The black and white keys
His best-known image: you can play a tune on the black keys alone, or on the white keys alone, but for real harmony you need both. It became Achimota's emblem, which still shows black and white piano keys.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Colonial Era · Anomabu · 1875–1927
He was born in a Fante trading town under an old slave fort, taught himself Greek and Latin, crossed the Atlantic at twenty-two, and spent twenty years as a professor in the American South. He came home to help found the most famous school in West Africa, told audiences across a continent that black and white piano keys needed each other, and inspired a young teacher called Kwame Nkrumah to go to America. He died at 51, five months after his school opened. Every Ghanaian child knows his name. Far fewer know why some of his own contemporaries disagreed with him.
James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey was born on 18 October 1875 at Anomabu, the Fante port east of Cape Coast whose Fort William had been one of the busiest slave-trading forts on the coast. His father, Kodwo Kwegyir, was okyeame, chief linguist, at the court of the King of Anomabu: the man who spoke for the king, with the memory, the proverbs and the skill with words that office required. His son inherited all three.
He was educated at the Wesleyan Methodist school in Cape Coast, the forerunner of Mfantsipim. By fifteen he was already a teacher, and he taught himself far beyond his classroom. Accounts of his life credit him with Greek, Latin, French and German as well as English and Fante.
In 1898 the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church sent him to America to train as a missionary. He enrolled at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, a black college of the AME Zion church, graduated in 1902 and stayed to teach. For about twenty years he taught, preached and ran parts of the college's administration, in the segregated South of the Jim Crow era.
In 1905 he married Rose Douglass, a teacher from Virginia; they had four children. He later studied at Columbia University in New York. America gave him degrees, a family and a platform, and it also gave him a daily education in racism, which shaped everything he later said about race.
The American Phelps-Stokes Fund sent two commissions to study education in Africa, in 1920–21 and 1924. Aggrey was the only African member of both. They travelled from West Africa to South Africa and East Africa, and Aggrey, the eloquent Fante linguist's son with American degrees, became their public voice.
His speeches drew huge crowds, black and white. In colonies where Africans were told they were not ready for higher education, here was an African who was plainly as educated as any governor. The nickname followed him home: "Aggrey of Africa".
Governor Sir Gordon Guggisberg wanted a school in the Gold Coast that would produce African leaders of the highest quality. With the Scottish clergyman Rev. Alexander Garden Fraser as principal, he recruited Aggrey, who joined the staff in July 1924 as assistant vice-principal, the highest post an African held in the colony's education system.
The Prince of Wales College at Achimota, north of Accra, was formally opened on 28 January 1927, co-educational from the start, which was unusual anywhere at the time. Its full story is on our page on Achimota School.
The last months: in May 1927 Aggrey left for Britain and America to lecture and finish his doctorate at Columbia. On 30 July 1927 he died suddenly of meningitis in New York, aged 51. He was buried in Salisbury, North Carolina, where he had taught, not in the Gold Coast.
His best-known image: you can play a tune on the black keys alone, or on the white keys alone, but for real harmony you need both. It became Achimota's emblem, which still shows black and white piano keys.
His parable of an eagle raised among chickens, which believes it is a chicken until someone lifts it to the sun and tells it to fly. Africans, he said, had been taught to think like chickens. Ghanaian schools still teach the story.
The line most often linked to him and to Achimota, against the idea that Africans needed only a basic, second-class education.
The saying that if you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a family, is widely credited to him in Ghana. It explains why Achimota took girls from the start.
Aggrey was not universally admired in his lifetime. The Phelps-Stokes commissions promoted an "adapted" education for Africa, heavy on agriculture, crafts and character, modelled on the industrial schools of the American South such as Tuskegee. Critics, among them W. E. B. Du Bois in America and many educated West Africans, saw that model as a way of training obedient workers rather than equals.
His message of racial co-operation also annoyed the more militant nationalists of the coast, heirs of men like J. E. Casely Hayford and John Mensah Sarbah, who wanted rights, not harmony. Some felt he told colonial governments what they wanted to hear, and several of his friends in Freetown looked at Achimota, a government school, with suspicion.
The other side: Aggrey never accepted that Africans should get less. He insisted on the best education, on women's education, and on African pride. The piano keys were an image of partnership between equals, and in 1920s South Africa, where he said it, even that was radical.
Among the students at Achimota in 1927 was a young trainee teacher from Nkroful, Kwame Nkrumah. He later wrote that Aggrey was the person who first filled him with nationalism, and that it was Aggrey's example that made him want to study in America. Nkrumah went, and came back to lead Ghana to independence. In that sense the road to 6 March 1957 runs through Aggrey.
Anomabu lies on the coast road about 15 kilometres east of Cape Coast, a short trotro or taxi ride from the city, or about three hours from Accra. The town's layers are easy to read on foot: the fishing beach, Fort William, and the ruins of the Little Fort, Castle Brew. Ask locally for the Aggrey family house and memorials; residents know them.
Combine it with: Cape Coast Castle, Fort Amsterdam at Abandze, and the beaches of the Central Region. More on the city on our dedicated site CapeCoastCastle.com.
The college that trained a nation, from Nkrumah to Rawlings.
Why he matters for Ghana 70.
And J. E. Casely Hayford: the coast's lawyers and nationalists.
Where the man who doubted the Phelps-Stokes model ended his life, in Nkrumah's Ghana.
Also: the Basel and Bremen missions, the other great school-builders of the Gold Coast; People of Ghana; and the 1,000-year timeline.
Aggrey is remembered in Ghana almost as a saint, and the reality is more interesting. He was a brilliant, restless man who worked inside the colonial and missionary systems rather than against them, and who believed that Africans would win respect by proving themselves the equals of anyone. His critics were right that the education the Phelps-Stokes commissions promoted could be used to hold Africans back. But Aggrey himself demanded the best, not the least, and the school he helped found produced the generation that ended colonial rule. The eagle he told Africans to set free flew further than he lived to see.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Birth and death dates, his father's office, Livingstone College from 1898, the Phelps-Stokes commissions of 1920–21 and 1924, his post at Achimota from July 1924, its formal opening on 28 January 1927, his death in New York and burial in Salisbury, North Carolina, follow standard biographies and Achimota's own records. The eagle parable and piano-key image are his; the two sayings marked "attributed" are widely credited to him but hard to trace to a single source. Nkrumah's debt to Aggrey follows Nkrumah's own autobiography. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.