I am GREAT at BlueSky 😂

Ooh, can I be in this?

Gus Casely-Hayford works in Ghanaian art history (or did, he’s now in the museum world); Toby Green works on precolonial West Africa broadly…

🥰

7) J.E. Casely Hayford's work is a portal into a milieu where such things mattered very much. I hope that readers find value in my presentation of it. Thank you for coming to my second thread ever.

6) African history and literature have been ill-served by the dominance of "the cultural" and "the social" over intellectualism that is unafraid to declare itself as such. They have been ill-served by a propensity to detach politics from the narration of denser kinds of moral & aesthetic reasoning.

5) But no label under which Casely Hayford and his ilk are packaged -- "coastal elite," "comprador bourgeoisie," “cultural middlemen," etc. -- does justice to the fine-grained attention that CH brought to questions OF disposition, and its role in the cultivation of self and state through law.

4) And hey, look, I get it; clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment are not necessarily things we get excited about in 2025. For obvious reasons.

3) In the language of Gen Z (or Y?), this book is my own cri de coeur against "tone-policing" previous generations of intellectuals and state-builders. J.E. Casely Hayford, and the West African (pre-)colonial legal class of which he remains emblematic, was dispositionally liberal to the core.