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GANDAH-YIR: THE HOUSE OF THE BRAVE. THE BIOGRAPHY OF A NORTHERN GHANAIAN CHIEF (ca. 1872−1950)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2012

S. W. D. K. (Kumbonoh) Gandah
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 356 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2012

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References

1 Mr Henkel was the headmaster of the Lawra Confederacy Native Authority Primary School, opened in 1935 in Lawra, which S. W. D. K. Gandah attended. For more details on this, see S. W. D. K. Gandah, The Silent Rebel, Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004: 36–7, 61–2.

2 ‘Mysticism’ here refers mainly to the important shrine for Kukpenibie which Gandah owned and attended.

3 This is an interesting perspective, but not supported by any documentary evidence on colonial land legislation in north-western Ghana where earth-priestly control of land was never replaced by chiefly administration. On colonial land tenure, see Bening, Raymond B., ‘Land policy and administration in Northern Ghana, 1898–1976’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 16 (1995): 227–66Google Scholar.

4 For details and archival sources of these durbars and Duncan-Johnstone's period of office, see Carola Lentz, Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and the International African Institute, 2006: 65–71.

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