Constitution of the Fante Confederacy

About the Author

The Constitution of the Fante Confederacy was the brainchild of members of the emergent educated class. This class included such men as Joseph Smith, Henry Barnes, T. Hughes, Charles Bannerman, Africanus Horton, R. J. Ghartey, James F. Amissah, James Hutton Brew, and F. C. Grant (the first treasurer of the confederacy). Both Grant and Ghartey were respected parishioners in the Methodist Church, where they were receiving instruction to become ministers, and Ghartey was elected president of the confederacy shortly after it was formed (but before the constitution was written). These men were beneficiaries of the introduction of Western education by missionaries and the prosperity engendered by the expansion of international trade. The constitution they helped produce bears the imprint of their familiarity with Western political ideas.

The most prominent African who contributed to the drafting of the constitution was Africanus Horton, who was born James Beale Horton in 1835. Horton, from Sierra Leone, was an army surgeon who was educated at King's College in London and at Edinburgh University. As a medical student he took the name Africanus to reflect his pride in his African origins. He served as an officer in the British army and later worked as a banker and in the mining industry. His book titled West African Countries and People (1867) outlined the prerequisites for a self-governing Fante state. The book's subtitle, Vindication of the African Race, indicates that his other purpose in writing the book was to counter theories of racial supremacy that were growing more prevalent. Because of his writings, Horton is sometimes considered one of the fathers of African nationalism. After the chiefs met to form the confederacy, he wrote a series of letters to the British Colonial Office urging Great Britain officially to recognize the confederacy. These letters were published in 1870 as Letters on the Political Condition of the Gold Coast. After the confederacy was formed, Horton abandoned political writing. He retired from the army and devoted the remainder of his life to his business interests. He died in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on October 15, 1883.