ABSTRACT
Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, Ghanaian, writer, lawyer, politician and PanAfricanist, was a founder of the National Congress of British West Africa, one of the first Pan-African organisations on the African continent. He was born on 29 September 1866 at Cape Coast, at that time in the British colony of the Gold Coast in West Africa. He was the fourth son of Revd and Mrs Joseph de Graft Hayford; his father was a minister in the Methodist Church and his mother a member of the Brew family. J.E. Casely Hayford was thus a member of the coastal elite whose families often had European as well as African ancestry and European or Europeanised names.
