George Alfred Grant, popularly known as Paa Grant (15 August 1878, Beyin, Western Nzema – 30 October 1956, Axim

Axim

Axim is a town, district and kingdom on the coast of Ghana. It lies 64 kilometers west of the port city of Takoradi, south of the highway leading to the Côte d'Ivoire border, in the Western Region to the west of Cape Three Points....

) was a merchant and politician in the Gold Coast

Gold Coast (British colony)

The Gold Coast was a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa that became the independent nation of Ghana in 1957.-Overview:The first Europeans to arrive at the coast were the Portuguese in 1471. They encountered a variety of African kingdoms, some of which controlled substantial...

.

Paa Grant was born into an influential merchant family. The grandson of Francis Chapman Grant

Francis Chapman Grant

Francis Chapman Grant was a merchant in the Gold Coast.Son of a Scottish father and an African mother, he was educated in the United States, where according to one story he was a schoolboy contemporary of Ulysses Grant. He became a schoolteacher in England before becoming a merchant in Cape Coast...

, he prospered as a timber merchant in the first decades of the twentieth century. He was a founder and the first president of the United Gold Coast Convention

United Gold Coast Convention

The United Gold Coast Convention was a political party whose aim was to bring about Ghanaian independence from British rule after the Second World War....

 in 1947.

In 1947, Paa Grant paid newly-elected UGCC Secretary General Kwame Nkrumah's

Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of Ghana and its predecessor state, the Gold Coast, from 1952 to 1966. Overseeing the nation's independence from British colonial rule in 1957, Nkrumah was the first President of Ghana and the first Prime Minister of Ghana...

£100 boat fare from Liverpool back to Ghana.

Further reading

• Ako Adjei, The Life and Work of George Alfred Grant (Paa Grant), Accra, 1992