Talk:J. E. Casely Hayford

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. [FAQ]
	This article is supported by the Politics and government work group.

[edit] Name

Where did the Ekra-Agriman title come from? And where did the Caseley come from, for that matter - if his father's name was just Hayford? GRuban 21:36, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Excellent questions both. Because he is sometimes shown as Casely-Hayford, I considered Casely to be part of his last name (and set up the categories accordingly). Also, there are several Casely-Hayfords, as we've already discussed (I think we could use an article on Adelaide Casely-Hayford if we get around to it), though it's not clear to me at least whether J. E. had any connection to them. However, apparently he didn't always use the initials at all, so now I think I was wrong. Based on contemporary reviews ([1] and [2] if you have access), I think his title pages looked like this:

• The Truth About the West African Land Question.
  • By Casely Hayford (Ekra-Agiman) (of the Inner Temple, Esquire, Barrister-at-law, and of the Gold Coast Bar).
• Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation.
  • By Casely Hayford (Ekra-Agiman), Barrister-at-Law.

These suggest that he was using Casely as his given name and Hayford (as you suggest) as his family name. My library has him under H, not under C. In short, I'm confused. As for Ekra-Agiman, it seems like a lot of West Africans had an alternate non-English name, but that what made J. E. C. H. distinctive was that he put it on his title pages. Maybe Dawson knows more. If you (or Dawson) don't have access to JStor and you'd like to see those reviews, e-mail me and I'll send them to you. Chick Bowen 22:01, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I should say, in calling him Casely Hayford rather than Hayford in the first place I was following Kwadwo Osei-Nyame's lead (see References). Chick Bowen 22:05, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

My guess is that Ekra-Agriman would be his given Fante language name, and that Joseph Ephraim were his Christian names, and that Casely may have been his mother's maiden name? I'm not really sure. Some sources hyphenate it, other sources don't. Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford^[3] was his second wife (a public speaker, educator, and feminist deserving of her own article), and Gladys Casely Hayford^[4] was his daughter, was a poet... and they used "Casely Hayford" as a surname. -Dawson 22:23, 31 March 2006 (UTC)