenya and Tanzania, since it seems that slaves from this region were generally taken northwards to Zanzibar and Arabia rather than southward towards America and Brazil.[12] In the introduction Koelle tells us that he wanted a selection of words that would be simple enough for each informant to be interviewed on a single day, and for this reason he omitted pronouns, which would have taken much longer to elicit.Included with a book is a map of Africa showing the approximate location, as far as it could be ascertained, of each language, prepared by the cartographer August Heinrich Petermann.This information, combined with a census of Sierra Leone conducted in 1848, has proved invaluable to historians researching the African slave trade in the 19th century.Eisami also provided the material for another work, African Native Literature, which consists of proverbs, fables, descriptive accounts, and historical fragments in the Kanuri language.After pressure from the British Government, Tewfik was sent into exile on the island of Chios, and eventually escaped to England, where he was baptized in 1881 into the Anglican church in a ceremony in St Paul's, Onslow Square London, witnessed among others by Koelle's father-in-law, Archdeacon Philpot.