Adelaide Casely-Hayford

Adelaide Casely-Hayford, MBE, was a Sierra Leone Creole advocate, an activist of cultural nationalism, a teacher and fiction writer and a feminist. Committed to public service, she worked to improve the conditions of black men and women. As a pioneer of women's education in Sierra Leone, she played a key role in popularizing Pan-Africanist and feminist politics in the early 1900s. She set up a Girls' Vocational and Training School in Freetown in 1923 to instil cultural and racial pride for Sierra Leoneans under colonial rule. In pursuit of Sierra Leone national identity and cultural heritage, she created a sensation by wearing traditional African attire in 1925 to attend a reception in honour of the Prince of Wales.