Joseph Ephraim Biography
He was born in Cape Coast on September 29, 1866. His name was Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford. His father, Reverend Joseph de Graft Hayford, was a Wesleyan Methodist preacher. He sent him to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone after the Wesleyan Boys’ High School in Cape Coast.
Joseph Ephraim taught at Accra Wesleyan High School and then became its director when he got back to the Gold Coast. He lost this job because he was working as a subeditor for his uncle James Hutton Brew’s weekly newspaper, the Gold Coast Echo. After that paper went out of business, he became the editor of two other local newspapers that didn’t last long.
He also worked as an articled clerk for a European lawyer in Cape Coast. Eventually, he moved to England and graduated from St. Peter’s College, Cambridge. After that, he went to London’s Inner Temple to study law. In 1896, he passed the bar exam and returned to the Gold Coast to work as a lawyer. When he returned, the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (GCARPS) was against the Lands Bill of 1894.
Casely Hayford assisted in organizing society’s opposition to this law, which aimed to regulate land management on the Gold Coast. He gathered a wealth of information about native institutions and wrote his first book, Gold Coast Native Institutions (1903), about them. He thought Africans should keep their own customs alive.
Published in 1911, it combined elements of a novel and “intellectual autobiography” [July 1967, p. 433]. In it, the main character, Kwamankra, who was a lot like Casely Hayford, tells his people to “free themselves from the slavery of foreign ideas harmful to racial development.”
When the young man was a student in Sierra Leone, Wilmot Edward Blyden’s “Ethiopianism” deeply moved him, and it had a significant influence on a lot of the things he wrote after that. The book Ethiopia Unbound talks about the mistakes made by colonial governments and the hypocrisy of materialistic Europe in comparison to the “simple idealism of unspoiled, persecuted Africa.”
The “gin trade” made native kings less powerful. Christian organizations, despite preaching brotherhood, segregated people of different races within their congregations and denied Africans a voice in government.
Casely Hayford wrote The Truth about the West African Land Question (1913) in response to protests against the Forestry Bill of 1911. He tried to connect this new attempt to “manage reserved lands” with the failed Lands Bill of 1894. The fact that he went to London by himself in 1911 and with four other people in 1912 to fight against this law shows how important he was to the colony.
The British government set up a committee to look at land policies in West Africa, but these delegations didn’t have much of an impact on it. Eventually, the bill died because of all the discussion in the committee. It was becoming more common for colonists to want chiefs to be involved in running the government. Invading the land they owned seemed like it would be bad for this strategy.
The way the British government dealt with land issues in the region made Casely Hayford think of a more West African group than the GCARPS, which people his age thought had become too narrow-minded. To have more freedom in how he wrote, he started his own newspaper, the Cape Coast Weekly Gold Coast Leader, in 1902.
He used the paper to propose a meeting of the most important men from the four British countries in West Africa. However, World War I came along and stopped them. Joseph Ephraim and other Gold Coast professionals weren’t able to set up the Gold Coast Section of the Projected West African Conference until 1919. During the war and at the peace conference in Versailles, the idea of self-determination became popular.
Joseph Ephraim also thought it was time for the “educated natives” to take over as the “natural leaders” of their country. This made the leaders of the GCARPS and Nana Ofori Atta of Akyem Abuakwa, the colony’s most important chief, angry. In 1920, Accra hosted the first meeting of the future Congress of British West Africa. The group chose Casely Hayford as its second vice president.
We should build a British West African university and increase opportunities for Africans to work at the highest levels of the civil service. Congress passed 83 resolutions, including these. At first, Governor Guggisberg’s government showed some support, but when the Congress quickly sent a group to London to push for changes, this support went away.
The chiefs, under the leadership of Nana Ofori Atta, fought against the notion that the educated elite should be in charge by default. They also made it harder for Joseph Ephraim and the other people on his delegation to have an impact on the Colonial Office in London. Because of the fight between the chiefs and the educated elite, the Gold Coast government was able to get rid of Congress for not being fair.
In order to change this idea, Congress took over the GCARPS and made Joseph Ephraim vice president. He spoke out against Nana Ofori Atta and his friends in the Legislative Council, where he had been an informal member since 1916. He called them “traitors to the cause of British West Africa.”
It was too late, though. There were a few joint meetings in Freetown in 1923, Bathhurst in 1925 and 1926, and Lagos in 1929, but it wasn’t until these times that the movement really came to life. Also, Governor Guggisberg’s new law from 1925 quickly changed the political scene. It made things worse between the chiefs and the educated class by giving the chiefs more seats in the expanded Legislative Council. Casely Hayford spoke out strongly against this law.
In 1926, he went to London as a one-man delegation. But because he was a practical politician, he knew that more resistance was pointless, so he ran for office and won, becoming the municipal representative for Sekondi. This move caused division among the educated elite.
Lawyer Kobina Sekyi led an organization with mostly Cape Coast members, which took over the GCARPS and labeled Casely Hayford and the educated elite who accompanied him as “defective leaders.” In 1929, as a member of the Legislative Council, Casely Hayford reconciled with Nana Sir Ofori Atta, who had received a knighthood in 1927. Casely Hayford received the MBE in 1919. He died in Accra on August 11, 1930, not long after this reunion.
Also Read: Dr. Kwame Nkrumah Biography
