Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation

First published 1911

This book is extraordinary in its optimism. One could approach the book as a novel, a philosophical treatise, a dialogue of rationalism, an Edwardian romance, or as a meditation on love, self, family, and community. It is all of these and more because it is filled with African as well as Greek myths as reference points and is a sound political tract on the contemporary striving of the Turks and the Russians as well as African life under British colonial rule.

Yet Casely Hayford is certain in the end that there would be victory over the colonial oppression in the Gold Coast and that his people, the Fante, would enjoy their own freedoms and independence as citizens equal to any in the world. For him, this is not just the objective of the Fante, it is it the aim for the entire Ethiopian world, by which he means all of Africa.

Rise, you mighty giant! Rise! Ethiopia will soon be unbound! And so it was.