The Nordic Africa Institute – Publications

Adam Afzelius botanist and professor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and one of he last of the pupils of the famous Linnaeus spent the years 1792-1796 as a botanist in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The first parts of his journals and his collections were destroyed in Freetown during a French attack in 1794, but the journals from 1795 and 1796 survived and are preserved in the manuscript collections of the University Library at Uppsala. Afzelius had a keen eye for minute detail and his journals abound with descriptions and notes of great botanical and ethnographical interest.