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William Esuman-Gwira Sekyi, better known as Kobina Sekyi (1 November 1892, Cape Coast – 1956), was a nationalist lawyer, politician and writer in the Gold Coast.
Biography
Sekyi, born on 1 November 1892 in Cape Coast, was the son of John Gladstone Sackey, headmaster of the Wesleyan School, who was himself the son of Chief Kofi Sekyi, the Chief Regent of Cape Coast and Wilhelmina Pietersen, also known as Amba Paaba, daughter of Willem Essuman Pietersen (c.1844–1914); Pietersen was an Elmina–Cape Coast businessman and one-time President of the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, a later president of which was Sekyi’s uncle, Henry van Hien, whose heir Sekyi was.
Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) was an African anti-colonialist organization formed in 1897 in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known. Originally established by traditional leaders and the educated elite to protest the Crown Lands Bill of 1896 and the Lands Bill of 1897, which threatened traditional land tenure, the Gold Coast ARPS became the main political organisation that led organised and sustained opposition against the colonial government in the Gold Coast, laying the foundation for political action that would ultimately lead to Ghanaian independence.
Sekyi was educated at Mfantsipim School and studied philosophy at the University College of London, accompanied to Britain by his maternal grandfather. He had originally wanted to become an engineer like his mother’s younger brother, J. B. Essuman-Gwira, but because his family controlled the purse strings and they wished him to study law, that was the career he entered. Sekyi was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple in 1918. He became a lawyer in private practice in the Gold Coast. He was president of the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS), an executive member of the National Congress of British West Africa, and member of the Coussey Committee for constitutional change.
The National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), founded in 1917, was one of the earliest nationalist organizations in West Africa, and one of the earliest formal organizations working toward African emancipation. It was largely composed of an educated elite in the Gold Coast, who felt under threat from the incorporation of ‘traditional authorities’ in the colonial system. The cofounders included Thomas Hutton-Mills, Sr., the first President, and J. E. Casely Hayford, the first Vice-President. Other co-founders and early officials included Edward Francis Small, F. V. Nanka-Bruce, A. B. Quartey-Papafio, Henry van Hien, A. Sawyerr and Kobina Sekyi.
The Coussey Committee was established on 14 March 1949, after the 1948 Accra riots, to draft a constitution towards self-rule for the country Gold Coast. The committee was chaired by Sir Henley Coussey and published their report on 7 November 1949. The committee made provision for greater African representation in Government as there were increasing demands for a representative government by Gold Coasters. The Watson Commission had earlier recommended an extensive Legislative Assembly with more Ghanaians included on 26 April 1948.
Personal Life
Sekyi married Lilly Anna Cleanand, daughter of John Peter Cleanand and Elizabeth Vroom.
Sekyi was popular as the first educated elite appearing in a colonial court in Ghanaian “ntoma” cloth as a lawyer. It is believed he vowed never to wear European clothes as he viewed himself as totally African.
He died in Cape Coast, on 20 June 1956
His Literary Work: The Blinkards
Sekyi’s comedy The Blinkards (1915) satirised the acceptance by a colonised society of the attitudes of the colonisers. His novel The Anglo-Fante, serialized in West Africa magazine in 1918, was the first English-language novel written in Cape Coast.
The Enduring Relevance of Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards in Twenty-First-Century Ghana by AWO MANA ASIEDU
“They conclude that all things African are bad and all things European and American are good. I know that the world will be a better place if all of us respect one another’s way of life, agreeing that no one is either superior or inferior; and that all of us are equal but our ways of seeing the world, worshipping God, rearing children or tending our crops may be different”
THESE WORDS, by a thirteen-year-old in the early 1960s, capture the essence of Kobina Sekyi’s ideas as expressed in his play The Blinkards, the earliest Ghanaian play, written and first produced in 1916. Situated within the colonial era, it satirizes the mannerisms of people who, in the early-twentieth century, had travelled to Britain and returned to the Gold Coast with condescending attitudes towards their own cultures and peoples; they had bought into the lie of white supremacy and African inferiority. The play focuses on the institution of marriage, questioning the tendency to adopt a Western style of contracting a marriage in an effort to be modern or civilized. It also examines attitudes towards speaking English instead of the local language, and notes the preference for European food and clothing as against African food and clothing. Sekyi exposes and interrogates the apparent inferiority of all things African and the supposed superiority of all things Western. I contend that the play raises questions that are still relevant more than five decades after Ghana’s independence.
I was fascinated to discover how this early-nineteenth-century Gold Coast intellectual was so far ahead of his time in his thinking, and why, though not a trained theatre practitioner, he found the medium of theatre a suitable means of sharing his views with his compatriots, who in large part thought of him as strange. James Gibbs, in an enlightening essay based on a painstaking search through old newspapers and archives, re-creates the conditions under which Sekyi produced his play in Cape Coast in 1916. He provides very useful background information and highlights the success of this first production, noting, however, that “the impact of the production was not followed by the establishment of a theatrical tradition or even by any real circulation of the script of the play.” In fact, the play was not published until 1974, eighteen years after Sekyi’s death. The reason for this lack of an enduring impact of the production may lie in the unpopularity of the issues he raised. Although a chronology of his life, as traced by Gibbs, indicates that a year after the production of the play he returned to England to further his education, and thus may not have had the opportunity to reproduce it, there is sufficient evidence, as provided later by Gibbs, to suggest that there were people who were suspicious of Sekyi and were not altogether pleased with his play. Gibbs quotes from an article in a Gold Coast newspaper, The Nation, reporting that “Before the production, certain wild rumours had been circulated by some person or persons to the effect that the play was of an impious nature.” Although the writer goes on to debunk this rumour, concluding that “the lessons it taught were wholesome and they brought some valuable home-thrusts to those who overstep the boundary of propriety in engrafting foreign customs on their own,” it is immediately clear that the production of the play was not welcomed by everyone. This is not at all surprising, as the play lampoons the elite of his day, and many influential people may have felt its barbs quite keenly. That some characters and incidents in the play still resonate with Ghanaian audiences nearly a hundred years after this first production points to Sekyi’s brilliant observation and understanding of the psychology of the colonized.
