Encyclopedia of world history (facts on file library of world history) 7 volume set ( PDFDrive ) 2340

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Casely Hayford, Joseph Ephraim

Carranza’s government took control of the railways and boosted
support for Mexican-owned business interests.

was to annoy Alvaro Obregón. One of Obregón’s men
tried to kill Carranza on April 8, 1920, forcing the president to flee Mexico City for Veracruz. He was deposed
on May 7, and on his way to Veracruz, on May 21,
in Tlaxcalantongo, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State,
he was assassinated by Rodolfo Herrera. He was succeeded as president by Adolfo de la Huerta, who was
president until November, when he was replaced by
Alvaro Obregón.
See also Mexican constitution (1917).
Further reading: Richmond, Douglas W. Venustiano Carranza’s Nationalist Struggle 1893–1920. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1983; Tuchman, Barbara. The Zimmerman
Telegram. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Justin Corfield

Casely Hayford, Joseph Ephraim
(1866–1930) West African lawyer and politician
J. E. Casely Hayford made enormously important contributions to the theory of Pan-Africanism and organized the National Congress of British West
Africa. Casely Hayford became an inspiration for
Ghana’s independence movement leader and first president, Kwame Nkrumah, though Nkrumah’s generation no longer accepted the British presence in the way
that Casely Hayford and his colleagues had.
Born in 1866, the man whom many would later
describe as the “uncrowned king of West Africa”
enjoyed educational opportunities in Africa and in

England. He completed his secondary education at a

Wesleyan (Methodist) boys’ high school in Cape Coast,
the major port in the colony known to the British as
the Gold Coast. He spent several years as a teacher
and principal in Wesleyan schools in both Accra (Nigeria) and Cape Coast. Following an apprenticeship to
a European lawyer, he traveled to London in 1893 to
become a lawyer himself. He completed legal training
in 1896 and soon returned to Cape Coast, where he
established an active, admired private practice.
Casely Hayford largely identified himself with other
professional, European-educated black Africans, but
he did not forget the traditions and worldview characteristic of the Fanti. During his youth Casely Hayford’s
father had participated in protests against the British
erosion of native autonomy and customs, particularly
with regard to land distribution and usage. This early
exposure to political activism and to debates about the
virtues (and flaws) of traditional, as opposed to British,
law prepared Casely Hayford to become involved in
the activities of the Aboriginal Rights Protection Society (ARPS) that formed at the end of the 19th century.
Shortly after the introduction of the 1897 Lands Bill
into the British parliament, traditional elites and intellectuals of the Gold Coast joined together in the ARPS
to resist this proposed introduction of British property laws. Casely Hayford and John Mensah Sarbah
supported the ARPS’s effort by authoring pamphlets
that explicated the traditional systems and presented
cogent arguments against the Lands Bill.
Over the next few decades, he augmented his
already strong reputation by publishing several books
that revealed his intelligence and his passionate commitment to achieving prosperity in Africa. Gold Coast
Native Institutions, published in 1903, dealt with
the issues at stake in the Lands Bill controversy. He
asserted that these societies already possessed democratic institutions and a high degree of civilization. He

thought of native institutions as an asset, not a liability, in the quest for progress and modernization.
In his 1911 autobiographical novel, Ethiopia
Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation, Casely
Hayford provided a fictionalization of Pan-Africanist
themes and ideals. By evoking the achievements and
influence of the “Ethiopian” (in Pan-Africanist ideology, this signified all Africans and not just the inhabitants of a particular country in Africa), Casely Hayford
boasted that the African could feel proud of his heritage despite the various racial theories that cast him
as inferior. The goal of activism should be to encourage the expansion of education, the preservation of