Edna Elliott-Horton


Edna Elliott-Horton
BornEdna Elliott
(1904-09-13)13 September 1904
Freetown, British Sierra Leone
Died26 March 1994(1994-03-26) (aged 89)
Freetown, Sierra Leone
OccupationPolitical activist
NationalityBritish Subject, Sierra Leonean
EducationUniversity of Cambridge, Boston College

Edna Elliott-Horton (13 September 1904 – 26 March 1994) was the second West African woman from a British colony to receive a university degree after the Nigerian physician Agnes Yewande Savage, who received a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1929.[1] A Sierra Leonean, Elliott-Horton became the first West African woman to complete a BA degree in the liberal arts, after graduating from Howard University in 1932,[2] where Dr. Edward Mayfield Boyle, her maternal uncle, had graduated as a medical doctor. Elliott-Horton was a political activist who challenged the colonial authorities in Sierra Leone through her participation in the West African Youth League which was formally established in her living-room.

  1. ^ "CAS Students to Lead Seminar On University's African Alumni, Pt. IV: Agnes Yewande Savage". Postgrads from the Edge. 16 November 2016. Retrieved 5 August 2017.
  2. ^ Adell Patton, Physicians, Colonial Racism and Diaspora in West Africa, University Press of Florida, 1996, p. 199.