Adelaide Casely-Hayford

Adelaide Casely-Hayford was born Adelaide Smith on the second of June 1868 — some records say the twenty-seventh — in Freetown, into the Krio elite; her father, William Smith Jr., was a senior official of the colony. The family moved to Jersey when she was four; the Ladies' College there schooled her, the Stuttgart Conservatory gave her some three years at the piano, and she came home to Freetown to teach in 1892, settling for good after a last English sojourn in 1897.

In 1903 she married J. E. Casely Hayford, the Gold Coast barrister and pan-Africanist of Ethiopia Unbound and, later, the National Congress of British West Africa; their daughter Gladys — in time the poet "Aquah Laluah" — came in 1904. The marriage broke around 1914 and they separated, each keeping to the work. In Freetown she served as lady president of the UNIA branch's Ladies' Division around 1919, resigning in June 1920 for a larger plan of her own.

The plan was the school. Touring America from July 1920 with her niece Kathleen Easmon, she raised funds on the industrial-education model, and in October 1923 opened her Girls' Vocational School in Freetown — fourteen pupils at the start, vocational craft taught beside African history, culture, and dress, with a quarterly Africa Day, in a colony schooled to look away from itself. She led the school until her retirement in 1940, sat from 1924 as the only Black woman on the colony's Education Board, and arrived at a 1925 reception for the Prince of Wales in African dress — a sensation, and precisely the intended one.

Her pen left "Mista Courifer," anthologized by Langston Hughes, and memoirs serialized through 1953-54; the empire she outargued gave her its Jubilee Medal and the MBE. She died at Freetown on the twenty-fourth of January 1960, at ninety-one. Honored be Adelaide Casely-Hayford, who dressed her nation's daughters in their own history.