Robert Samuel Blay

Robert Samuel Blay was a lawyer, judge and nationalist, known as the first Nzema lawyer, who was a founding vice-chairman of the United Gold Coast Convention and twice president of the Ghana Bar Association. He was born at Esiama in April 1901 and died at Sekondi on 5 December 1979.

He trained as a teacher and taught at Tarkwa Methodist School before going to London in 1920 to study law. There he led the Union of Students of African Descent and sat on the executive of the West African Students' Union. He was called to the bar in 1926, joined the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society and founded Nzema Chambers in Sekondi, now Blay and Associates. He represented Sekondi on the Legislative Council, and was a founder and the first vice-chairman of the UGCC in 1947.

He was the first president of the Ghana Bar Association from 1957 to 1959 and again from 1960 to 1962, and sat on the first board of the Bank of Ghana. Nkrumah appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1962 and dismissed him in 1964 for protesting against the sacking of Chief Justice Korsah. He was Speaker of the 1969 Constituent Assembly, and in 1978 he risked detention by filing habeas corpus writs for the detained politicians B. J. da Rocha and K. A. Gbedemah. His daughters include the diplomat Mary Chinery-Hesse and Ama Afo Blay, the first woman Director-General of the Ghana Education Service.