Jacob Wilson Sey

Jacob Kwaw Wilson Sey (10 March 1832 – 22 May 1902), also known as Kwaa Bonyi, was a colonial era Fante artisan, farmer, philanthropist, nationalist and the first recorded indigenous multi-millionaire on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). He played a major role in the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (ARPS), founded to oppose the 1896 Crown Lands Bill and the 1897 Lands Bill that threatened the traditional land tenure system and stipulated that all unused lands be controlled by the British colonial government. The society was the 19th-century precursor which laid the foundation for the mid-20th-century "ideological warfare" pushed by the Gold Coast intelligentsia and the independence movement. Some academic scholars regard him as the "first real architect and financier towards Ghana's independence" and the ARPS as "the first attempt to institutionalize nationalist sentiment in the then Gold Coast."