Kofi Adjei-Maahes

Worked alongside independence organisers and bridged the Pride and the freedom movements

The only Maahes in the Roll who is known by his birth name with the title joined to it. Kofi Adjei was a schoolteacher on the Gold Coast who had been carrying the Pride's songs in his head since he was a boy. The mantle chose him in 1912, two years after Tunde-Balogun died, and the people of his town have called him Adjei-Maahes ever since.

He took the mantle in the middle of a colonial world. The cells of the Pride had learned, under Tunde-Balogun, how to hide from a government that did not know it existed. Kofi learned something harder. The government did have enemies, and some of them were people the Pride could not ignore.

The organisers of the independence movements were gathering in the towns of the coast, writing, teaching and building networks. They were being watched by colonial police, and they were also being watched by something older. The Children of Apep had learned, over a century of empire, to hide inside colonial administrations: in tax offices, labour boards and the quiet rooms where decisions were made without being recorded.

He spent forty years on what he called the Quiet Alliance. The Pride never joined the freedom movements and never led them. It hid the organisers from the police and from the brood. It broke the brood's footholds in the administration. It carried messages along the old Pride roads, passing them off as ordinary letters. In 1945, delegates from the Pride's cells in Africa, the Caribbean and Britain met in the margins of a great congress in Manchester, the first time in a century that cells from three continents had sat in one room.

In 1957, the Gold Coast became a free country. The new government offered him a post. He declined, citing the oldest rule in the Roll, the Rule of the Empty Hand: a Maahes holds no office of state. It was the first time that the rule, laid down in Chapter III after the fall of Userhat-Seti, had been tested against a government the Pride had helped to make.

He died three years later, in 1960, as the first groves began to come back. He died an old man, in a country that was free.

What he left behind: the Quiet Alliance, and a Pride that had helped to build a free country and had not asked for anything in return.