From 1868 to 1874, self-determination in Cape Coast [in present-day Ghana] got ahead of Africa’s standard anticolonial timeline, which locates the advent of modern nation-state building in the middle of the twentieth century. What had been a loosely allied group of Fante kingdoms evolved in the 1860s toward the new administrative form of the Fante Confederation, what Kwaku Larbi Korang calls a “protonationalist” state, which possessed a constitution, judiciary, and the capacity to wage war and collect taxes. Though short-lived in its efforts to thwart the consolidation of British rule, the following generation of Gold Coast Fante leaders—with J.E. Casely Hayford most prominent among them—built a powerful intelligentsia in its image. A small but formidable canon of legal-humanistic essays and treatises by Casely Hayford as well as by John Mensah Sarbah (1864–1910) and S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma (1863–1921) sought to define Fante intellectual character through its personification as the “Educated Native,” who was typically, though not always, a lawyer. This figure’s distinguishing trait was an ability to perceive facts where the British could not, especially when it came to Gold Coasters’ role in advancing imperial history. He embodied objectivity as a situated rather than “placeless” intellectual ideal and claimed it as a distinctly African virtue.
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If there is one epistemological motif that captures Casely Hayford’s confidence in the Fante past as he marshals it to direct the future, it is that of the fact. Native Institutions opens by stating its intentions to get the British Empire back on course in terms that grant “facts” much the same kind of muscle that it later grants national progress. “I consider that there can be no greater safeguard to British administration on the Gold Coast than in the free dissemination of the historical facts embodied in this book,” Casely Hayford declares on its first page. He regularly sanctifies the self-announcing form of the fact, along with its close cousin evidence, since he believes that they will guide colonial administrators in the process of refinding the Fante Confederation’s path. A couple of pages later, when revisiting the ARPS victory in defeating the Lands Bill of 1897, he notes, “The Colonial Office yielded to the logic of facts,” and in the book’s first chapter, he opines, “Science will tell you that there can be no healthy growth except from within; and the history of the Gold Coast will disclose to you the facts and circumstances which must guide such internal growth.” Native Institution’s recourse to the vague instructive force of “history” and “science” is broadly characteristic of nineteenth-century European positivism, which, in the figure of the Sierra Leonean surgeon and researcher Africanus Horton, had a pioneering emissary within the Fante Confederation (who will re-appear in this chapter’s next section). The text is replete with references to history as the domain of facts unmarred by any particular historical misprision, including that of British colonial ethnography.
History is determined for Casely Hayford before the historian arrives on the scene, and one can only be counted as a historian by accepting this order of things. “The reader must be prepared to disabuse his mind of all prejudice in this matter,” he advises. “If you once start with the premises that the Ashantis are a barbarous, bloodthirsty people . . . you naturally take a different standpoint from the historian, whose object is the ascertainment of truth from facts as they are, and not as they are supposed or wished to be for purposes of argument or invective.” In Native Institutions’ chapter “The Conflict of Systems,” which elaborates a long tradition of representative government among the Akan, he again clears space to assert the Gold Coast’s verifiably unique role in the British Empire, the details of which have now “passed from the province of controversy to that of his-tory.” Importantly, however, facts evolve toward self-revelation at the site of their emergence, not by being “processed,” as it were, in a different and bigger one. Anticipating “the criticism that self-government is reserved by Great Britain for those English-speaking Colonies whose populations are nearly or wholly white,” Casely Hayford thus offers an alternative standard of competency to a racial one, which is at once more universal and less generalizable from place to place. “I am inclined to think that it is not so much a question of the particular people inhabiting a particular Dependency,” he writes, “as yielding to the logic of facts in the given circumstances.” The facts of the Gold Coast’s uniqueness are observed by Gold Coasters because they are facts, not because they are being observed by Gold Coasters. In British philosopher Thomas Nagel’s classic work The View from Nowhere, he writes, “The aim of objectivity would be to reach a conception of the world, including oneself, which involved one’s own point of view not essentially, but only instrumentally, so to speak: so that the form of our understanding would be specific to ourselves, but its content would not be.” Casely Hayford essentially sees himself as having inherited a situation that grants him a leg up in being able to hold such a view, and so accepts this ideal of a self-inclusive objective viewpoint quite unproblematically. Facts for him are born, not made.
This does not, however, mean that facts bear no relation to the formation of character. For the Fante intelligentsia, facts do not just reveal an objective historical reality, but index an unevenly distributed ability to see that reality that contradicts the political hierarchy in which it is enmeshed. The “real” essence of history, in other words, exists apart from the history that shapes even the impulse to get it on record. Another way of putting this is that Casely Hayford, in Native Institutions, calls on the self-evident nature of facts in order to make Akan traditions into facts in the act of their written systematization. He sees history as dynamic but not fundamentally shapeable and therefore can position himself both as its proud product and its neutral print conduit. He shares this goal and posture with John Mensah Sarbah, the Gold Coast’s first barrister and co-founder of the ARPS, as well as the author of Fanti Customary Laws (first published by William Clowes and Sons in London, 1897), the closest precursor and intertext to Gold Coast Native Institutions. In each case, an air of unassailable neutrality surrounds the demonstration of individual good sense that they nonetheless mark as an act of curation. In Sarbah’s preface, addressed to family friend and senior Gold Coast jurist George Eminsang—who facilitated the Dutch-British fort swap around the Fante Confederation’s founding—he confesses that this is his “first attempt in the thorny paths of literature.” While he clearly intends “literature” here to refer to written texts as such, the description nonetheless fore-grounds the literary attributes of Sarbah’s work in a stricter sense.
On the one hand, Sarbah’s reference to a “thorny path” invokes the messiness and variability of the Akan lived experiences from which Fanti Customary Laws draws by way of Gold Coast court cases. On the other hand, he is guided by a standard of accuracy—rather than just aptitude—in their print rendition. “I know that you have often given the first correct idea on Customary Laws to newly arrived European officials,” he praises Emin-sang, and later remarks on the failure of his own text “to test [Customary Laws’] accuracy by comparison with similar cases in other districts affecting the same class of persons.” The “literary” work, then, done by both Fanti Customary Laws and Gold Coast Native Institutions is in their dual claim to creation (as they bring an archive of customs and traditions into “official” existence) and to be recording merely what is already true. They harness a virtuosic cultural vision to a more prosaic kind of documentary responsibility. Extrapolating from this description to provisionally define the literary as a category in and for this milieu, Sarbah’s thorniness suggests that literary authorship is marked by a sheer will to disciplined observation—staying out of the thorns, so to speak. Along these lines, Casely Hayford announces and effaces his own presence in Native Institutions, narrating his planning process as a step toward affirming his commitment to speak through evidence. The variation between the two facets of the work is evident even in its syntactic rhythms. Casely Hayford’s self-narration across two full paragraphs reads like a parade of clauses: “It occurred to me, in the course of my critical examination of the issues raised and the evidence necessary to throw light upon them, that ample data existed, if only one would search for them,” and so forth. A paragraph right after attests to the book’s extensive work with legal sources and contains only a single comma. Such a performance of laboring toward ideological suspension in the name of political self-rule diverges from the long-standing critical tendency to identify African literature (usually for the better) with its ideological credentials, based on later struggles that reverberate more strongly in today’s political battles.
From The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa Used with permission of the publisher, Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Jeanne-Marie Jackson.
