Becoming a Good Living Ancestor

What inspired me to write this essay was Dr. Joyce Mercer’s reference to Dr. James W. Fowler as our common “intellectual ancestor” at Emory University. Dr. James W. Fowler is known for his theory of constructive developmental research in faith and moral development. He also studied the cognitive patterns of knowing, valuing, interpreting, and reasoning as the basis for moral and ethical understanding. However, for me and the people of Gomoa Mprumem, Ghana, Dr. Fowler is counted among the esteemed company of the Ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo); that is, he has bequeathed to succeeding generations a name worthy of evocation and worship. An ancestor, however, must first be an elder, dully nominated, elected, and inaugurated by a group, after a person has demonstrated selflessness and generosity to a group. Thus, as a living ancestor myself and ruler of Gomoa Mprumem, I conferred the title of elder (Nana) on Dr. Fowler when “I ... presented him with an ancestral stool ... on which we seated him three-times, making him a citizen and an elder (Nana) of Mprumem and Ghana. The ancestral stool symbolized his soul as eternally seated ... member of the community” during his first and only visit to Mprumem, Ghana (and Africa) in 1999 (Tanton 1999). This was when he accepted my invitation and attended the celebrations of my fifth anniversary as king of Mprumem, during which he inaugurated a junior high school that he helped build for my community. My formal introduction to Dr. Fowler at Emory University, however, came at a very trying time for me in 1988 (Ephirim-Donkor 2021, 117). I had been arrested on campus for using the gymnasium as a black student and charged with trespassing. As word got around that a foreign graduate seminary student had been arrested, the upper echelon of Candler School of Theology, including James Fowler and Romney Moseley, perhaps embarrassed, quickly intervened and got the charges dismissed but not before I was taken to the DeKalb County jail for a couple of hours. Decades later, I am still delayed when entering the United States from abroad in order for immigration authorities to ascertain as to why I have trespassing charge on my record. Ironically, the racism I endured led to my cultural reclamation and intellectual renaissance. The shame and helplessness that I felt while in custody became the source of my perspicacity, as I was forced to reminisce on my upbringings in Ghana. For the first time, I was made aware of my “blackness”—something I had taken for granted growing up in Ghana. Schooled in the theoretical developmental framework espoused by James Fowler and Erik Erikson, my goal was to superimpose the theories on the Akan intoto. Each time, however, I failed. Then serendipitously I thought about my own upbringings and hence my book, African Spirituality: On Becoming Ancestors. It was liberating.