The ARPS
Guardians of land, law and identity in the Gold Coast.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Colonial Era · Cape Coast · 1864–1910
In 1897 the British tried to pass a law that would have handed "waste" and unoccupied land in the Gold Coast to the Crown. In a country where every patch of forest belongs to a stool, a family or a lineage, that meant almost everything. A 33-year-old Cape Coast lawyer, the first African from the colony ever called to the English Bar, stood up in the Legislative Council and took the bill apart. It never became law. That is why Ghanaian land is still, overwhelmingly, Ghanaian. John Mensah Sarbah died at 46, and today most Ghanaians know him only as the name of a hall at Legon.
John Mensah Sarbah was born on 3 June 1864, most sources say in Cape Coast, though some give Anomabu, where his family also traded. Born on a Friday, he was Kofi Mensah at home. His father, John Sarbah, was a prosperous merchant and himself a member of the colony's Legislative Council: the family belonged to the educated, Methodist, trading class of the Fante towns that had grown up around the forts.
He went to the Wesleyan school in Cape Coast, and at sixteen his father sent him to England, to Queen's College at Taunton in Somerset. He was a child of the years just after the Fante Confederacy, when the coast's educated men had tried to govern themselves and been crushed for it. That lesson shaped his life.
He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in London on 25 June 1884, and called to the Bar on 4 May 1887, the first African from the Gold Coast to qualify as a barrister. He came home the same year and set up his own practice.
Why it mattered: until then, Africans in colonial courts were defended, if at all, by Europeans or by self-taught "native attorneys". A trained African barrister who knew both English law and Fante custom changed what was possible. Within a generation the coast had a whole class of African lawyers, and most of Ghana's independence leaders came from it.
Colonial judges constantly had to decide cases under "native law and custom" that they did not know and that had never been written down. Sarbah set out to put it on paper, in terms an English-trained court had to respect.
A tradition begins: with these books Sarbah started a Gold Coast habit that runs through J. E. Casely Hayford, J. B. Danquah and beyond: educated nationalists writing their own history and law, rather than leaving it to Europeans.
In 1894 and again in 1897 the colonial government brought in bills to give the Crown control of "waste lands", forest and minerals. Governor Sir William Maxwell presented the Lands Bill of 1897 as a way to regulate the gold and timber rush. To the chiefs and educated men of the coast it was an attempt to take the land itself.
In 1897 chiefs and educated men of Cape Coast, with Sarbah, Casely Hayford, J. W. de Graft Johnson and others, founded the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (ARPS). They chose Sarbah to argue their case before the Legislative Council. He did, clause by clause. Maxwell would not withdraw the bill, so Sarbah advised the society to go over the governor's head.
In 1898 an ARPS delegation, financed largely by the Cape Coast merchant Jacob Wilson Sey, went to London and petitioned the Colonial Office. The Lands Bill was dropped.
The fee he returned: the ARPS paid Sarbah 400 guineas for his work. He handed it back, saying it was an honour to serve his country. The society used the money to set up its own press, which later published nationalist newspapers. Compare Kenya, where settler land seizures went ahead, and you see what the defeat of the Lands Bill saved. The full story of the society is on CapeCoastCastle.com: the ARPS.
When the Wesleyan Mission, short of money, closed its secondary school at Cape Coast, Sarbah and other Fante leaders set up a company to revive and finance it themselves. Under their control it took a new name, Mfantsipim. Sarbah is credited with its motto, Dwen hwe kan, "think and look ahead", and its emblem; one of its houses carries his name.
Mfantsipim went on to educate an extraordinary share of Ghana's leaders, among them Kofi Annan. Sarbah also backed a Fante national education fund to build more schools, and he bought a pipe organ for the Methodist church in Cape Coast.
In 1901 Governor Sir Matthew Nathan nominated Sarbah to the Legislative Council, and apart from a short break he sat on it until his death. There he argued for law reform and against abuses of power by colonial officials, patiently and in the colonial state's own language. In 1910 he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG).
He died suddenly on 27 November 1910, aged 46, a few months after the honour.
Cape Coast is about three hours west of Accra by the coast road. The old town between Cape Coast Castle and the hills is Sarbah's world: the Methodist churches, the merchant houses of the Fante trading families, and the schools on the hills above town, Mfantsipim among them. Walk it with time, and ask locally for the old ARPS and Sarbah family sites.
Nearby: Fort Royal, Fort McCarthy, Kakum and, 15 km east, Aggrey's Anomabu. Our dedicated site: CapeCoastCastle.com.
Guardians of land, law and identity in the Gold Coast.
The Fante millionaire who paid for the fight.
And the Fante Confederacy: the legal battles before his.
His ARPS colleague, and Dr J. E. K. Aggrey, the educator of the next generation.
Also: British colonial administration, 1901–1957, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline.
Sarbah was not a revolutionary. He worked inside the colonial system, sat on the governor's council, wore the CMG and never called for independence. But he used the coloniser's own law better than the colonisers did, and in 1897 that was enough to stop a land grab that would have changed Ghana for ever. He also wrote down the law of his people so that no court could pretend it did not exist, and he kept a great school alive. Of all the men whose names Ghanaian students walk past at Legon, few did more for the country with less noise.
Verified: 29 September 2026. Birth and death dates, his admission to Lincoln's Inn (25 June 1884) and call to the Bar (4 May 1887) follow Lincoln's Inn's own archive. The ARPS campaign against the Lands Bill, the 1898 delegation, the returned 400-guinea fee, his books, the Mfantsipim motto and his Legislative Council service from 1901 follow the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the Encyclopaedia Africana and the University of Ghana. His birthplace is given as Cape Coast, with Anomabu noted, because sources differ. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.