Information about the Easmons.
KATHLEEN MARY EASMON SIMANGO….. Reflections
Ahovi E F & Ngadi W Kponou
[This work may not be copied in part or whole without the permission of the authors, Ahovi E F Kponou and Ngadi W Kponou.]
Her obituary in The Times of London, on July 29, 1924, began thus:
“One of the most cultured women that West Africa has yet given the world, passed away at the early age of 32 at Charing Cross Hospital … This was Mrs. Kathleen Easmon Simango, A.R.C.A., daughter of ….”
Each time I came across a fresh piece of information about her, revealing her to have been a talented, intelligent, and very beautiful woman, I wondered why, when I was growing up, I never heard talk about her in family circles. It was not until my mother came to live with me, in 1995, in Rocky Point, NY, that I became fully aware of her. I wondered silently if she was persona non grata in the family because of some notoriety. How wrong I was!
Getting ahead of the story a bit, Kathleen died on July 27, 1924, when our mother and grandmother, Kathleen's niece, Mary Kponou (MA), nee Easmon, was not even six years old and growing up in Moyamba. Kathleen had left Freetown for the U.S.A. in 1920, never to return. What MA knew of Kathleen was picked up from conversations with others, very likely her aunt, Hannah Easmon Harleston [Figure 00], MCF's and Kathleen's older half-sister, as well as from photographs, after she moved to Freetown at the end of 1933 to live with her father. From our personal experience, Hannah was very close to her brother, so we may surmise that she must have had a close relationship with Kathleen in the short time – November, 1917 to July, 1920 – that Kathleen spent in Freetown.
Who was Kathleen Mary Easmon? She was the daughter of Dr. John Farrell Easmon(JFE) [Figure 01] and Annette (Nettie to her sisters) Kathleen Easmon [Figure 02], nee Smith. Kathleen was the younger sister of Dr. M.C.F. Easmon(MCF). They were both born in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, where their father was Principal Medical Officer (PMO). (The London Times obit for Kathleen is in error when it placed JFE as PMO in Sierra Leone, not Gold Coast.) From dates in her obituary, we can deduce that she was born sometime after July 27, 1891, since she was 32 years old when she died on July 27, 1924.
We have practically no information about the formative years of Charles and Kathleen in the Gold Coast, but we do know that they made two trips to England before 1900. The first was in 1896, when they traveled with their mother to spend time with their grandfather whose health started deteriorating early that year. Presumably, the sisters caring for him in Jersey must have let the other sisters know, and John and Annette decided that the children should have the opportunity to see their grandfather alive. He died on August 6 that year. It must have been during their stay in Jersey that Charles and Kathleen sat for the portrait reproduced later in this narrative [FIGURE 03]. A passenger manifest shows Nettie and the children sailing for Accra on October 9, 1896, but we have not seen one for the travel to England.
The children's second trip to England was in 1897. Their father traveled to England for discussions with the Colonial Office regarding problems he was having with local colonial officials about his professional/administrative advancement. The return trip to Africa was in October. Besides Dr and Mrs Easmon and two children on the return trip, the passenger list also includes one Miss Emma Smith and another Miss Smith. Mrs Easmon was once a Miss Smith, and Emma was one of her older sisters. The other Miss Smith in the manifest had to be sister Adelaide. Also of interest is that the list shows that Dr and Mrs Easmon had Accra as their destination, while the children and Emma and Adelaide were to disembark in Sierra Leone (Freetown). The eldest of the Smith sisters, Elizabeth (Mrs William Awoonor-Renner) was living in Freetown with her husband, Dr William Awoonor-Renner. If this was not a clerical error, then an adult would have had to travel with the children to be reunited with their parents in the Gold Coast. Emma and Adelaide were returning Sierra Leone with the intention to start a school in Freetown.
Kathleen's father died in Cape Coast, on June 9, 1900, from complications from a riding accident, and he was buried in the Cape Coast Military War Memorial Cemetery and Museum there [FIGURE 04]. Charles and Kathleen were ten and eight years old. Later that year, the thirty-year old widow and her children traveled first to Sierra Leone, to spend some time with her eldest sister, Elizabeth – Mrs William Awoonor-Renner, and then to England, where she felt the children would get a better education. (No passenger list for this trip has been found, but Adelaide mentions in her Memoirs that Annette and the children, Emma and herself traveled to London (the children for free!) by Elder Dempster Lines. She and Emma abandoned the school project.) The children were in Freetown long enough for young Charles to attend the C.M.S. (now Sierra Leone) Grammar School for about six months. His late father had also attended the school, and a few decades later, Charles’ first son, also John Farrell Easmon, and a grandson, Ahovi E. Farrell Kponou, also attended the Grammar School. Did Kathleen also attend school in Freetown?
From age 10, Kathleen attended Notting Hill High School for Girls, in London. From an article in the school magazine after her death, we know that she was highly regarded by her schoolmates. (It is fair to say that by 1902, with Kathleen attending a London school, the Smith sisters still living in England, Hannah, Emma and Adelaide, had left Jersey for London.)
Outside of school, Kathleen must have moved in elite circles. Her mother and aunts were friends of the renowned composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (SCT), whose Sierra Leonean father had studied medicine in England, and also friends of Queen Victoria’s god-daughter, Victoria Davies, of Yoruba and Freetown connections. Kathleen, in fact, wrote poems, some of which Coleridge-Taylor felt were good enough to set to music, which he did. We have a published copy of the collaboration titled “FIVE FAIRY BALLADS”. [FIGURE 05] The year of publication of this work was 1909 when she was sixteen or seventeen. This means she must have been writing poems and composing songs in her early teenage years. (Could Kathleen have been a role model for her younger cousin by some 11 years, Gladys Casely-Hayford?) The story of how the collaboration with SCT happened is told by Louis Charles Elson in: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, in Modern Music and Musicians, p 474, a Google Book. The published work mentions FIVE, not SIX, ballads. The story is reproduced here:
(See Figure 05.b)
By 1912, the “young West African girl” in the above passage had grown into a mature, intelligent, and beautiful young lady of twenty. She had become a close friend of the Coleridge-Taylors, and in his book, “Black Mahler – The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story”, Charles Elford describes how she socialized with them, and that she was a frequent visitor to the house when the composer was on his deathbed in September of 1912. This work leaves the reader with the impression that SCT's wife Jessie was slightly jealous of Kathleen's friendship with him. One of us - AEFK, believes that the Kathleen in Elford's book could have been Kathleen Mary's mother, Annette Kathleen, a widow, who was only 4 years older than SCT, whereas Kathleen Mary was seventeen years his junior. The author also mentions that “Kathleen was there”, referring to a 1932 performance in London of SCT's masterpiece, Hiawatha, to observe the twentieth anniversary of his death. Now, Kathleen Mary, our subject, died in 1924, and Annette Kathleen was living in Sierra Leone by then, having moved back to Sierra Leone with Kathleen in November, 1917. It is quite possible that Annette was in England that year-1932, but we have not found any evidence in available passenger manifests which confirms this. To add to the confusion regarding SCT's death, Kathleen's Aunt, Adelaide, mentions in her Memoirs that an older Smith sister, Emma,“had been called in to help his - SCT - wife nurse him. She(Emma) later told me that as the end drew near, this great little man sat up in bed, and with a rapt expression, began to conduct some triumphant symphony, which started on earth and ended in heaven.” Could it have been Emma who attended the 1932 performance, and whoever talked to Elford might have mistaken her for Kathleen? Highly unlikely, since Emma died in 1928! We should keep in mind that Elford's book was partly fictional.
We also learn from the London Times obituary [FIGURE 06] that after Notting Hill High School for Girls [FIGURE 07], Kathleen attended South Kensington College where she studied fashion design, among other subjects, and in 1914, became an Associate of the Royal College of Art (A.R.C.A.). The journalist, late Bankole Timothy, in a 1975 article in the magazine West Africa, claimed that she was the first African woman to obtain a qualification at this level in any sphere of endeavor. Many years later, an article in the Southern Workman magazine of (then) Hampton Institute, [FIGURE 08] reporting on Kathleen's visit there with her Aunt Adelaide, stated that she was “.....the only girl student of her time to receive a *special-talent scholarship* in that institution.....”, information which they must have obtained from Kathleen. We located and purchased a portfolio of designs of students who graduated from the College in 1914. In it are ten signed sketches by Kathleen, some of which are included in these reflections.[FIGURE 09] Kathleen also appeared in some theatrical productions on the London stage. A short piece in the magazine CRISIS (NAACP) for June 1915 mentions her appearance in an Indian Opera. [FIGURE 10] The performance, which was in aid of wounded Indian Soldiers in WW1, was also reported in THE TIMES (London) of June 19, 1915. [FIGURE 11]
On November 28, 1917, Kathleen and her mother set sail from London for Freetown, her parents' birthplace [FIGURE 12]. Her brother Charles was by then also in Freetown practicing medicine; he qualified in 1913. Annette’s sister Adelaide and her daughter Gladys were also living in Freetown, after the failure of Adelaide's marriage to J. E. Casely Hayford of the Gold Coast. Also in Freetown was the eldest of the sisters, Mrs William Awoonor Renner (Elizabeth). By the time of their arrival in Freetown, Charles had already served a WWI tour of duty as a medical doctor in the Cameroon theater. ACH's Memoirs tells us that very soon after the pair got to Freetown, the four of them, Nettie, Kathleen, Adelaide and Gladys, traveled to Moyamba to visit Charles, who was stationed there. Had Charles' liaison with Dinah Moseray, resulting in daughter Mary Ngadi (our mother and grandmother, in Sept.,1918), begun by then?
Kathleen assisted her aunt, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, in trying to organize a vocational school for girls in Freetown. They occasionally put on concerts to raise funds for the school. No doubt, these concerts showcased their talents in music - Aunt Adelaide on the piano, and in drama, Kathleen, from her work in theater in London. One of the concerts, advertized as a “Grand Oriental Concert”, must have drawn on her appearances in some Eastern-themed theatrical productions in London. This particular concert generated some controversy in Freetown, and was discussed at length in the Sierra Leone Weekly News issue of June 12, 1920. [FIGURE 13] Kathleen, in her capacity as Secretary of the School, wrote a strong letter to the editor of the Colonial & Provincial Reporter, defending their plans for the school. [FIGURE 29 - on page 4].
She and her aunt also gave lessons at the YWCA. An advert in the October 11, 1919 issue of The Weekly News – left column, [FIGURE 14] had Aunt Adelaide giving singing classes, and Kathleen giving “Handicraft classes, in Woodwork, Leather work, Basketwork Design, Stencilling, etc...”, and also in Elocution and Deportment.
Kathleen may have shared her mother's and brother's interest in Sierra Leone country cloths. From the late John Karefa-Smart, one of us (AK) learned that her mother, Nettie, frequently visited MCF at the various district hospitals where he served and she took a keen interest in the production of country cloths. Nettie must have done some weaving herself. Some idle weaving equipment was in the room next to her bedroom at No. 2 Pademba Road, up to her death in 1950. It is quite possible that Nettie's interest in weaving developed during the nearly ten years she lived in the Gold Coast. Gold Coast/Ghana is well known for the Kente Cloth. It must have been an interest Nettie shared with her son MCF who, in the few years he had spent working in the Protectorate (now the Provinces), was able to prepare a definitive monograph titled “Sierra Leone Country Cloths” , [FIGURE 15] for the British Empire Exhibition which was held in London in 1924 and 1925. Although Nettie is never mentioned in the monograph, the possibility that she and her son collaborated on it cannot be ruled out. Coincidentally, Kathleen died in London on July 27, 1924, after traveling from Lisbon on matters related the Exhibition.(Fred Bunker) While on this visit to London, she took ill and subsequently died. MCF was in England a year later to take the London University M.D. Examination, in July 1925. Since the Exhibition was open until October 1925, we can safely assume that he must have visited it, and especially the Sierra Leone Pavilion, [FIGURE 16] to see the country cloth exhibit which he had been very instrumental in setting up, before he returned to Freetown later in July.
In her Memoirs, Adelaide C-H says this of Kathleen in Freetown, “Kathleen, with her intelligence, charm and spiritual kind of beauty, won all hearts, and it took my sister all her time to keep callers at bay.” Why were the local eligible men discouraged from calling on her? Her brother, Charles, married a local woman in 1919, and as we see in the next paragraphs, in June 1922, less than two years after Kathleen arrived in America, she was married to an East African!
In 1920, aunt and niece traveled to the U.S., via the U.K., to raise funds for the school and observe American vocational education. They landed in New York on August 18, 1920. The New York Times mentioned their arrival the next day. [FIGURE 17] They gave talks about Africa to church congregations and schools and colleges. The New York Times carried an ad for one such presentation at St. Bartholomew Church in New York City, in which Dr. Aggrey of Gold Coast was also to participate.[FIGURE 18] There was a stop at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where the students must have been so pleased and impressed meeting the duo that they made them honorary members of the Alpha Chapter of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority there. They also gave performances of African songs and dances, in which they often had the help of one Columbus Kamba Simango, an East African student at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City. More about him later!
A stop on their fund-raising travels through the South was Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Her aunt recalls in her memoirs how well they were received there. We know that a photographic portrait of Kathleen, made at the Institute, was on display there for a very long time after their visit because, in 1969, Kathleen's niece, MCF's daughter Mary Kponou, visited Tuskegee, and while being given a tour of the campus, came across the photograph on display. She instantly recognized it, because a smaller copy, which has the stamp of the Photographic Division of the Institute, was in her possession in Sierra Leone, and is now in ours. [FIGURE 19]
There are also newspaper accounts of their stops in Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago.[FIGURE 20], Figure 20.2.
It must not have been too long after they started their tour that Kathleen caught the eye of an East African, C. Kamba Simango, who was a student at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. The friendship quickly blossomed into a romance, and, in June, 1922, they were married in a church in Wilton, Connecticut. The Norwalk Hour, a newspaper in nearby Norwalk, [FIGURE 21] gave the wedding prominent coverage in the June 1 issue. She was thirty years old. The marriage was also reported in the Sierra Leone Weekly News in Freetown [FIGURE 21.2]. At the organ was the renowned Sierra Leonean musician, Nicholas Ballanta Taylor who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the U.S. Paul Robeson, who had graduated from Columbia University Law School that year, and who was a friend of Kamba, may have sang at the wedding. [FIGURE 30 - on page 4] is their wedding photograph.
They were in the U.S. until 1923 when they set sail for Europe. Bunker says that Kamba graduated that year. The New York Amsterdam News publicized their last performance in its April 25th issue. [FIGURE 22] Their plan was to immerse themselves in the Portuguese language, after which they planned to return to Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique, where they would open a co-educational vocational school, similar to the one her aunt Adelaide planned to start in Freetown. They arrived in Southampton, England on June 3, 1923. (In May, 1923, before they sailed to Europe, they both autographed a copy of a book, “Songs And Tales From The Dark Continent” which Kamba Simango co-authored in 1920, to a Miss Florence Tannenbaum, probably of New York City.) [FIGURE 23]
They spent several months in London, where they both took ill. Kamba was bedridden for three weeks, but Kathleen's was the more serious. She underwent an appendectomy. At some point, Kathleen's mother joined them in London (ACH's Memoirs also mentions this).We learn from a letter from Kamba Simango dated January 9, 1924, to their friend Florence Tannenbaum in New York City that he did not get to Lisbon until early in January, 1924. Kathleen stayed behind in London to get better from her surgery. He also stated in the letter that he expected Kathleen and her mother to join him in February, which they did [FIGURE 24]
Things happened very quickly when the three were all in Lisbon. They made rapid progress with learning Portuguese. A letter from W. E. B. DuBois to them, dated July 10, 1924, expressed his pleasure in earlier meeting them in Lisbon. [FIGURE 25] Kathleen traveled to London, probably for matters connected with the Sierra Leone Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London. Shipping passenger lists show her arriving in England on June 15, although the Rev Fred R. Bunker, Kamba Simango's mentor, in an article in a Hampton Institute publication, The Southern Workman, states that she made this trip in July. In another letter from Kamba to their friend Florence Tannenbaum in New York, Kamba states that Kathleen took ill again on July 20, and required another operation from which she never recovered. [FIGURE 26] In the same letter to Florence, we learn that she died at 2 a.m. on July 27th. Kamba and her mother, who had been summoned from Lisbon, got to the hospital at noon that day, too late to see her alive. She was 32 years old, and was interred the following Wednesday, July 30, in Kensington Cemetery.
ACH in her Memoirs, mentioned peritonitis as the cause of death, maybe a legacy of the appendectomy she underwent the previous year. A few years later, and penicillin would very likely have saved her life, as it might have saved her father's too in Cape Coast in 1900.
Obits:
The Times London and Notting Hill High School [FigureOBIT1].
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Alpha Chapter, Howard University, Washington, DC [FigureOBIT2].
Bunker’s previously cited article above also claimed that Kathleen, on her death bed “had expressed the wish to a friend that Kamba might marry this cousin (hers…Christine Mary Coussey), for she realized, in her great love for the work she was leaving, how absolutely essential it was that he should have the comfort and help of a good wife in his work.” Kamba, with the approval of friends and relatives, married Christine Coussey in London on September 26, 1925. They had at least one child. [FIGURE27] A Dr Louis Kamba Simango died in Accra, Ghana, on November 26, 2012 at the age of 85 years. [FIGURE28] He was just the right age to have been the baby in Figure27!
Bunker also quotes the following from a tribute in the Manchester Guardian (which we have so far been unable to find):
Africa has lost one of her best and most gifted friends by her death.
Ahovi E F & Ngadi W Kponou
[This work may not be copied in part or whole without the permission of the authors, Ahovi E F Kponou and Ngadi W Kponou.]
Her obituary in The Times of London, on July 29, 1924, began thus:
“One of the most cultured women that West Africa has yet given the world, passed away at the early age of 32 at Charing Cross Hospital … This was Mrs. Kathleen Easmon Simango, A.R.C.A., daughter of ….”
Each time I came across a fresh piece of information about her, revealing her to have been a talented, intelligent, and very beautiful woman, I wondered why, when I was growing up, I never heard talk about her in family circles. It was not until my mother came to live with me, in 1995, in Rocky Point, NY, that I became fully aware of her. I wondered silently if she was persona non grata in the family because of some notoriety. How wrong I was!
Getting ahead of the story a bit, Kathleen died on July 27, 1924, when our mother and grandmother, Kathleen's niece, Mary Kponou (MA), nee Easmon, was not even six years old and growing up in Moyamba. Kathleen had left Freetown for the U.S.A. in 1920, never to return. What MA knew of Kathleen was picked up from conversations with others, very likely her aunt, Hannah Easmon Harleston [Figure 00], MCF's and Kathleen's older half-sister, as well as from photographs, after she moved to Freetown at the end of 1933 to live with her father. From our personal experience, Hannah was very close to her brother, so we may surmise that she must have had a close relationship with Kathleen in the short time – November, 1917 to July, 1920 – that Kathleen spent in Freetown.
Who was Kathleen Mary Easmon? She was the daughter of Dr. John Farrell Easmon(JFE) [Figure 01] and Annette (Nettie to her sisters) Kathleen Easmon [Figure 02], nee Smith. Kathleen was the younger sister of Dr. M.C.F. Easmon(MCF). They were both born in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, where their father was Principal Medical Officer (PMO). (The London Times obit for Kathleen is in error when it placed JFE as PMO in Sierra Leone, not Gold Coast.) From dates in her obituary, we can deduce that she was born sometime after July 27, 1891, since she was 32 years old when she died on July 27, 1924.
We have practically no information about the formative years of Charles and Kathleen in the Gold Coast, but we do know that they made two trips to England before 1900. The first was in 1896, when they traveled with their mother to spend time with their grandfather whose health started deteriorating early that year. Presumably, the sisters caring for him in Jersey must have let the other sisters know, and John and Annette decided that the children should have the opportunity to see their grandfather alive. He died on August 6 that year. It must have been during their stay in Jersey that Charles and Kathleen sat for the portrait reproduced later in this narrative [FIGURE 03]. A passenger manifest shows Nettie and the children sailing for Accra on October 9, 1896, but we have not seen one for the travel to England.
The children's second trip to England was in 1897. Their father traveled to England for discussions with the Colonial Office regarding problems he was having with local colonial officials about his professional/administrative advancement. The return trip to Africa was in October. Besides Dr and Mrs Easmon and two children on the return trip, the passenger list also includes one Miss Emma Smith and another Miss Smith. Mrs Easmon was once a Miss Smith, and Emma was one of her older sisters. The other Miss Smith in the manifest had to be sister Adelaide. Also of interest is that the list shows that Dr and Mrs Easmon had Accra as their destination, while the children and Emma and Adelaide were to disembark in Sierra Leone (Freetown). The eldest of the Smith sisters, Elizabeth (Mrs William Awoonor-Renner) was living in Freetown with her husband, Dr William Awoonor-Renner. If this was not a clerical error, then an adult would have had to travel with the children to be reunited with their parents in the Gold Coast. Emma and Adelaide were returning Sierra Leone with the intention to start a school in Freetown.
Kathleen's father died in Cape Coast, on June 9, 1900, from complications from a riding accident, and he was buried in the Cape Coast Military War Memorial Cemetery and Museum there [FIGURE 04]. Charles and Kathleen were ten and eight years old. Later that year, the thirty-year old widow and her children traveled first to Sierra Leone, to spend some time with her eldest sister, Elizabeth – Mrs William Awoonor-Renner, and then to England, where she felt the children would get a better education. (No passenger list for this trip has been found, but Adelaide mentions in her Memoirs that Annette and the children, Emma and herself traveled to London (the children for free!) by Elder Dempster Lines. She and Emma abandoned the school project.) The children were in Freetown long enough for young Charles to attend the C.M.S. (now Sierra Leone) Grammar School for about six months. His late father had also attended the school, and a few decades later, Charles’ first son, also John Farrell Easmon, and a grandson, Ahovi E. Farrell Kponou, also attended the Grammar School. Did Kathleen also attend school in Freetown?
From age 10, Kathleen attended Notting Hill High School for Girls, in London. From an article in the school magazine after her death, we know that she was highly regarded by her schoolmates. (It is fair to say that by 1902, with Kathleen attending a London school, the Smith sisters still living in England, Hannah, Emma and Adelaide, had left Jersey for London.)
Outside of school, Kathleen must have moved in elite circles. Her mother and aunts were friends of the renowned composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (SCT), whose Sierra Leonean father had studied medicine in England, and also friends of Queen Victoria’s god-daughter, Victoria Davies, of Yoruba and Freetown connections. Kathleen, in fact, wrote poems, some of which Coleridge-Taylor felt were good enough to set to music, which he did. We have a published copy of the collaboration titled “FIVE FAIRY BALLADS”. [FIGURE 05] The year of publication of this work was 1909 when she was sixteen or seventeen. This means she must have been writing poems and composing songs in her early teenage years. (Could Kathleen have been a role model for her younger cousin by some 11 years, Gladys Casely-Hayford?) The story of how the collaboration with SCT happened is told by Louis Charles Elson in: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, in Modern Music and Musicians, p 474, a Google Book. The published work mentions FIVE, not SIX, ballads. The story is reproduced here:
(See Figure 05.b)
By 1912, the “young West African girl” in the above passage had grown into a mature, intelligent, and beautiful young lady of twenty. She had become a close friend of the Coleridge-Taylors, and in his book, “Black Mahler – The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story”, Charles Elford describes how she socialized with them, and that she was a frequent visitor to the house when the composer was on his deathbed in September of 1912. This work leaves the reader with the impression that SCT's wife Jessie was slightly jealous of Kathleen's friendship with him. One of us - AEFK, believes that the Kathleen in Elford's book could have been Kathleen Mary's mother, Annette Kathleen, a widow, who was only 4 years older than SCT, whereas Kathleen Mary was seventeen years his junior. The author also mentions that “Kathleen was there”, referring to a 1932 performance in London of SCT's masterpiece, Hiawatha, to observe the twentieth anniversary of his death. Now, Kathleen Mary, our subject, died in 1924, and Annette Kathleen was living in Sierra Leone by then, having moved back to Sierra Leone with Kathleen in November, 1917. It is quite possible that Annette was in England that year-1932, but we have not found any evidence in available passenger manifests which confirms this. To add to the confusion regarding SCT's death, Kathleen's Aunt, Adelaide, mentions in her Memoirs that an older Smith sister, Emma,“had been called in to help his - SCT - wife nurse him. She(Emma) later told me that as the end drew near, this great little man sat up in bed, and with a rapt expression, began to conduct some triumphant symphony, which started on earth and ended in heaven.” Could it have been Emma who attended the 1932 performance, and whoever talked to Elford might have mistaken her for Kathleen? Highly unlikely, since Emma died in 1928! We should keep in mind that Elford's book was partly fictional.
We also learn from the London Times obituary [FIGURE 06] that after Notting Hill High School for Girls [FIGURE 07], Kathleen attended South Kensington College where she studied fashion design, among other subjects, and in 1914, became an Associate of the Royal College of Art (A.R.C.A.). The journalist, late Bankole Timothy, in a 1975 article in the magazine West Africa, claimed that she was the first African woman to obtain a qualification at this level in any sphere of endeavor. Many years later, an article in the Southern Workman magazine of (then) Hampton Institute, [FIGURE 08] reporting on Kathleen's visit there with her Aunt Adelaide, stated that she was “.....the only girl student of her time to receive a *special-talent scholarship* in that institution.....”, information which they must have obtained from Kathleen. We located and purchased a portfolio of designs of students who graduated from the College in 1914. In it are ten signed sketches by Kathleen, some of which are included in these reflections.[FIGURE 09] Kathleen also appeared in some theatrical productions on the London stage. A short piece in the magazine CRISIS (NAACP) for June 1915 mentions her appearance in an Indian Opera. [FIGURE 10] The performance, which was in aid of wounded Indian Soldiers in WW1, was also reported in THE TIMES (London) of June 19, 1915. [FIGURE 11]
On November 28, 1917, Kathleen and her mother set sail from London for Freetown, her parents' birthplace [FIGURE 12]. Her brother Charles was by then also in Freetown practicing medicine; he qualified in 1913. Annette’s sister Adelaide and her daughter Gladys were also living in Freetown, after the failure of Adelaide's marriage to J. E. Casely Hayford of the Gold Coast. Also in Freetown was the eldest of the sisters, Mrs William Awoonor Renner (Elizabeth). By the time of their arrival in Freetown, Charles had already served a WWI tour of duty as a medical doctor in the Cameroon theater. ACH's Memoirs tells us that very soon after the pair got to Freetown, the four of them, Nettie, Kathleen, Adelaide and Gladys, traveled to Moyamba to visit Charles, who was stationed there. Had Charles' liaison with Dinah Moseray, resulting in daughter Mary Ngadi (our mother and grandmother, in Sept.,1918), begun by then?
Kathleen assisted her aunt, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, in trying to organize a vocational school for girls in Freetown. They occasionally put on concerts to raise funds for the school. No doubt, these concerts showcased their talents in music - Aunt Adelaide on the piano, and in drama, Kathleen, from her work in theater in London. One of the concerts, advertized as a “Grand Oriental Concert”, must have drawn on her appearances in some Eastern-themed theatrical productions in London. This particular concert generated some controversy in Freetown, and was discussed at length in the Sierra Leone Weekly News issue of June 12, 1920. [FIGURE 13] Kathleen, in her capacity as Secretary of the School, wrote a strong letter to the editor of the Colonial & Provincial Reporter, defending their plans for the school. [FIGURE 29 - on page 4].
She and her aunt also gave lessons at the YWCA. An advert in the October 11, 1919 issue of The Weekly News – left column, [FIGURE 14] had Aunt Adelaide giving singing classes, and Kathleen giving “Handicraft classes, in Woodwork, Leather work, Basketwork Design, Stencilling, etc...”, and also in Elocution and Deportment.
Kathleen may have shared her mother's and brother's interest in Sierra Leone country cloths. From the late John Karefa-Smart, one of us (AK) learned that her mother, Nettie, frequently visited MCF at the various district hospitals where he served and she took a keen interest in the production of country cloths. Nettie must have done some weaving herself. Some idle weaving equipment was in the room next to her bedroom at No. 2 Pademba Road, up to her death in 1950. It is quite possible that Nettie's interest in weaving developed during the nearly ten years she lived in the Gold Coast. Gold Coast/Ghana is well known for the Kente Cloth. It must have been an interest Nettie shared with her son MCF who, in the few years he had spent working in the Protectorate (now the Provinces), was able to prepare a definitive monograph titled “Sierra Leone Country Cloths” , [FIGURE 15] for the British Empire Exhibition which was held in London in 1924 and 1925. Although Nettie is never mentioned in the monograph, the possibility that she and her son collaborated on it cannot be ruled out. Coincidentally, Kathleen died in London on July 27, 1924, after traveling from Lisbon on matters related the Exhibition.(Fred Bunker) While on this visit to London, she took ill and subsequently died. MCF was in England a year later to take the London University M.D. Examination, in July 1925. Since the Exhibition was open until October 1925, we can safely assume that he must have visited it, and especially the Sierra Leone Pavilion, [FIGURE 16] to see the country cloth exhibit which he had been very instrumental in setting up, before he returned to Freetown later in July.
In her Memoirs, Adelaide C-H says this of Kathleen in Freetown, “Kathleen, with her intelligence, charm and spiritual kind of beauty, won all hearts, and it took my sister all her time to keep callers at bay.” Why were the local eligible men discouraged from calling on her? Her brother, Charles, married a local woman in 1919, and as we see in the next paragraphs, in June 1922, less than two years after Kathleen arrived in America, she was married to an East African!
In 1920, aunt and niece traveled to the U.S., via the U.K., to raise funds for the school and observe American vocational education. They landed in New York on August 18, 1920. The New York Times mentioned their arrival the next day. [FIGURE 17] They gave talks about Africa to church congregations and schools and colleges. The New York Times carried an ad for one such presentation at St. Bartholomew Church in New York City, in which Dr. Aggrey of Gold Coast was also to participate.[FIGURE 18] There was a stop at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where the students must have been so pleased and impressed meeting the duo that they made them honorary members of the Alpha Chapter of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority there. They also gave performances of African songs and dances, in which they often had the help of one Columbus Kamba Simango, an East African student at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City. More about him later!
A stop on their fund-raising travels through the South was Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Her aunt recalls in her memoirs how well they were received there. We know that a photographic portrait of Kathleen, made at the Institute, was on display there for a very long time after their visit because, in 1969, Kathleen's niece, MCF's daughter Mary Kponou, visited Tuskegee, and while being given a tour of the campus, came across the photograph on display. She instantly recognized it, because a smaller copy, which has the stamp of the Photographic Division of the Institute, was in her possession in Sierra Leone, and is now in ours. [FIGURE 19]
There are also newspaper accounts of their stops in Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago.[FIGURE 20], Figure 20.2.
It must not have been too long after they started their tour that Kathleen caught the eye of an East African, C. Kamba Simango, who was a student at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. The friendship quickly blossomed into a romance, and, in June, 1922, they were married in a church in Wilton, Connecticut. The Norwalk Hour, a newspaper in nearby Norwalk, [FIGURE 21] gave the wedding prominent coverage in the June 1 issue. She was thirty years old. The marriage was also reported in the Sierra Leone Weekly News in Freetown [FIGURE 21.2]. At the organ was the renowned Sierra Leonean musician, Nicholas Ballanta Taylor who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the U.S. Paul Robeson, who had graduated from Columbia University Law School that year, and who was a friend of Kamba, may have sang at the wedding. [FIGURE 30 - on page 4] is their wedding photograph.
They were in the U.S. until 1923 when they set sail for Europe. Bunker says that Kamba graduated that year. The New York Amsterdam News publicized their last performance in its April 25th issue. [FIGURE 22] Their plan was to immerse themselves in the Portuguese language, after which they planned to return to Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique, where they would open a co-educational vocational school, similar to the one her aunt Adelaide planned to start in Freetown. They arrived in Southampton, England on June 3, 1923. (In May, 1923, before they sailed to Europe, they both autographed a copy of a book, “Songs And Tales From The Dark Continent” which Kamba Simango co-authored in 1920, to a Miss Florence Tannenbaum, probably of New York City.) [FIGURE 23]
They spent several months in London, where they both took ill. Kamba was bedridden for three weeks, but Kathleen's was the more serious. She underwent an appendectomy. At some point, Kathleen's mother joined them in London (ACH's Memoirs also mentions this).We learn from a letter from Kamba Simango dated January 9, 1924, to their friend Florence Tannenbaum in New York City that he did not get to Lisbon until early in January, 1924. Kathleen stayed behind in London to get better from her surgery. He also stated in the letter that he expected Kathleen and her mother to join him in February, which they did [FIGURE 24]
Things happened very quickly when the three were all in Lisbon. They made rapid progress with learning Portuguese. A letter from W. E. B. DuBois to them, dated July 10, 1924, expressed his pleasure in earlier meeting them in Lisbon. [FIGURE 25] Kathleen traveled to London, probably for matters connected with the Sierra Leone Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London. Shipping passenger lists show her arriving in England on June 15, although the Rev Fred R. Bunker, Kamba Simango's mentor, in an article in a Hampton Institute publication, The Southern Workman, states that she made this trip in July. In another letter from Kamba to their friend Florence Tannenbaum in New York, Kamba states that Kathleen took ill again on July 20, and required another operation from which she never recovered. [FIGURE 26] In the same letter to Florence, we learn that she died at 2 a.m. on July 27th. Kamba and her mother, who had been summoned from Lisbon, got to the hospital at noon that day, too late to see her alive. She was 32 years old, and was interred the following Wednesday, July 30, in Kensington Cemetery.
ACH in her Memoirs, mentioned peritonitis as the cause of death, maybe a legacy of the appendectomy she underwent the previous year. A few years later, and penicillin would very likely have saved her life, as it might have saved her father's too in Cape Coast in 1900.
Obits:
The Times London and Notting Hill High School [FigureOBIT1].
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Alpha Chapter, Howard University, Washington, DC [FigureOBIT2].
Bunker’s previously cited article above also claimed that Kathleen, on her death bed “had expressed the wish to a friend that Kamba might marry this cousin (hers…Christine Mary Coussey), for she realized, in her great love for the work she was leaving, how absolutely essential it was that he should have the comfort and help of a good wife in his work.” Kamba, with the approval of friends and relatives, married Christine Coussey in London on September 26, 1925. They had at least one child. [FIGURE27] A Dr Louis Kamba Simango died in Accra, Ghana, on November 26, 2012 at the age of 85 years. [FIGURE28] He was just the right age to have been the baby in Figure27!
Bunker also quotes the following from a tribute in the Manchester Guardian (which we have so far been unable to find):
Africa has lost one of her best and most gifted friends by her death.
Figure 00. Hannah Easmon Harleston, seated left, with her brother Charles behind her, her son Kofi next to Charles, and Charles' daughter, Mary, seated right. This photograph was taken in the yard of Charles' residence at No. 2 Pademba Road. An educated guess of the date is 1939/40 ....before Mary got married.
Figure 01. John Farrell Easmon. Kathleen's father. This is probably a wedding portrait.
Figure 02. Annette Kathleen Easmon (nee Smith, Nettie to her family). Kathleen's mother. Probably a wedding portrait. She got married at age 19 (ACH's Memoirs) and had her first child, Charles, in 1890.
FIGURE 03. Kathleen and her older brother Charles. This was taken at the studio of the Tynan Brothers, at 41 Bath Street, St Helier, Jersey. Their maternal grandfather, William Smith Jr, retired to Jersey after his service in Sierra Leone. They were in Jersey with their mother in 1896 when their grandfather died. They returned to the Gold Coast in October. The photo must have been taken in '95 or '96 when she was 3 or 4 and Charles was 5 or 6. Their mother's presence in England is mentioned in her sister Adelaide's Memoirs, in the section dealing with the death of their father, Wm Smith Jr.
But again, MCF Easmon, in article on his father, JF Easmon, mentions that his father went on leave to England in 1897, and returned to the Gold Coast that same year. That he was accompanied by his wife and children is confirmed by a passenger list for their return journey to the Gold Coast that year.
Figure 04. The grave of John Farrell Easmon in the Cape Coast Military War Memorial Cemetery and Museum. The marble headstone was in pristine condition 113 years later when this photograph was taken, although the vegetation had to be cleared to find it.
Figure 05. Cover of the published songs on which Kathleen and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor collaborated.
Figure 05.b. An account of how the collaboration of Kathleen and Samuel Coleridge Taylor came about.
Figure 06. The Times of London obituary, July 26, 1924.
[Corrections to the Times of London obituary: Husband was Columbus Kamba Simango; He obtained his Baccalaureate degree and a Teaching Diploma at Teachers College, Columbia University. Kathleen's father served in that capacity in the Gold Coast, not in Sierra Leone.]
Figure 08. Their stop at Hampton Institute,Virginia, as reported in the Southern Workman, vol 50, 1921, p94. It throws some light on Kathleen's days as a student at the Royal College of Arts in London. We also learn that from Hampton, they continued on to Atlanta, and then to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Figure 09. Four of the ten designs which Kathleen submitted for her final year portfolio in 1914. The themes are mainly European-looking, with one of them - the lower right – non-Western. She went to England at the age of 8 yrs, and these designs were done when she was about 22 yrs. For those 14 years that she had been in London, it is safe to say that she was exposed to very little in the way of African fashions that could have showed up in some of her designs.
Figure 10. This clipping is from the September, 1915, issue of The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP. It identifies Kathleen as a musician and dancer in London, and mentions some of her stage appearances. (Her brother returned to Freetown from the Cameroons that same year.)
It is interesting that Kathleen's activities in faraway England were deemed worthy of mention in the Crisis magazine in America.