Edward Mayfield Boyle was born on 24 June 1878 in
Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Charles Boyle and Sarah Easmon, both of whom were of African-American descent. Sarah Easmon was a member of the
Easmon family. Boyle was a maternal nephew of
Albert Whiggs Easmon, a leading physician and surgeon in Freetown, and
John Farrell Easmon, one-time Chief Medical Officer of the
Gold Coast who coined the term "
Blackwater fever". Boyle attended the Wesleyan (Methodist) Boys' High School in Freetown, and attended
Zion Methodist Church, Wilberforce Street, a Settler church founded by the early
African-American founders of the Colony of Sierra Leone and the settlement of Freetown. He was an ideological disciple of
Edward Wilmot Blyden, a
Caribbean pan-Africanist scholar who taught in
Liberia and
Sierra Leone. ==Education and medical career==