May the Eudemonious Spirit of Sydney Casely-Hayford (1954-2023) Acquire More Strength in Transition and Eternal Repose – Part 1

Sydney Casely-Hayford, aged 69 years old, was the quintessential paragon or personification of what Americans call a “Mensch,” a human being in the behaviorally emulative sense and context of the word (See “Financial Analyst Sydney Casely-Hayford Dead” Modernghana.com 12/2/23). To be certain, Big Brother Sydney, as he was more popularly and affectionately known, was much more than the mere description of his chosen profession. He was a Pan-Africanist and a Nationalist patriot even as both of his paternal grandfather, Mr. Archibald “Archie” Casely-Hayford, a core and seminal member of the cabinet of Ghana’s first postcolonial Prime Minister and President, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, even as his great-grandfather, the legendary and the immortalize Mr. Joseph Ephraim “J E” Casely-Hayford had been. Now, we shall shortly be talking about genuine and authentic pedigree in due course.

For now, let it just suffice for me to say that although the two of us never personally met, not even on Facetime, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately, or maybe we did, nevertheless, we did communicate fairly regularly and oftentimes heartily during the several years that Sydney lived and worked in the US’ capital of Washington, DC, well enough for our fast tele-friendship to authentically pass for friendship in the basic sense of the term and then some, as Americans are wont to say. Indeed, so cordially intimate were the two of us that when Big Brother Sydney called be from “DC” shortly after he had arrived at the definitive conclusion that he was struggling extremely hard to feel as comfortable, both personally and socioeconomically, right here in the United States of America, the mythological home of the proverbial “American Dream,” the way he would have seamlessly felt in his own Motherland of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, and that he was very certain that, at best, the United States could only be considered as a pit-stop or a way station to his ultimate destination which, for all intents and practical purposes, of course, was Ghana, I, naturally took it for one of the proverbial jokes of the century.

You see, as an economist and a financial analyst, Sydney was a crackerjack practitioner at his trade and the versatile publisher of a newspaper called The New Ghanaian, as I vividly recall. There was another newspaper that he published which was more narrowly focused on economic and financial issues, largely pertaining to business opportunities in his Motherland and the proverbial Primeval Continent at large. There was absolutely nothing surprising about the media aspect of his work, for after all, wasn’t his great-grandfather one of the pioneer newspaper publishers of the erstwhile Gold Coast? I had first gotten to know of and been brought into direct communication with Sydney by an at once burly and handsome and an equally affable gentleman by the name of Mr. Vanderpuije, who regularly did the rounds with complimentary copies of the New Ghanaian newspaper at various functions and activities organized by members of the Ghanaian-American Community all over the American Northeast and other parts of our Modern Empire of a country.

I would shortly learn that there had been a mutually and a consensually amicable parting of the ways between Mr. Vanderpuije, whose first name must have been “Sylvester” or some such soft-sounding name and Sydney, as the latter matter-of-factly related the same to me in a very brief sentence or two completely devoid of any emotionally fraught sentiments or bitterness. The scion of the half Anglo-Irish and Ghanaian Casely-Hayford Clan was far more about the serious and the adult business of making a very constructive and a major impact on the socioeconomic development of his homeland. Which means that merely putting together some nifty and well-edited newspaper publications into the public domain was not really the most salient concern of our recently deceased protagonist, a professionally acute and masterful graduate of Ghana’s oldest and most respected flagship tertiary academy, the University of Ghana. Rather, what first and foremost evinced or elicited the “Menschness” or the rarefied humanity of the man was his very warmth and charming and sedate personality, even while he spoke on the phone about very controversial topics and subjects.

I guess it would be even more appropriate to say that Sydney waxed most eloquently when the subject of conversation revolved smack around such metaphorical bread-and-butter issues as the basic problems and concerns of the proverbial average Ghanaian citizen, to wit, the lower-middle class Ghanaian civil servant and the blue-collar worker, that is, those at the very bottom of both the socioeconomic ladder or the figurative totem pole and the socioeconomic trough, if one could so politely albeit vulgarly put matters. When he gave me that first most delightful courtesy call to inform Yours Truly that he was departing God’s Own Homeland to settle in his Motherland for good, because he did not envisage himself making the kind of remarkable impact that he avidly wanted to make if he was already Back Home, this urbane gentleman who was also the great-grandson of perhaps the second Ghanaian to have obtained a law degree from the West in the second-half of the nineteenth century or the very early twentieth century, only second after the equally legendary and immortalized Mr. John Mensah-Sarbah, I promptly and pointed responded that I personally was not the least bit afflicted with the kind of “belly-fire” or even embers that the late Gen. Colin Luther Powell, the very first ever African-American General to be named Head of the United States’ Military, once claimed was direly needed to fuel up any American politician with presidential ambitions, but which the then United States’ Secretary of State or Foreign Minister, like Yours Truly, firmly believed he woefully lacked.

“Personally, I strongly believe that I am more effective and impactful living right here in the United States and regularly contributing my ideas via newspaper columns and articles at home towards the development of Ghana,” I would assure Big Brother Sydney, and quickly add that I also strongly believed that it would not be very long, after he had been settled in Ghana that my good friend would start feeling an acute sense of regret and disappointment and even outright betrayal, the acute racism and flagrant marginalization of African people here in the United States, notwithstanding. “I hope, as our elders are fond of saying, you have not completely burned up whatever bridges it is that you have built hereabouts and, instead, at least you have left a plank or two as fallbacks for the nonce, in case you have to come back.” He is the real “Mensch” who makes up his mind and does not look back for a split-second, no matter the temptation to doing so. This pretty much epitomized the personality, temperament and the character profile of the man whom I called my Big Brother. And true to his words and promise, he would not look back though, once settled back home, Sydney would wince and be constantly and bitterly complaining over the last seven or eight years of his life about the fact that Ghanaian leaders had been, by and large, a apocalyptic failures, all their pontifical jiving about believing in the sovereign integrity and the national-development potential of country, given the chance to take over the helm and the affairs of our beloved nation by the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters notwithstanding.

This recollection goes way back to sometime between late 2014 and the spring or the early summer of 2015 or thereabouts. Big Brother Sydney would also pen and publish, as he was already widely known to do, reams and book-length volumes of newspaper columns and articles bitterly complaining about the woeful inability of the John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama-led regime of the populist and faux-socialist National Democratic Congress (NDC) to turn and keep the lights on for any remarkable span of time. Once, Big Brother Sydney wrote that he found nothing to be more annoying than being in the middle of composing a very important article for publication on a pressing national issue, often an issue of socioeconomic significance, only to have all the lights in his private residence blackout without any advance warning whatsoever, often in the middle of the day but almost invariably at night as well.

Which gave me something critical to immediately think about. Which was that if I should ever decide to spend at least one month in Ghana, I would have absolutely no alternative but to make sure that the three-bedroom pad, which I recently completed with my wife, was fully equipped with solar panels. You see, Dear Reader, the last time that our family was in Ghana, that is, with my wife and our two teenage sons, which was some five years ago – the younger of the pair was actually 11 years old – we stayed next door in the much more spacious house of my brother-in-law and his wife which was fully equipped with solar panels. So, I did not have to worry about worry about the capricious vicissitudes of Dumsor, which the then newly elected Akufo-Addo government was still diligently working literally around-the-clock to significantly reduce to the barest minimum or even completely banish altogether.

Now, the Dear Reader should not get me wrong at all; there was Dumsor all right, but it was definitely more relatively tolerable than had been the case under the watch or, more appropriately speaking, THE SLUMBER PARTY of the Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja-led regime of the National Democratic Congress. Now, there was at least some semblance of alternating rationality to it, and not the sort of patent and shameless rhetorical bunk being presently retailed by the Mahama and the Asiedu-Nketia Posse to some unsuspecting eligible and potential voters by a criminally desperate Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama under the guise of a specious chimerical political propaganda spiel called a 24-Hour Economy. I bet my proverbial bottom-dollar that Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome has been having a field day laughing and farting uncontrollably all the way to the bank, as the New York City cliché goes ever since Kwame Gonja came up with latest sloganeering poppycock.

Unfortunately, from reliable eyewitness accounts and media reports emanating from the Motherland, that is, the historically uncontroverted Birthplace of Divine Providence, the overall situation does not appear to have significantly improved the way that it ought to have been even under the present far more visionary and progressive Akufo-Addo Administration. Which pretty much explains why my good friend and Big Brother Sydney Casely-Hayford would enlist for voluntary service in the locally renowned civil society pressure group called #OccupyGhana, an obviously mundane take on the New York City movement with a similar socioeconomic and political thrust called #OccupyWallStreet. I bet my proverbial bottom-dollar that Jesus Christ and Saint Peter already have their work cut out for them and must already be sweating profusely, now that Big Brother Sydney has begun sprinting up the ladder to Heaven’s Gate in the manner of either Miles Mills or Carl Louis. I don’t envy these two gentlemen one bit!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 3, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]