In 1680 in the forests of central and southern Ghana, the high priest to King Osei Tutu I called down a golden stool from the heavens and gave Tutu the divine foundation on which he would build the mighty Ashanti Empire. The Ashanti combined strength in war — conquering lands from what is now Ivory Coast in the west to Togo in the east and defeating British colonizers several times — with skill in art, particularly sculpture and cloth. But not everyone appreciated their authoritarian ways, and in the early 1700s a group of chiefs broke away and moved northeast. Traveling through a narrow pass in a line of towering granite cliffs west of the Volta River, they came to a plateau whose woods offered good hunting. The village became known as Kwahu-Tafo; its name combines the words in Twi, Ghana’s main language, for “go and die” — the fate of many an Ashanti warrior who tried to scale the cliffs under a hail of rocks from the separatists above — and “wet ladle,” or plentiful food.
Ten years ago, my uncle, Humphrey Barclay, became a chief of Kwahu-Tafo. Humph has noble lineage of his own: a clan cloth — the Barclay tartan — and ancestors stretching back through the founders of Barclays Bank and the first Quakers to the time of William the Conqueror. But it was as a 60-year-old London TV producer that, in 2000, he traveled to Kwahu-Tafo for the funeral of Gyearbuor Asante, a Ghanaian friend and an actor in one of his shows. Something about Humph’s manner impressed the chief, Nana Ameyaw Gyensiama III, a.k.a. Nana Tafohene, and after the burial he asked my uncle to mediate between a woman and her mother who had not spoken for five years. Humph succeeded — “I worked in TV,” he says, “so I’m fluent in platitude.”
Almost before Humph knew it, the chief had adopted him as a son, renamed him Nana Kwadwo Ameyaw Gyearbuor Yiadom and anointed him Kwahu-Tafo’s head of development. A two-day enstoolment, or coronation, followed a year later; by then Humph had started work on a house in Kwahu-Tafo and formed a charity, Friends of Tafo, to raise money to fix up the village schools, dredge its rivers, run health campaigns and build a library and an Internet caf. A signal success has been the senior high school, once run-down with just four pupils, now a complex of buildings, including a science block, with 500 students.
It’s a great story — how my uncle became a chief of a tribe in a faraway land. But it is not unique. Raphael Aidoo, who is writing a thesis on Ghana’s foreign chiefs for his anthropology Ph.D. at King’s College, University of London, has found at least 30: British, American, Japanese, Canadian, Australian, Norwegian and Jamaican.
