The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa (Princeton 2026) is the first book devoted to the career of anglophone West Africa’s most important early twentieth-century statesman and intellectual.
The author of the first African novel published in English, Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Casely Hayford was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought and in African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In this revisionist account, Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. She maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work within its Gold Coast and British imperial contexts, demonstrating the far-reaching conceptual and aesthetic resources of his elite legal background. The law, for Casely Hayford and his Fante nationalist peers, was intimately bound to the virtues they attached to textuality: clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment. Jackson argues for this liberal disposition as a crucial and neglected part of anticolonial intellectual and political history.
