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Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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Elisa
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome back to New Books on African Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Aniza Prosperedi, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Jean Marie Jackson about her new book, the Letter of the Law in J. Casely Hayford's West Africa. Jean Marie is a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where she specializes in African literary studies. She's also the director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Jean Marie, welcome to the podcast.
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Jean Marie Jackson
Thank you so much, Elisa. It's really wonderful to get to chat with a historian, since you guys were sort of my target readership in a lot of ways as I was researching and finalizing this manuscript. So I really am glad to be here.
- [02:01]
Elisa
Well, as we'll discover through this conversation, this is a very multidisciplinary, or at least a book that's trying to seek to bring several different audiences together. So I'll represent the historian part of the audience. But let's start, please, by having you introduce yourself to us.
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Jean Marie Jackson
Sure. As you said, I am a professor in the English Department at Johns Hopkins for more years now than seems like it should be possible. I've been here since 2014. That said, I do not have a doctorate in English. My doctorate is In Comparative literature. I have a joke that I've probably made too many times that it's like an English PhD but hard because you have to, you know, learn languages and compare them and move betwixt and between traditions and whatnot. I did train in sort of big so called foundational European novel traditions way back in the day. I have a degree in Russian and German as well before that, but was a pretty tried and true Africanist by the time that I finished my PhD. I started off doing a lot of work in South Africa and then Zimbabwe, so. So my first book was about 19th century Russia, what I call its golden age of literature and ideas in conversation with South African writing in both English and Afrikaans, kind of through the emergency years of the 1980s under apartheid and after. I then wrote a book on the novel and philosophy and what it means to be a sort of a philosophical weirdo in a couple of different African geographies and intellectual traditions. So that book was called the African Novel of Ideas. And it moved among South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and what is now Ghana. And this project, in a lot of ways, although not all emerged from that one. So when I began researching it, I was thinking of it as kind of a sequel to the African Novel of Ideas because JE Caseleigh Hayford did appear in. In one chapter or about a third of a chapter in that book. And slowly it evolved into something that was markedly methodologically different from what I had done there. And that's why I'm so happy that it has brought me to you. Someone in the field that my press actually told me the book is listed in. It is. I think it's listed as a history title rather than a literary studies title. And I. I don't know, I felt like I should see it as a little feather in my cap or something. But now I'm opening myself up to being, you know, put to the historical test. And I have to make sure I have all of my. My dates memorized in ways that I'm not used to doing.
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Elisa
Well, historians are a Catholic discipline. We take everyone who's interested. You just have to go to the archives and then you're our friend.
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Jean Marie Jackson
That's right. I'm here, guys. I've done my fair share.
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Elisa
Yeah, that's the only way. The only thing you need to do to be loved by us is you have to go. Go get your hands dirty in the archive. And then. And then you're part of the fold.
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Jean Marie Jackson
Yeah. And at Hopkins, I go to the history seminar, so, you know, it's a Double duty.
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Elisa
That's interesting what you kind of lay out your, let's say, in such rapid, you know, condensed way the. Your intellectual journey that brought you to J. Kaseleigh Hayesford's West Africa. And maybe we can come back to this later, but thinking about the importance of places, having written two books that were much more, maybe expansive geographically or maybe transnationally. But before we get more into the specifics of the book, we need a little bit of a primer on who the main character is. JE Caseleigh Hayford. Tell us about him. He's someone who, if you work on Ghana or West Africa, he's a name that, you know, he's inescapable, but he's also somewhat of, somewhat of an ill defined figure because, as you say, this is the first book really devoted to him as an individual. So give us just a sense kind of at the baseline level, who is this person and why is he important?
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Jean Marie Jackson
I think that's put really well and answering this question actually gets pretty quickly into the weeds of a lot of the things that make him such an interesting subject or character. For me, Casey Hayford as a surname is, as you know, and as some of the listeners I hope will know, extremely well known in Ghana, also in London. Casely Hayford is now probably best known as the name of a design house in London. I have a shirt or two for. For my husband as a special treat from there. They do fabulous work, but she hasn't been taken up recently, really, outside of the footnotes of a bunch of different interlinked fields. So J. Casely Hayford is the progenitor in most people's eyes, I think, of this diasporic Casey Hayford tradition, this kind of London based Casey Hayford tradition. But it doesn't mean that he came out of nowhere and, you know, suddenly invented intellectual life in the Gold coast by the time that he was born in 1866 and the small town Animabu, which is, you know, kind of affixed to Cape coast, but quite distinguished in its own right. A lot of intellectuals at the time grew up in Animabu. He was already building on a really essential legacy of deep intellectual, textual and in fact, legal engagement that spanned generations. So on his father's side, he was the son of a Methodist minister, as many members of any number of African intelligentsias were. Methodism played a pretty significant inordinate role in sort of facilitating text based intellection in the Gold coast, certainly. And his grandfather had been a well known otiame or linguist, as it's often translated although Caseley Hayford himself did not favor that translation necessarily. And he was immersed from the earliest days of his childhood in this kind of, I wouldn't say hybrid, I actually don't love the word hybrid but this kind of chameleonic environment where an intense attention to language was characteristic of both being afanti, which is the kind of sub ethnicity that he's part of. The meta ethnicity would be the Akan AKA M for non Ghanaianist listeners here and in which that intense attention to language and text was associated also with, you know, the kind of mission education tradition and British constitutionalism and newspapers and so forth. On his mom's side he was descended from the Brou family, so the 18th century merchant Richard Brew, Irish merchant who was a sort of jack of all trading trades including the slave trade. And his maternal line was mixed race. And in that way he's often just sort of slotted into a kind of generic, you know, mixed race elite from the 19th century and not much more is is made of it in sociological terms. He goes on to become this absolutely unstoppable and to my mind really sui generes force in Goldko's political life, print life and legal intellectual life in a broader way of framing that. He goes to Cambridge, Peterhelps where I'm actually launching this book. Over the time this airs we'll perhaps have launched this book. He was one of the first, if not the first, it's hard to quite pin it down. African alumni of Peterhouse College, which is very rich to be perfectly blunt, one of the more prestigious colleges at Cambridge from that period. And then he trained to be a barrister and was admitted to the bar in the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in London, um, and was fully qualified by 1896, at which point he goes back to Ghana, um, and then in pretty quick succession he founds or co founds basically every major kind of seminal, both Gold coast and regional pan Africa, pan African institution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So in 1897 he's co founder of something called the Aborigines Rights Protection Society or the arps which is notable primarily because they were working with the so called traditional rulers. So people who were trained as barristers, right in some cases as doctors who were editors, part of this new sort of merchant descendant professional class, you know, were willing to work with chiefs who oftentimes were not the most straightforward collaborators in planning new things for the country. In 1902 he then co founds this really important Newspaper called the Gold Coast Leader, as well as something called the Fante National Education Fund. He starts publishing huge, and I do mean that literally, books in 1903. The first one was called Gold Coast Native Institutions, which I call a legal humanistic treatise, but in some cases is categorized as the earliest kind of customary law textbook. I think that's probably not an apt characterization, but it was taught in law schools in West Africa for a very long time, right up to the present. In 1911. I'm going to run out of breath here. He writes the first ever novel in English published by an African He In 1913, he writes the first. It's a long essay, I would call it, but the first really dense piece of writing about proto Pentecostalism which is typically dated to a much later period. And it just goes on and on. In 1916 he joins the Gold Coast Legislative Council. You know, he does a lot of work in opening up structures of colonial representation to Gold Coast Africans. He co founds a bunch of major secondary schools, the Mfantsepim School, which he also attended when it was still called Wesleyan Boys High School, and then later the Achimota School. He was on the founding council of that and probably most well known by the people who might have dropped him in a footnote here and there. In 1920 he co found something called the National Congress of British West Africa or the ncbwa. And when he makes it into black studies literature, when he makes it into African and Diasporic studies literature, it's typically for that. And it's because it was the first kind of formal bureaucracy that united the West African colonial states. So Sierra Leone, of course Nigeria or the Lagos Colony at that point, the Gold coast, the Gambia and Liberia. And it dies after he does in 1930, but really set the standard for the possibility of being able to do that kind of work effectively within the still extant British Empire. That was a very long answer to a very short question. I apologize to everybody listening, but I assure you that I have also left out a ton of Je Case to Leaver's accomplishments and the things that make him an interesting and worthwhile person to write a book about. And that alone, I think should tell you quite a bit about why I chose to.
- [14:08]
Elisa
I mean, it's incredible to think about his life. It's. You know, when you really kind of sit there and marvel at it. And he didn't have email, he didn't have the Internet, and yet he didn't have a word processor. I don't know how he did so Many things. So much across so many scales. But before we move on, I just wanted to ask you about the politics of naming, because there might be a question here about, for a listener, who is Paisley Hayford, this name? How does he kind of get read? And then he also has another name and how he chooses. Yes. And how he chooses to move between.
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Jean Marie Jackson
Yeah, and I like that phrasing of it. And again, I tend to eschew the sort of hybrid and cosmopolitan language because I don't think it. What gets at the precision of what he's doing as he moves between and among these different spheres. So Casale Hayford was. He was the first one to have Cecily Hayford as a surname. He put the Casey and the Hayford together. Hayford is a colonial corruption of efwa and that was the original Fante surname of his grandfather. I don't know fully why he decided that he wanted to go by both Caseily Hayford rather than having Casely as a middle name. I think probably he had a sense that it had a sort of multicultural dimension to it, that it would be intelligible both when he was working in London and Cambridge and within the colonial Gold Coast. But it's, you know, like you said, he's a. Didn't have email. Right. The archive is relatively limited. We don't have any. Any firm evidence of why he made the decision. But he did increasingly, as he started publishing, more also go by Ekra Achiman. So his first editions are typically accredited to Jek Sumi Hayford or Ekra Achiman. E K R A Right. Being the first part of that. And I think that the fact that the authorship is duly named like that is hugely revealing of how he structured his career in more general terms. The best way to sort of pinpoint it is probably to go to an antidote very quickly that his. One of his grandsons, Joe Casey Hayford, who is the late British designer who founded the Case Le Hayford House, told a story about when JE is his grandfather would wear a Kinta cloth when he was at Cambridge. I mean, just imagine it, right? This sort of, you know, early 20th century, the elite of. The elite of British aristocratic education. I mean, Peter Hobbes is, you know, kind of as rarefied as you could get at that point. And he was in Klost and in fact insisted against quite a number of other, in some cases more. More radical, I guess you might say, politicians back in the Gold coast that students at Echimota College, for example, should wear cloth rather than tailored to Clothing, as in, you know, suits and jackets and all that. And then according to Joe Case Le Hayford's story, when he was back in the Gold coast, he would wear these perfectly tailored, you know, British suits. And at one point I actually found in, in the archive when I was writing this book, a bit of shade, little side eye, we might say that someone in one of the Gold coast newspapers had thrown at him because he was pictured in his gorgeous, you know, three button vest and suit, three piece suit, alongside a caption noting that he was known to rail against Africans who didn't wear their native garb. And the intention was clearly to kind of call him out as, as a hypocrite of some sort. And I think that's a hugely misunderstanding what he was doing. I think it was much more adroit, even humorous. Probably knowing his writing very well, to just sort of play with people, right, and just be that chameleonic figure moving back and forth to get people to pay attention and to think a little bit harder about his tactics and how they were reading him in whatever environment he was moving in at the time.
- [18:48]
Elisa
His life really does have this sense of the expansive, I think, from the clothing, the sartorial choices and the self fashioning, a term that you reference to the larger expanse in which he's writing, thinking, moving. He doesn't feel like someone who's limited or constrained or that he chooses his own limits and constraints rather than slotting into something that's, that's, that's prefabricated. But this book, for all that we have now spent this time laying the groundwork about. Caseleigh Hayford is not a biography. We have to be clear, it's not a biography.
- [19:27]
Jean Marie Jackson
People will be very disappointed if they think you're picking up a biography, very
- [19:31]
Elisa
confused if they think this is a biography. And it's not either a intellectual history or a strict intellectual history, you call it actually something that I thought was interesting, a conceptual history. So can you kind of give me a sense of why you chose to approach jcle Hayford through his writings and thinking through it in this way? Why did you discard alternatives and how did you end up with this way of approaching him and his writing?
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Jean Marie Jackson
It's a wonderful question, especially because when I first started thinking about this book, I did see it as a way of trying to learn a new skill, basically. And that was more conventional literary biography writing. I should say that, you know, the reason I was able to do it in the years that I was because I won a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. That gave me a lot of time just to sit with it and really think hard about what shape I wanted this project to take. But the way that I had pitched it to them was precisely as a sort of literary biography of this key figure who, you know, for various reasons that we can get into later, had been sorely underserved by any number of fields. And as I read and as I sat with him and as I reread, I felt that I was doing him an injustice by trying to write a biography. A. Because the archive is quite scant. If that's the kind of work you're doing, there's plenty there to I think have a feel for JE Casely Hayford's life. I have to shout out his other grandson, Guest Casely Hayford, who's an art historian and scholar in his own right, who's been just wonderfully warm and forthcoming. You know, there's ways of getting at that kind of family backstory, but there is not a voluminous archive of Casey Hayford's comings and goings and drafts and things like that. But I think more than the practical reason, I didn't feel that a more staid literary biography was true to what he was doing with text and how he seemed to envision the expanses, as you put it, of intellectual life in for the most part, you know, not even in London, but these small towns in the Gold coast in Cape Coast, Animabu Axim especially where he practiced law as really being these. These connection between the most flying right sort of metaphysical contemplation. What is the nature of a rule? What ultimately, you know, is the. The standard by which one should live trans historically and how does that meet the goals, you know, that are embedded in an extremely self historicizing, self documenting milieu. All those kinds of questions, those were meeting the down and dirty nitty gritty. I think in the book I use the phrase brass tacks. You probably read the book more recently than I have work on the ground that he was doing to build institutions. And I thought, okay, what I actually need to do is come up with a shape of my book that can match that in some way, that can try to help have an equally huge range of scales and ways in to how he was situating himself and this fancy milieu in the world. And the way that ultimately related to most as being able to do that was the conceptual history that I look to as the Cambridge School or in the Cambridge School, typically. I'm not going to go far into the weeds with this but there are two kind of like big schools of conceptual history. One is the kind of German Reinhard Kozelek school, which tends to be more lexical in orientation, grammatical. Like how do individual terms change over time? How does their meaning sort of shade from one thing to another? His most famous example is probably thinking about the difference between burger and citizen. And the Cambridge school is, you know, usually associated with people like John Pocock, people like Quentin Skinner. And they're more invested in a slightly upstream version of what a concept is. So how do big terms end up evolving through the use of a cohort of people in a particular moment. Right. And having to situate those terms through what Quentin Skinner calls circuits of use. And so you can't really work with a term in that school of conceptual history unless it is both intrinsic to the texts you're working with, but also kind of in circulation in a couple different people's hands. You're trying to kind of flesh it out conversationally and then you bring other stuff into the mix and figure out what they're doing. But it's a really rigorous kind of worked out way. I mean, the Cambridge School, you know, crew has been going for, for decades at this point to try to take thinkers on their own terms. And that's what I wanted to do is a long and short of it with J. Kaseley Hayford. It sounds a bit more banal when, when you distill it to that degree, but I didn't feel that I could do that through more straightforward kinds of biographical narration.
- [25:28]
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- [26:29]
Elisa
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- [26:41]
Jean Marie Jackson
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- [26:44]
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- [26:58]
Elisa
As I'm hearing you talk about this decision, I think also there's one thing to take a thinker and their text on their terms and try to write a book or engage with them in a way that respects their own intellectual output positioning. It's very much another to do that with an African writer intellectual, because as we all know, African writers get shortchanged as writers, as intellectuals very, very frequently have to be used to represent something by force, even if that's not what their own choice is or how they see themselves. So I wanted to ask you about this book as re situating, which as you write the history of West Africa's intelligentsia within a deep seated cultural predisposition to text, which counters a lot of what African history has used to kind of affirm its place in the academy by saying African history is a place to innovate all of these techniques around the oral, or all of these techniques that try to sidestep the absence of a literary tradition or a textual tradition, which we know is false, but it's also something that has stuck. So I wanted to ask you to talk to us a little bit about the implications of approaching Casey Hayford, his texts AZTexts, and this re situating West African intelligentsia in a cultural view that is predisposed to text and what that means for you, particularly as someone who works in the field of literary studies and not a historian.
- [28:38]
Jean Marie Jackson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the money question or the money sort of set of questions. So thank you for picking up on their centrality to the project. The idea that to really be an Africanist you have to be deep in orality. Right. Whether you're coming from literary studies or whether you're coming from history has died so many deaths. And yet zombie like it's still I mean, it comes back, I think every year, every time I'M at a conference, I'm like, oh, there it is again. You know. And that's not to say that orality isn't a hugely significant part of, of certain fields of the African humanities and social sciences, or that people shouldn't do it or that people shouldn't try to get beyond so called elite forms of expression. It is to say that it very quickly becomes a kind of inverse bias, right from what is supposed to be the set of biases built into. And I say so called probably too much, but I'm going to insist on doing it. I am an, I'm an air quotes kind of girl, an air quotes kind of thinker built into to so called Western field or so called kind of, you know, originary fields for humanistic disciplines as they are situated in European and American universities. I think that every time, and there are very few of them to be clear, but I finally found a short article or you know, 10 page chapter in an out of print invited, you know, kind of chapter volume buried somewhere that mentioned intellectual history as such in an African context. And there are one or two that do broach conceptual history. There's a very fine essay by Rhiannon Stevens and Axel Fleisch that does talk about conceptual history as such. It all still goes back to the idea that, well, yes, these are kind of useful movements and useful ideas. That there could be a history of ideas that is separate from either ethnographic thinking, right, ethnographic sort of location of meaning, or from text in isolation from politics, lived out in other domains. But we have to do it differently. You have to do it differently in Africa because we just don't have a dense enough textual archive. I simply. I haven't found a. I was going to say I haven't found a single exception to this. There is one exception is I think the person that I'm most in conversation with at this point in my career, which is the elder Olofa Mi Taiwo, you know, at Cornell. And he has a book recently. Can a Chief be a Radical? Can a radical be a Chief? I might be inverting that name. And he names this tendency the metaphysics of difference. And the sort of unwitting in many cases reversion to a metaphysics, metaphysics of difference. When we're thinking about how we need to, how we're supposed to do work on African thinkers, you know, it's just not true. Not only is there a textual archive of the sort of newspaper sort in the 19th century, I call this in a recent interview, the newspapers and Networks paradigm and where text and where a sort of like rebuttal of the need to do other things, where ethnographic things typically winds up is in these, these newspapers, right, And a sort of archive of ephemera. It's simply not true that there is an, an extremely long form, formal, if you will, African textual archive and West African textual archive specifically in the 19th century. There's Africanus Horton going back to 1868. There's, you know, Carl Reindorf, there is John Mensa Sarba, you know, right before Jek Cille Hayford. These are all texts that are hundreds of pages long, rich with allusion, rich with footnotes. I mean, Anthony Grafton could have had a field day with these guys. And then of course for me there's J E Case, Lee Hayford, who is writing these legal humanistic treatises, as I called them, as early as 1903. So, you know, heading into the early 20th century. It's there, this work is there. I have my own ideas about why it hasn't been contended with in any really, really ample way. It's a lot to do with how African Studies in the US and the UK especially have been. Have been had to be right, corrective that, you know, when you're doing a corrective both of earlier and frankly racist tendencies in African Studies, but then also corrective, you know, of non African Studies fields that have consigned Africa, you know, to, to. To non intellectual status, non human status, if you go back further than that. And so we've not always necessarily been able to find the line between a useful correction and an overcorrection. And I think it's a very understandable thing ultimately. So if you have an idea, if, and I think this is actually not always true, not always tenable, but if there is a dominant idea that Western conceptual history, let's just take the Cambridge school and kind of abandon the Germanic strain, you know, for purposes of argument, has been about formal bodies of texts that identify themselves as bodies of texts. And you know, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner did in fact, you know, say that that's what distinguishes political theory from a lived epistemology, say, or just politics as opposed to political theory as a demarcated tradition of writing. You say, oh God, you're leaving out so many people, you're leaving out so many traditions. You're leaving out, I don't know, the Bugandan mythology that Jennifer Makumbi takes up in Chintu. You are leaving out all of the people who are thinking about chieftain seas as being Repositories, you know, of specifically intellectual traditions rather than only as cultural or legal ones. And that's true, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that the other stuff doesn't exist. Right? And oftentimes it is. And I think it ends up, to my mind, and this is where I may be being a little bit less generous, becoming a kind of easy way out, because you sort of know what the baseline of the argument is. You know, the point we're entering in, which is, okay, we have to be mixing it up, we have to be doing something a little bit different. And I think it gets a lot, a lot harder frankly to do our work. If you say, oh, well, actually, you know, these sort of other methodologies that are supposedly Western coded might not be as absolutely alien as they seem. And in fact we need to figure out precisely where they work and precisely where they falter in relation to these hundreds of pages long, dense, elusive texts that date back to the middle late 19th century in West Africa.
- [36:42]
Elisa
Okay, so thinking about these, let's say, methodological divisions and how they're born out of an impulse of correct direction and then how they end up sidelining the production of this formal body of text that you're engaging with in this book, there's also another aspect, let's say, of the history that's downstream of Caseleigh Hayford that contributes to his, if not erasure, at least marginalization, let's say. And that's the charge of him as an elite actor. And therefore his elitism makes him so far beyond what is the experience of everyday people. And that I think is true in general as a way of diminishing maybe the production of intellectuals in certain places. But I think it's particularly true in Ghana because Nkrumah's project was to bring everyday people into the political arena. And he was his, his innovation was to reject the Gold coast elite of the Donkwas of the generation prior to him. And so particularly in Ghana, the let's say text based elite, anti colonial but not anti imperial actors have, have forcibly been pushed to the background by the history of what happens after the war. And so I wondered also if you can think through for us what the politics around engaging with Caseleigh Hayford's body of work is in the context specifically of writing on Ghana's intellectual history, political theory in the Ghanaian context.
- [38:35]
Jean Marie Jackson
Yes, I mean, these are really fraught questions and obviously it's good that we're raising them. So JE Caseleigh Hayford is an interesting figure in Nkrumah's oeuvre because he has mentioned with, at various points, a ton of praise. Right. Nkrumah also styled his sort of own literary activism and sort of literary ethnogenesis, I guess you might say, after Caserli Hayford's ilk, these moments in the late 19th and early 20th century of the literary and social clubs that Stephanie Newell writes so wonderfully about, for example. So, you know, he. He wants to have Enzyma literary society and things like that, right? Kind of take it into that different ethnic register. This is before, obviously, he's running Ghana and, you know, embarks on this detribalization campaign. At other points, he derides the National Congress of British West Africa specifically for being elitists. At the same time, I mean, it sounded. And, but, and, but I feel like for. For every conjunction here, you know, Archie K. Sally Hayford, JE Caseli, Hayford's son, to whom he was extremely close, who also became a barrister and then actually occupied two different ministries in Nkrumah's government. He's standing with him when he makes the Midnight Speech. When Nkrumah makes the Midnight Speech. And I've always found it fascinating in not a ton has been written on it that the Midnight Speech, you know, the preambles and flunti. And typically when you are teaching it or reading it in an anthologized form, which I have gotten myself, I can never find an anthologized form that has the plenty. I actually don't know that I've ever seen a print of the flinty text of the Midnight Speech preamble, to be perfectly honest.
- [40:23]
Elisa
Wait, can I just pause to say the Midnight Speech is a speech that Nkrumah gives at Independence in Order. And he famously says that the liberation of Africa will be incomplete or the liberation of Ghana is only a step towards the liberation of Africa.
- [40:43]
Jean Marie Jackson
Yeah, total liberation. All caps, right? T O T I L. But Kwame Nkrumah is not funty. He was not mainly a fancy speaker. And that was a very deliberate move on his part. So on the one hand, there's a disavowal of the later stages of Casey Lehford's political work. On the other hand, there is a very active cultivation of a connection to Casey Hayford in particular. So there's an interesting kind of ambivalence there. The Donkhwa connection complicates it even further. Casey Hayford and ZB Donkwa were actually connected. I mean, Don Hoa has as. As if, like he sits right. JB Taghua had, I think, a very Fair claim to having been J E Caseleigh Hayford's protege. You know, he was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple, the same as Casely Hayford. They worked together quite a lot in as late as 1929, you know, the year before J.E. caseleigh Hayford died. And Dunkwood then, to my mind, very obviously styles his own written work. Dr. J E Caseley Hayford. So with the Akan doctrine of God, Right. You know, with his texts on customary law, trying to do this interweaving of. Yeah, sort of self conscious, non essentialist, you know, kind of ethnogenetic mapping, if you will, of their history with this grand conceptual architecture and kind of metaphysical philosophy. And obviously Danko was, was trained as a philosopher as well. And so I think that connection can more readily explain some of the later disavowal of the NCBWA leaders as elitists, perhaps. Although, you know, none of these causations are direct and they're all kind of in the mix there. To the larger point though, about this erasure or, you know, a relative erasure based on the fact that JE Casey Hayford is elite. And, and I can't tell you how many times I heard this, you know, kind of when I was working on him, I would get one of two responses in Ghana from family and friends there. 1. Oh, wow. But like, everyone knows Casey Lee Hayford and I would say, do you? Well, then tell me about him. And people would kind of think about it and then realize, oh, I actually, you know, I do, but I don't. He's the most famous, the most revered sketchy figure in the country in some ways. Or I would get a sort of, oh, well, you know, but those elitists, you know, the draws introduction to. I forget, I think it's. I think it's to. J.W. deGraff Johnson's book toward nations and West Africa talks about how he was just written off as a colonial stooge for a very long time. To my mind, elite is just not very useful and maybe more to the point, not a very interesting designation. Elite, there's always going to be an elite. As I wrote this book, I think it goes without saying I kind of watched American politics, you know, in horror, right, descend into the first and then second Donald Trump presidency. And I found myself thinking, man, I would not mind a J Case Lee for the elite right now, this kind of noblesse of liege style of governance, liberal constitutionalism started to look pretty good in ways that it hadn't. I mean, viscerally, for A while. And it also doesn't do a lot to name the ways in which J E Caseily Hayford and John Mensah Sarba to some degree Dahua even were themselves grappling with different versions of what elite meant, sort of, you know, collated or stacked up against one another. So to. It kind of misses the wood for the treaties in a lot of ways. I don't think it says a whole lot for that matter. I don't know on what planet. Kwame Nkrumah is not elite by anyone's definition by the time that he's ousted. So I think the better question is was Jek Salida Hayford an elite? Was Jek Sally Hayford an elite? And a lot of the work I tried to do in this book is answering that question, which I think, you know, is not directly relevant to anything happening either in Ghana or in the world right now, but is nonetheless extremely resonant to a lot of questions about who should govern and how the relationship between leaders, temperaments and value systems and you know, actual policy making or complete overriding of policy as the case may be, policy and process plays out in. In the world. So maybe not direct relevance, but definitely resonance. And the. The sort of model of elite state building in which there is a very strong sense of civic obligation that is oftentimes at odds actually with financial or economic viability. As in Casely Hayford's case, he was broke half the time he couldn't afford to make it to London. You know, he would spend his. The proceedings from his legal practice on buying a printing press, you know, kind of Gandhi style, although it never actually became a collective like it did in South Africa. But, you know, he was not getting rich off of the work that he was doing in any way, shape or form. And I think that it's a huge mistake to either implicitly or explicitly conflate the J E Caseleigh Hayford elite with the elite that we know if we care about African literature and theory from Fanon, right? You know, this kind of. This kind of corrupt fat cat bourgeois class or from closer to home, you know, the, the kind of early rulers of, of Ghana and immediately turning a prophet and abandoning civic works. And that is not the person or the cohort that I wrote about in this book. And I think that's a crucial distinction. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
- [47:30]
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- [48:15]
Jean Marie Jackson
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- [48:23]
Elisa
In the book, you make the point that we have these texts and this is literary. You know, we're reading them in a literary way, but and I think that these two words together were something I'll really hold on to, but that we should also see the very literal implications, the very to the ground in the weeds, Not something that is so rarefied as to not have concrete meaning and import for society. And this juxtaposition, or not juxtaposition, this fusing together of the literary and the literal in the work of J. Caseley Hayford. And each chapter, there are three substantive body chapters in the book engages most directly with one of his major pieces of writing, of course, integrates archival material, other writings, it goes further afield, but it's anchored around one piece of text really, let's say, and one kind of legal concept. And how he's trying to elaborate this legal concept in order to propose forms of state building forms of governance, legal forms that will help constitute Gold coast society, the Fante world. So I wanted to invite you to choose one of the chapters to kind of bring out the way that you approach connecting his texts to these legal concepts. I should say that the second chapter is devoted to Ethiopia Unbound, which is his most famous publication, 1911, you say we can make a strong case for this being the first African novel written in English. So if readers are interested in Ethiopian Bound, there's a deeper exploration of it in chapter two. But I wanted you to see if you can kind of invite us into your method as you use these Bodi chapters to explore these concepts.
- [50:30]
Jean Marie Jackson
Yes, please. I'm going to answer that question in two parts. I am probably too long winded for 10:16pm as it is right now sitting in Baltimore in the US So the first thing about the literary and the literal more broadly is that Casey Hayford was, I think, kind of an engineer at heart, and his understanding of the law was extreme, extremely mechanical in that way. And I don't mean mechanical in that it was rote. I don't mean mechanical, you know, and that ultimately he. He was trying to make law into a science characteristic of, you know, early and mid 20th century American law schools. And the way that, for example, Kunal Parker, as written about law schools here as really kind of failing, right, to kind of address big humanistic questions and things like that. I mean, mechanical again, literally, as you say. I love that when he was at the Inner Temple, I don't know which committees he served on, although I did spend quite a bit of time in their absolutely incredible archive there. But the committees that he could have served on, and I like to think that he would have picked, included the electric light bulb committee, where they would meet for hours and talk about precisely which electric light bulbs they should be outfitting. You know, this really highfalutin in a court with, right, and debate the merits of different kinds of batteries and generators and things, you know, really down to the minutiae of that machinery. That says a lot, regardless of whether he actually served on it. Although again, I like to think he did about his bent, about his cat, Cast of Mind, and also about the tradition that he was working with in the Gold Coast. So very briefly, and then I'll get to the chapter, as I mentioned earlier, Casely, Hayford was not sort of the progenitor of his intellectual tradition, although he is. It's his standard bearer, you might say. He was hugely indebted to King Garthi of Winnebagh, who at that point, you know, was sort of becoming funny, right? I mean, Winnabans, whether they're funny, I realized, like, I get in a lot of. For assigning status one way or the other. But I think Garci wrote in Fancy, spoke in Fanti with Caseley Hayford and others, and I think would not have fully objected to the identity. And he wrote one of the first travel monologues or, sorry, travelogues in all of Africa called Guide to Kumasi. It was a hugely literate man, an incredible polymath, and then also came up with this really innovative timber flotation system for moving timber around the Gold Coast. I mean, just to kind of like, you know, spell out for people here the full extent of his conjuncture of the literal and the literary. That's what Caseleigh Hayford was part of this line. Casely Hayford of himself, himself was quite preoccupied with streets. He wrote a law about, about roads, about the importance of having certain kinds of roads. I believe that they're called speeder roads to this day in Ghana. Right. My, my brother in law lives out in Suyani and this is a topic of much debate out there. Exactly what width should a road be to get different types of other roads, whether they're hills or flat, into a cocoa farm. Caseley Hayford was really involved in those conversations, really involved in conversations about how and when to tar or tarmac different kinds of roads and when he referred back in Gold coast native institutions to the Ponti Confederation moment. So for people who, you know, don't know this, who might be listening, this is this fully fledged African constitutional state founded in 1868 by most dates. Some are earlier, some are later. He cites one of their major achievements as having been attending to Rhodes also, you know, the education of women, for example. That's very much in the mix. And then berates the British Empire for kind of failing at maintaining Rhodes. So that's the sphere that we're operating in. How this connects to the chapter that I would like to talk briefly about for the second part of your question. It's my, I think maybe my personal favorite chapter. Although it changes as you write a book and then as you dare to go back and read your work, it changes again. But right now I think I'm partial to chapter three, which is called the Jurisdiction of Morals. I think, I think that's what it's called. I don't actually have the book in front of me and that is about how Casey Lee Hayford shows his work. So Casey Hafer describes and a couple different places this describes his writing. You know, again, these really lofty, right, kind of hundreds of page long engagements that suture legal questions to flinty cultural self definition, to kind of all the ins and outs of British Victorian and Edwardian literature and intellectual life. Theosophy to George Eliot, I mean, you name it. He describes it as at one point, this is an actual quote, a lot of hard office work. And I absolutely love this phrase for getting at who he is as a writer and I think as a leader as well because he's doing all of this, going through all of these pains to show he's sourcing his work, you know, to show he's determining which citations to go deep on, which citations to sort of, you know, just kind of throw into the mix and slightly more passing ways. He's shouting out to readers all the time in this kind of signposting language that is very hard to teach new writers to do, actually. I'm sure many of people tuning in are professors or at least writers of some sort, teachers to get people to kind of guide readers. Right. I mean, it's really, it is sort of hard office type work. It's really kind of going back through the grand strokes of a text and tweaking and tightening and turning the screws to figure out how and where you want things to connect. And he's just incredibly deliberate and incredibly judicious about how he does that. So the jurisdiction of morals sort of takes this literalism, literariness, right. Kind of conjuncture and uses it to talk about the truth about the West African land question, which is in a lot of ways his most radical, most political kind of tracty book. Although it is very, very long, you know, it is not a manifesto, to be clear. It does not read as one. And it's a book that he uses to showcase his most. His research and writing process. So the chapter tries to draw out how he does that as a means of modeling who, who he is as a legal mover and shaker. And when he stands up in the Legislative Council, in the Gold Coast Legislative Council, he often instructs people, mostly British people, right? There are only six members at that point from the Gold coast in how to read well. And he, he, he, he is extremely, you know, no bones about how they read poorly. And he reads out these long quotations from articles from the Gold coast and British press that he thinks are really beautifully reasoned and cited. And he reads out these long quotations that he thinks are extremely poorly reasoned and cited. And he stops and he repeats things at key moments. I will admit that I think for some people who maybe are wanting a more firebrand kind of temperament from a book called the Truth about the West African Land Question, it might be a little bit tedious, but my God, for a literature scholar, you're like, oh, this is a gold mine. And he sees this sort of slow moving through the points of textual demarcation and responsibility as integral to the political work and the legislative work that he is doing to build the National Congress of British West Africa in particular, but to just generally ensure formal African representation within the British Empire. So that's really something, right? If you are someone who spends A lot of time reading less historicist literary scholars. And I'm like the kind of, you know, historicist black sheep in a lot of rooms that are more excited about literary criticism as such. It's not really my, my, my thing. I, I'm a wannabe historian in a lot of ways. Close reading and you go deep in the text and you examine its well wroughtness. I mean the kind of the urn right would be the new critical language. And now it's thinking about how literary texts think differently than other kinds of texts. And I'm really going in the opposite direction. And I'm saying no, JE Caseli Hayford is showing us how and where close reading and then reading out loud in an extremely consequential legislative council at an extremely, you know, at a pivotal juncture in imperial representational and self representational history. Showing how close reading actually matters for whether or not you are qualified to lead your people. I mean he did all my work for me. I'm endlessly grateful to him. But that, but that's what that chapter is about and it's called the Jurisdiction of Morals because it shows how he ends up connecting those skills at reading and sort of values really the value system that he assigns to things like citation practice. When he thinks that someone is referencing someone else's article fairly, he has these kind of like three and four tiered citation almost weds going on in the truth about the West African land question. He's also linking that back to the bond of 1844, which a lot of people probably don't know who might be listening to. This is when Fante chiefs and sort of the British governor at that time strike a deal for the Fantes to have some of their own control of things basically for them to have all of the jurisdiction over legislative matters in a broad sense and civil matters. And then for the British just to handle criminal, criminal proceedings basically. I mean kind of what they call serious crimes, so murder and human sacrifice and things like that. But it went down in history as being a moment of selling out, right. That the fantasies sort of didn't hold the line that the Ashanti Empire did, for example, against the British. But anyway, he sees that moment as having been hugely significant for thinking about how, how finely tuned distinction making is in and of itself a moral operation. You're deciding what sorts of things are flexible and what sorts of things are not, what sorts of things are open to the logic of trade offs morally, what sorts of things are not. In other words, they have a kind of deontological right or immovable status to them. And he takes that all the way up into the early 20th century, so, you know, not quite a century later, but. But getting towards that. To think about how we parse the citation practices of Gold coast and Imperial newspapers. Again, probably overspoke there, but there's a lot of text to get through. And I want to do justice to just how far reaching his efforts in that book especially were.
- [62:53]
Elisa
You know, academics do not like to seed disciplinary ground. We like to, you know, keep our borders up. But you do make a strong case for Caseleigh Hayford as being someone who speaks to the literary scholar and not only to the historian. So we'll let you in. We'll invite you.
- [63:14]
Jean Marie Jackson
Thank you. Thank you. You know, I've done my best, and now you all can do what you will with me.
- [63:20]
Elisa
No, but it's work that really, as you explain, requires a kind of incredibly deep sustained attention, which is a training, really, like a way of thinking about the world, a discipline. And so I'm very happy that you found him and your mind and your training found him to be able to bring out these ideas. It seems that it would be very hard for almost anyone to replicate the kind of deep thinking that you've done about him and his work. So, as we come to a close, I just wanted to ask you if you're working on new projects that you want to share and kind of what's on the horizon now.
- [64:07]
Jean Marie Jackson
You know, I'm almost angry at myself to have to tell you that, yes, I am working on two new projects now. I promised myself after finishing this book, which really took a. I mean, they all take a pound of flesh, but for the reasons that you just sort of very kindly laid out this one, I thought. I felt like especially took it out of me. I mean, like everyone else, you know, concentrating is harder than it used to be. So to do a book about the virtues and specifically functive virtues of concentration was definitely challenging. But I am moving in slightly new directions. I just put under contract a very small book, I believe they call them mini graphs these days, for a new series at Oxford University Press. It's a little series of these kind of invited partnerships. So two people who come together with different disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives and then write paired essays framed by an introduction and then an interview with both authors on a term that they think really brings together literature and politics. So I'm writing mine with a wonderful scholar and longtime close friend, Tsitsi Jaji, a Zimbabwean American literary scholar and musicologist and classical Pianist and jazz pianist and like she's a zillion things. I don't ever want to pigeonhole Tse at Duke in their English and Africana studies department. And we are writing about a sort of institutional history of mostly Southern Rhodesian into Zimbabwean intellectual life around the term of discipline. And I'm calling my essay Discipline and Flourish, which is obviously a play on discipline and punishment. And it's about discipline gets wrested in the 21st century by writers out of a frame of the state and therefore this kind of punitive or panoptical association into something that is a little bit more wonky and individuated and oftentimes used to ends of immense gratification. And she's doing something kind of similar but from a more musicological perspective and a second project which will take a long time, I hope. Otherwise I've really lost it. If I. If I go hard at this too quickly is. I'm thinking of it as the intellectual backstory that I would want a reader to have who wanted to understand the company merger that becomes Anglo Ashanti. So we have Anglo American, right? The gold mining company that then absorbed De Beers diamonds and is the outlet that most represents in a lot of ways the horrific racism and labor technologies and racial and widespread social abuses of the Cecil Rhodes mining. So the legacy, you know, Africa run obviously for a long time. I also work in Afrikaans and they merge with what used to be Ashanti goldfields, which is this incredible source, as you know, at least I'm sure of, you know, Black African pride going back to the opening of the Abuasi mines in the. Was it the 1870s? Right. I'm, I'm. I'm tired. I'm going to get that year wrong. Y', all. Y' all can edit me, but it's crazy in a lot of ways. They are now the same outlet. Like that's crazy. That happens to be a story that we have a close family connection to. My, my oldest brother in law helped kind of broker that. And I've just become intensely interested in the ways that gold mining not absorbs but generates in both the Gold coast and Ghana and you know, what becomes South Africa, These rapidly shifting moral frameworks and moral vocabularies. So the book is going to be kind of a history of different types of moral terms told through moments that lead up to this corporate merger. We're going all the way back to Olive Schreiner and all the way up through corporate responsibility discourse and sort of socially conscious mining as the wave of the future. And I'm super excited about it. I'm going to be teaching a course on it in the center for Economy and Society, which I'm affiliated with at the Agora Institute at Hopkins in the fall for the first time, super multidisciplinary. And then I'm also going to be going to some, like mining conferences and mining executive conferences and things like that to watch how they talk about themselves and when it veers into moral territory.
- [69:08]
Elisa
Well, no one can accuse you of not being ambitious. These are big projects, and I think very much in sync with the tradition of J. Kaseleigh Hayford to bring together the literary and the literal.
- [69:22]
Jean Marie Jackson
Well, that's a very high compliment, and I only hope that over the next decade or so I can try to live up to that. So thank you so much.
- [69:30]
Elisa
Well, thank you, Jimri. Thanks for talking about this lovely new book.
- [69:34]
Jean Marie Jackson
Such a pleasure.