Akilagpa Sawyerr

Akilagpa Sawyerr, born Gosford Collins Sawyerr, was a lawyer and early nationalist who helped found the National Congress of British West Africa and sat on the Gold Coast Legislative Council for Accra. He was born in Accra on 2 March 1883 and died on 13 December 1948.

His father was a merchant and his mother belonged to the royal family of Owooman Faase. He went to the Wesleyan school in Accra and to the Wesleyan Boys' High School and Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, took a degree at Durham University and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1907. As a student in London he helped found the United African Association and joined the South African Alfred Mangena in an appeal to the Privy Council against death sentences passed after the Bambatha Rebellion in Natal.

He was a founder of the National Congress of British West Africa in 1920 and of the Accra Ratepayers' Association, which he represented on the Accra Town Council from 1932. In 1934 he went to London with the delegation protesting against the colonial Sedition and Waterworks ordinances, and he joined the committee raising money for the defence of the Scottsboro Boys in the United States. He sat on the committee that shaped the 1946 Burns Constitution and was elected to the Legislative Council in 1947. He founded the Tudu Lawn Tennis Association and co-founded the Accra Turf Club. His son is the academic Akilagpa Sawyerr.