Adelaide Casely-Hayford, MBE (née Smith; 2 June 1868 – 24 January 1960), was a Sierra Leone Creole advocate, an activist of cultural nationalism, a teacher and fiction writer and a feminist. Committed to public service, she worked to improve the conditions of black men and women. As a pioneer of women's education in Sierra Leone, she played a key role in popularizing Pan-Africanist and feminist politics in the early 1900s. She set up a Girls' Vocational and Training School in Freetown in 1923 to instil cultural and racial pride for Sierra Leoneans under colonial rule. In pursuit of Sierra Leone national identity and cultural heritage, she created a sensation by wearing traditional African attire in 1925 to attend a reception in honour of the Prince of Wales. Early life and education Adelaide Smith was born on 2 June 1868 to an elite family in Freetown, British Sierra Leone, to a mixed-race father (William Smith Jr, of English and royal Fante parentage) from the Gold Coast and a Creole mother, Anne Spilsbury, of English, Jamaican Maroon, and Sierra Leone Liberated African ancestry. Adelaide was the second youngest of her parents' seven children. She and her sisters grew up mostly in England, where her father had retired in 1872 with his family on a pension of 666 pounds sterling. She attended Jersey Ladies' College (now Jersey College for Girls). Like many other Sierra Leonean women born into the elite society, she was deeply influenced by Victorian values and ideas of family and gender roles. Casely-Hayford also travelled, and while doing so became interested in Pan Africanist politics. In 1872, she migrated to London and studied at the Ladies College on the island of Jersey. At the age of 17, Smith went to Stuttgart, Germany, to study music at the Stuttgart Conservatory. She returned to England, where she and a sister opened a boarding home for African bachelors living in the country as students or workers. During a speech in 1905, she emphasized the importance African women could have in social and political development. Two years later, she returned to the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Marriage and family While in England, Adelaide Smith married J. E. Casely Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman). Their marriage may have given her a deeper insight into African culture and influenced her transformation into a cultural nationalist. Their daughter Gladys Casely-Hayford became a well-known Creole poet. In 1914,