Joseph Casely Hayford

Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford was born in Cape Coast, in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), on the twenty-ninth of September 1866, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister. He took his secondary education at Wesley Boys' High School in Cape Coast, studied law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the English bar in 1896.

He returned to the Gold Coast to practice law. He emerged in the early twentieth century as the principal pan-West African political organizer of the pre-First World War generation. In March 1920 he convened the National Congress of British West Africa at Accra — the first political organization to bring together the educated elite of all four British West African colonies (Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia) under a shared program of constitutional reform and African political representation.

The Congress dispatched a delegation to London in 1920 that presented the British Colonial Office with a comprehensive memorandum for reform: African representation in colonial legislatures, the appointment of African judges, the establishment of African universities, and the abolition of racial discrimination in colonial employment. The Colonial Office formally rejected the petition, but several of the reforms it demanded were enacted piecemeal over the subsequent two decades, and the Congress is recognized as the political ancestor of every subsequent West African nationalist movement.

His 1911 novel Ethiopia Unbound — published in London by C. M. Phillips — was the first novel published in English by an African writer. The book combines fiction with political essay; its central character argues for "a renaissance of the race" through African intellectual and political organization.

He died in Accra on the eleventh of August 1930, age sixty-three. Kwame Nkrumah, then a young teacher and subsequently the first president of independent Ghana, identified Casely Hayford as a principal political ancestor.

He is honored here as the West African organizer who convened the first colony-spanning political congress.