Foday established an Islamic school at Gbinle, over which he presided for the next fifty years. By the mid-1800s it had become an institution which amazed outside observers. When Edward Wilmot Blyden visited Gbinle in 1872, he was astounded at the sight of a large and well-run university in the Sierra Leone interior, fifty miles from Freetown. He described Tarawaly as the "presiding genius" and Gbinle as "a sort of university town, devoted altogether to the cultivation of Islamic learning".
There were several hundred young men and some female students in residence, and Tarawaly looked forward to the continued growth and prosperity of his university, having trained three of his sons as master scholars who could carry on after his death. But Foday Tarawaly's dreams of continued success for Gbinle were not to come true. Internal strife in the area between the Soso and Temne led to the destruction of his university in 1875. The great man became a roving scholar and continued his work, though on a much smaller scale, until his death at a very advanced age. Foday Tarawaly’s life reminds us that education and intellectual achievement are by no means, new to Sierra Leone.
