Sir Edward Okyere Asafu-Adjaye was the very first Asante lawyer. Descended from an Asante royal family; he was born in 1903 and educated at the Kumasi Government Boys’ School before attending the University of London, England, where he won the prestigious Profumo Prize and was called the bar in 1927. He set up his private practice in Accra and took an active interest in local and national politics. He became a firm supporter of Ghanaian nationalism during the 1930s. He was a member of the Kumasi Town Council and of the so-called Confederacy Council for many years. During the early 1950s he served under Kwame Nkrumah first as minister of local government (1951-54) and then as minister of trade and labour in 1955. In 1957, he was appointed an ambassador to France and, in the early 1960s, was a member of the United Nations Committee which investigated apartheid in South Africa. His international reputation as a lawyer and a diplomat led to his being appointed also to the commission established by Great Britain to enquire into the disturbances that had occurred in British Guiana. He later served as chairman of the commission which exposed the conditions prevailing in Ghana’s prisons during Nkrumah’s administration. In addition to his legal and political assignments, Asafu-Adjaye was a director of Barclay’s Bank (Ghana) Ltd, Mobil Oil (Ghana Ltd) and the Consolidated African Selection Trust Ltd. He also served as president of the African Liberal Council in Accra. Sir Edward Asafu-Adjaye died on 27 February 1976. He had been knighted for his services to Ghana and is best remembered perhaps as his country’s first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom after its achievement of political independence in 1957.
ASAFU-ADJAYE, Edward
