James Africanus Beale Horton described Richard Burton as ‘[t]he most determined African hater’ of their time (qtd in Fyfe 1972: 60). Burton's work, Horton wrote, was ‘[p]ersonally abusive, turgidly illustrative, and illogically argumentative’ towards Africans, Creoles in particular (61). Further, Horton felt that the tenets of racial anthropology, as explained in James Hunt's 1863 speech ‘The Negro's Place in Nature’, were fundamentally ‘pro-slavery’ (62). A writer, army officer and physician born in Sierra Leone and trained in Britain, Horton wanted economic independence for Sierra Leone and to exonerate his race from the accusations of backwardness and savagery levelled by Burton, Hunt and their colleagues.

Horton's life embodied several contradictions. Although he is now posited as one of the forefathers of African nationalism, Horton's education and his role within the British military was made possible by the same racial science that underlay Burton's tracts and many policies of the Victorian empire. Horton was trained as part of a movement by the British War Office to replace white doctors on the West Coast of Africa with black Africans, who, it was thought, would survive tropical health challenges better than their predecessors. The mid-nineteenth century, ‘in spite of all the confident European belief in Progress’, was still ‘the period of “the white man's grave” in West Africa’ (Shepperson 1969: ix). Although the rising prophylactic use of quinine from the 1840s had ameliorated the death rate somewhat, as Philip D. Curtin has documented in his book Disease and Empire, ‘the change was more modest’ for British land troops. The previously cited statistic of 151 deaths per 1,000 between 1859 and 1875 was gleaned from military mortality records of British non-commissioned officers in West Africa, specifically the West India regiments in which Horton served (Curtin 1998: 26). It was thought that Horton and his fellow West African doctors could mitigate these risks through their supposedly superior disease resistance and knowledge regarding local conditions.

However, Horton became ill as often as his white compatriots, since they were all exposed to the same unhealthy garrison conditions, and his recommendations regarding improvements to sanitation and treatment were followed only haphazardly. Horton remarks, ‘I urged the necessity of sanitary reform on the coast, and I was harshly remarked upon by many of those whose lives it was my chief object to spare’ (1868b: x).