Robert Benjamin Ageh Wellesley Cole

Robert Benjamin Ageh Wellesley Cole (11 March 1907 – 31 October 1995 ), was a Sierra Leonean surgeon and writer who was the first West African to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Background and early life Robert Benjamin Ageh Wellesley Cole was born at No. 15 Pownall Street, Freetown, Sierra Leone (then a colony of the United Kingdom), to Wilfred Sydney Ageh Wellesley Cole and his wife, Elizabeth Cole (née Okrafo-Smart). The Wellesley-Cole family had three other children including Dr. Irene Ighodaro.

The Wellesley-Coles were a Sierra Leone Creole family of partial Caribbean origin who also descended from Wolof and Yoruba Liberated African ancestors. The Okrafo-Smart family was another prominent Creole family largely of Igbo Liberated African descent. His Yoruba great-grandfather, a Liberated African, who had escaped from slave traders in Nigeria and settled in Freetown, adopted the surname of Wellesley out of deep admiration for the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.

He passed the Master of Surgery examination, M.S. in 1944.

He was President of the League of Coloured Peoples from 1947 to 1949, following the death of the organisation's founder Dr Harold Moody.

He was a Director of the West African Students Union and a founder member of the West African Society and an editor of the society's journal Africana, as well as a member of the Fabian Society.

In 1950, he married Amy Manto Bondfield Hotobah-During, a Sierra Leone Creole nurse who was the younger sister of Dr Raymond Sarif Easmon and Bertha Conton and the couple had four children. One of his daughters, Patrice Suzanne, read law at Oxford.