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  • Gandah-Yir: The house of the brave. The biography of a northern Ghanaian Chief (ca. 1872 − 1950)
  • S. W. D. K. (Kumbonoh) Gandah and Carola Lentz

Preface

I did not set out purposely to write a history text book on my father but to put on paper what he himself narrated orally to his audience when the family gathered to have some pots of pito [sorghum beer, C. L.] to drink. But having started to put on paper his own narration about his life history, I felt it would be very useful to the family, both for those members [. . . ] who have grown up to know him personally and those who have not had the opportunity to know him well or at all before he passed away. For it would be selfish of me and of any of my literate brothers who knew him so well and had the opportunity to hear all his oral history not to pass this down in written form so that his children and grandchildren and future generations would be able to read and remember him with great adoration as I do today.

However, having started to put pen to paper, I felt I should open the readership not only to the family members alone, but to a wider audience, to the members of the immediate Dagara community in which he lived and played no mean feat but also to any reader in Ghana and abroad who might find this a fascinating book to read. It is my hope, should I succeed, to be able to give to future researchers, anthropologists and historians alike, an insight into the society in which my father grew and was brought up during his life time. I am only a lay and general reader in these subjects and I do not profess to be an expert in them; so if I fail to meet my hope and aim, I do humbly apologise to these experts for my inability to do so; for this is not a thesis on history or anthropology.

Since childhood my father never, at any single day, stopped telling people about his life story and the history of the era in which he grew up. Until I went to school, I did not pay much heed to what my father was talking about, and even at the time I went to school, this interest did not develop immediately until I finished my middle school education and was in the first year of a two-year teacher training course. It was then that an ardent passion to write about his life story developed. Even at the primary school there was some encouragement by Mr Henkel,1 who wanted to collect some historical stories from the district from his pupils through their parents, so that he could make use of them for his dramatisation classes. But the only pupil in the Gandah family, who had enough knowledge about my father’s life history, would have been our eldest brother, [End Page 356] Sorkumo. However, even if Sorkumo had volunteered to tell stories about my father, they would not have included his mysticisms.2 For Sorkumo would not have told much of my father for fear that he would reveal the secrets of my father and that it would lay my father open for the attacks by his enemies. Anyway, at the teacher training college, in one of our English literature lessons, Miss Gladstone, who was our form mistress for English literature, read to us the legend of Beowulf, after which she set us to write an essay on a similar historical episode that we knew of. Of course, by this time I was mature enough and had heard and comprehended enough of my father’s life stories to be able to write on one of his episodes. The interest and fascination that Miss Gladstone took in this short essay encouraged me so much; so now my brother Biz and I listened to and collected more episodes of his life story any time we went home on holidays. I must indeed be thankful to Miss Gladstone for my early but unconscious encouragement.


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