By a Native of Aneho
Eko Akete 22 February, 1924.
Marcus Garvey stands out prominently as one of the greatest Africans of the age. The scriptures saith, a little child shall lead them. Garvey is comparatively a child, a youngman of thirty-four, aspiring to unite 400 million Africans and to found an African Empire. That he is succeeding in realising his dreams, no one can dispute, although that success might be on a small scale, for Marcus has already four million followers. Never before in the history of the world has any individual undertaken such a stupendous task.
In America, Garvey is regarded as Utopian by those whom God has not chosen to lead his people to the promised land although they may be highly placed and enjoying the patronage of the Caucasian race from whom all the good things of this world flow to those who worship them. Marcus Garvey is a Jamaican, and therefore, a West Indian and a British subject. He is a journalist by profession and studied in the London University.
But before Marcus Garvey had ever dreamt his dreams, and when he was a mere child still under the surveillance of his parents, a Gold Coast man under the guidance of an invisible hand was making plans for the unification of the four British West African colonies. Under a Crown Colony system, such an idea in any man will be ludicrous as these” crown” colonies are regarded as “estates”. But the birth of the Congress of British West Africa, which has come to stay despite the Clifford-Guggisberg-Armitage onslaughts, is a monument to the great African, Hon. Casely Hayford, M.B.E., M.L.C., B.L. Slight of frame, yet with a giant heart and with brains, this shrewd statesman, eminent lawyer, author, thinker, and writer, with much of his time occupied, finds time to devote himself to the services of the African race. As a member of the Gold Coast legislature, what needs there be for him to urge for reforms or to worry himself about the Crown Colony system? Herein lies the greatness of the man.
If the Nigerian government was not being administered on the Czarian model, the Hon. Casley Hayford would have had a serious rival in Herbert Macaulay, who has a following that no African has ever had. Despite this fact, Macaulay is an extraordinary man endowned with extraordinary gifts which he uses to benefit his country. The Nigerian government failed to destroy him, and any attempt at his destruction gives him the many lives of the cat, and his triumphs are shared by numberless Africans of every creed except those employed by th government to bring about his ruin. It is very difficult to write anything about this great man. West Africa, from Senegambia to the Congo and also the Congress, needs him. Make use of him and be sure of success.
