The Persecution and Trials of Marcus Garvey – e-Book

Description

ROBERT JOHN HAYFRON-BENJAMIN was born on 9 April 1929 and died 22 September 2000. He was a distinguished Ghanaian jurist, scholar, and Pan-African thinker. He was a grandson of the late John Mensah Sarbah, the first Ghanaian barrister and a prominent nationalist leader. In Ghana, Robert Hayfron-Benjamin served as Solicitor-General and subsequently as a Justice of the Court of Appeal (at the time the highest court in Ghana). He was Chief Justice of the Republic of Botswana and also contributed at the continental African level as Vice-President of the Organisation of African Unity’s Mediation, Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (1968-1970). He served for a time as Vice-President of the Asian and African Legal Consultative Committee in New Delhi, and was an Observer to the trial of the White Mercenaries in Angola. He was a member of the International Commission of Inquiry into Mercenaryism, and later served as Constitutional Advisor to African nationalist delegations at the Geneva Conference on the future of Rhodesia. He became a Legal Consultant on Zambia’s claims against major multinational oil corporations for breaching United Nations sanctions in supplying petroleum to Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Following his tenure as Chief Justice in Botswana, Hayfron-Benjamin moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where he practiced as a barrister-at-law for five years and taught civil procedure at the High Wooding Law School, Trinidad. Hayfrom-Benjamin was commited to intellectual labours and public life. He held that law must be understood not in isolation but as part of Africa’s broader struggle for justice, freedom, and dignity. It was in this spirit that he conceived a series of Famous Pan-African Trials, as a continuing project to reinterpret critical trials in African and African diasporic history, through legal and historical analysis. This present volume, “Africa for Africans, at Home and Abroad: The Persecution and Trials of Marcus Garvey,” was originally conceived as the first in the series. It was completed by Hayfron-Banjamin, but remained unpublished in his lifetime.