JOE APPIAH AND PEGGY CRIPPS: INTERNATIONAL INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE DESCRIBED AS "DISGUSTING" BY APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT AND INSPIRED THE MOVIE "GUESS WHO`S COMING TO DINNER"
Joe Appiah,Ghanaian royal and his bride Peggy Cripps, daughter of the former Chancellor of exchequer. Circa 1953
The marriage, unlike that of the London secretary Ruth Williams and the future president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, five years earlier, did not provoke British government opposition. But the first society match to cross the colour bar was still a big news story when she announced her engagement after a Buckingham Palace garden party.
Sitting in the Regent's Park flat of the artist Feliks Topolski, 32-year-old Peggy Cripps and Joe Appiah coped well with being grilled by a polite press. She explained that she worked for the organisation Racial Unity, and that they had met two years earlier; her father, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had died before he had the opportunity to meet Joe, but her mother approved of her future son-in-law.
Appiah, who was reading for the Bar in England while also representing Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, denied suggestions that he was the son of a chief. With a diamond engagement ring glistening on his fiancée's hand, he jibbed at revealing his age (three years her senior), saying that he did not have a birth certificate. He said he would practise law in the Ashanti confederacy, where his father was chief secretary, and expected no problems over the marriage since there were no racial or religious prejudices in his country.
Peggy Cripps Married 1950 (clich here:http://www.britishpathe.com/video/peggy-cripps-married to the video)
When the couple were married at St John's Anglican Church, St John's Wood, several weeks later, the Independent Labour Party sent its best wishes. Such Labour figures as Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot joined the Indian politician Krishna Menon and colourfully attired African chiefs in the congregation. But less goodwill was detectable in Africa when the wedding pictures were published.
Charles Swart, the South African Minister of Justice, denounced the match as "disgusting", saying it was an argument for his Bill to keep coloured and native peoples off Europeans' buses and trams. A letter-writer to the Northern News in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, declared that the pictures would "turn the stomach of a pig"; a chairwoman of the Women's Institute and others signing themselves "Colonial", "Settler", "Concerned" and "Disgusted" protested that it was not only an insult to every right-minded European but a dangerous threat to political stability in the British colonies.
Enid Margaret Cripps was born on May 21 1921, the fourth child of the barrister and MP Sir Stafford Cripps. She was brought up at the family home in Gloucestershire, where her father was known locally as "The Squire of the Moated Grange" and banned from reading the lesson at his local church because of his politics. Young Peggy, however, remembered his liking for blue jokes and the future Commonwealth leaders who came to call; she was unselfconscious enough to write a poem entitled Nigger.
After Maltman Green School at Gerrard's Cross, she studied History of Art in Florence before returning home to go to a secretarial school. When the the Blitz began it moved to Dorset, where she was arrested for acting suspiciously while looking for flowers. At the police station she reeled off an impressive list of Latin names for flora, then encountered fresh suspicion by saying that her father was in Moscow, where he was ambassador.
Dr Kwame Nkrumah,Ghana`s first president (prime minister),Peggy Cripps and Dr Joe Appiah
On joining him, she decided that, although Muscovites were shabbily dressed, they seemed more independent than ordinary Londoners. She and her mother visited Finland, where a Russian officer proposed to her, saying he would come to England in 10 years, after the war and the revolution.
When her father left the Soviet Union, Peggy worked in Teheran for the British embassy and then the Army. After the war she had a breakdown, which necessitated recuperation in Switzerland. She studied art in London before setting off with her mother on an aid mission to China, which prompted the Chinese ambassador to predict:
Millions of Changs and Wangs with open arms
The Albion maiden will embrace,
Whose rare benevolence and natural charms
Profoundly touch the heart of an ancient race.
After Joe Appiah completed his Bar finals the couple settled at Kumasi in the Gold Coast, where she satisfied his family by coming from a respectable background and having borne him a son, who was to be joined by three sisters. Joe started off working for Nkrumah, but he fell out with "the Redeemer" as the Gold Coast was about to become an independent Ghana setting off on the "Golden Road to Socialism".
Appiah practised at the Bar while joining the opposition United Nationalist Party, and found himself in jail without trial for 15 months after fiercely campaigning against a Prevention Detention Act. He later formed his own own party to champion democracy; had another spell in jail after being accused of trying to foment a coup; and latterly became a roving ambassador regarded as an apologist for the new regime.
During these years Peggy Appiah learned to wear the local cloth on ceremonial occasions, though she preferred to wear European dress around the house. She started to write a series of children's books, which included The Pineapple Child and Other Tales from the Ashanti, Why There are So Many Roads, Afua and the Mouse and the reader Yao and the Python. There were also a couple of adult novels - Smell of Onions and A Dirge Too Soon - as well as a volume of verse and a collection of 7,000 Ashanti proverbs.
When Joe Appiah was jailed, there were plans to expel Peggy; but this would have caused unwelcome publicity, with the prospect of moving photographs of her at press conferences surrounded by her attractive light-skinned children.
Joe Appiah,Peggy and their four kids
Peggy Appiah bought a house in England to be close to the children when they were at school, but continued to visit Ghana, where she spent her last years gardening and amassing what is arguably the finest collection of Akan gold weights. In 1996 she was appointed MBE for services to Anglo-Ghanaian relations.
When her husband died in 1990 she was asked if she would return to Britain; she replied that her home was in Kumasi. She bought a plot for herself next to Joe's grave, covering it with a concrete slab to prevent anyone else being buried there.
Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah (L,son of Joe Appiah and Peggy Cripps Appiah,) is presented with a National Medal of Humanities by U.S. President Barack Obama (R) during an East Room ceremony February 13, 2012 at the White House in Washington, DC. Appiah was presented with the medal for seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values
“I do not think of myself as crossing boundaries,” says Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values.
Short Biography of Dr Joe Appiah
Nana Joseph Emmanuel "Joe" Appiah, MP (16 November 1918 – 8 July 1990, was a Ghanaian lawyer, politician and statesman.
He was born in Kumasi to Nana James Appiah and Nana Adwoa Akyaa, members of the Ashanti imperial aristocracy. His father was a schoolmaster, Methodist leader, traditional nobleman and, finally, Chief Secretary of Asanteman, a position his son would also subsequently occupy. Appiah was educated at Wesley College, Mfantsipim, and the Middle Temple.
During his time in the United Kingdom, he was closely involved with the West African Students' Union (WASU), eventually becoming its president. He came, through residence in London and involvement with WASU, to know many of the main players in the fight against imperial rule in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa. Not least among these was Kwame Nkrumah, to whom he became very close. Nkrumah was Appiah's first choice for best man at his wedding to Peggy Cripps in 1953 ("but the job went to arguably the more influential figure of George Padmore, a Trinidadian who was political mentor to African nationalist leaders, including Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta"). Their firstborn child, son Kwame (now world renowned Professor of philosophy and co-author of Encyclopedia Africana Prof Anthony Kwame Appiah), was born in London in 1954, followed by Ama (born 1955), Adwoa (born 1960) and Abena (born 1962).
The Appiah family returned to Ghana in late 1954. Soon after, Joe Appiah's friendship with Nkrumah was ruined. He joined the National Liberation Movement party and won the Atwima-Amansie seat in 1957. The NLM was later to merge with other opposition parties to form the United Party. After the General Afrifa-led coup that overthrew Nkrumah in 1966, he was asked to explain the new regime's motives to Ghana's friends and neighbours. Appiah was intermittently involved in public life as a diplomat and a government minister from then on until his retirement in 1978.
Left to right: Nana Akyempemhene (D.J. Buahin), Joe Appiah, Adam Amandi, Victor Owusu, members of the political intelligentsia of the Gold Coast and Ghana, freedom fighters, and pioneers of Ghana's independence
He returned to Kumasi, where he continued to fulfill his duties as a tribal elder. His autobiography Joe Appiah: The Autobiography of an African Patriot was published in 1990. Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture was inspired by his father's easy cosmopolitanism.
Joe Appiah died in Accra after an illness and was buried next to his wife at the Tafo cemetery at Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. His tomb was vandalised in 2008 by unknown persons
Short biography of Lady Peggy Cripps Appiah
Enid Margaret "Peggy" Appiah, MBE (21 May 1921 – 11 February 2006), was a British children's author, philanthropist and socialite. She was the daughter of the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps and Dame Isobel Cripps, and the wife of Ghanaian lawyer and political activist Nana Joe Appiah.
Enid Margaret Cripps was born in Goodfellows, Gloucestershire, just across the county border from the home of her parents, Stafford Cripps and Isobel (née) Swithinbank, in the village of Filkins, Oxfordshire, the youngest of four children.
The family had only recently moved into Goodfellows, the home in Filkins where Peggy grew up; a Cotswold-style manor house, whose decoration and development owed much to the influence of Sir Lawrence Weaver, the architect, who was, with his wife, Kathleen, one of the Cripps' closest friends. Lady Weaver died in 1927 of pneumonia. When Sir Lawrence also died in 1930, their two sons, Purcell and Toby, were, in effect, adopted by the Crippses. In later life, Peggy always regarded them as her brothers.
Childhood
Growing up in the country, in the care of her mother and her beloved nanny, Elsie Lawrence, and with the companionship of her sister Theresa, she spent much of her childhood exploring the English countryside, collecting the wildflowers and the fruits and mushrooms that grew in the hedgerows and meadows of the 500 acres (2.0 km2) of her father's farm and the surrounding woods and fields. As members of the British Wildflower Society, she and her sister learned how to identify plants and got to know the common and Latin names of many of them. She was to transfer this interest in later years to the flora of Ghana. This love of the countryside was something that united her family. Her brother, Sir John Cripps, not only farmed at Filkins, but edited The Countryman and was later the European Countryside Commissioner.
Family
On her father's side, the family had long lived in Gloucestershire: they were a solidly upper-middle-class family. Her paternal grandfather, Lord Parmoor, was a lawyer who had been ennobled in 1914, when he became a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Her paternal great-great grandfather, Joseph Cripps, had been MP for Cirencester. Lord Parmoor had represented Stroud in the House of Commons.
The political connections of her maternal side were also impressive. Two of her maternal grandmother's sisters were married to the MPs Charles Edward Henry Hobhouse and Leonard Henry Courtney, Baron Courtney. Another great-aunt, Beatrice, was married to Sidney Webb, who served with her grandfather Lord Parmoor in the first Labour Government, in 1924, and was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the second Labour government in 1929, where he served in cabinet with Lord Parmoor, as Lord President of the Council, and was joined later by Stafford, as Solicitor General. (It was at this time that her father was knighted.)
The Cripps family were devout Anglicans. Lord Parmoor was an ecclesiastical lawyer, a member—and in 1911 the Chairman—of the house of Laymen in the Province of Canterbury, Vicar General of various English provinces, and author of Cripps on Church and Clergy. Stafford Cripps is said to have been the first layman to preach in St Paul's Cathedral.[2] When Peggy Cripps was preparing for her confirmation, she told her parents that she had doubts about some of the thirty-nine articles of faith of the Church of England, and her father arranged for her to discuss them with his friend, William Temple, Archbishop of York (later Archbishop of Canterbury). Peggy used to enjoy telling people that as they had gone through the 39 articles, each time she had expressed a doubt, the Archbishop had said, "Yes, I find that one very difficult, too!"
Education
She had a conventional education for a young woman of her class and time. She was educated first at a day school at Queen's College, Harley Street, and later at Maltman's Green, a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, where she and a group of friends attended a Quaker Meeting House. Through her parents’ connections, she also began to learn something of the world outside England. In 1938 she and her family spent several months in Jamaica, and in the same year Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom Stafford had begun an extensive correspondence as a result of his interest in the development of democracy in the British colonies, visited Goodfellows with his daughter Indira.
"Off to study"
After finishing school, she applied to Edinburgh University, but first went off to Italy to study the history of art in Florence. The Second World War was looming and she had to return hurriedly to England from Florence. She declined her place at Edinburgh University, enrolling instead at the Whitehall Secretarial College, which had been evacuated to Dorset with the onset of bombing in London, so she could start work immediately.
Once she had completed her training, she was able to set off to join her father in Moscow, where he was then British Ambassador and she was able to be useful as a secretary in the embassy. Because the direct route to Moscow would have required traveling through German-occupied Europe, she and her mother and her sister Theresa, traveled to Russia by way of Canada, crossing the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway and then passing through Japan and China and crossing the Soviet Union by rail.
In Moscow, Peggy did secretarial work for her father and became friends with the daughters of the Yugoslav and Chinese ambassadors, and the daughter of an Iranian diplomat, who was to remain a lifelong friend. In 1941, at the age of 20, with her parents in London, and her sister in Iran, she was left in charge of the evacuation of the British Embassy, with the German invasion of Russia looming. Since she was officially a secretary in the Foreign Service, she found herself working for a Mr. Cook in the consular department in Teheran. Later on, when the British Army took over the Iranian railway system, she worked as a secretary for the Brigadier who was in charge.
In 1942, she returned to England, accompanying her father, who was returning from a visit to India. They traveled through the Middle East on a seaplane, landing on Lake Galilee in Palestine and the Nile in Egypt, where she was able to see the pyramids of Egypt. This was also her first visit to the African continent. For the rest of the war she worked in the Ministry of Information, first in the Indian Division and then in the Soviet Relations Division, where she was able to use her knowledge of the Russian language in her work. As her father committed himself full-time to politics, and to the reduced income that came with the loss of his legal practice, the family left Goodfellows and moved into a smaller house at Frith Hill, Gloucestershire, although her brother John eventually took over the running of the farm at Filkins.
At the end of the war, Peggy had a nervous breakdown.[citation needed] She had given up her place at university to be useful during the war; now she found herself experienced but unqualified for the job she was already doing. She was sent to Switzerland to recover at the Maximilian Bircher-Benner clinic in Zurich, spent a summer in Lugano studying painting, and returned to London to take up the study of art full-time at the Anglo-French Art Centre in St John's Wood, north London. Then she took up painting in a small studio in the apartment of the artist Feliks Topolski and attended life-classes at Hammersmith Art School, under the tutelage of Carel Weight.
Throughout this period she was in close and regular touch with her parents, even though her father was increasingly busy with his political work. With the Labour Party victory in the 1945 election at the end of the War, Stafford had entered the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, where he spent most of his time working on negotiations with the leaders of Indian independence, including Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. In November 1947, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and most of the rest of his life he helped to manage the beginnings of the post-War recovery of Britain and the creation of the modern welfare state.
In 1942, her mother had agreed to lead a campaign to raise money for aid to the people of China, who were facing great suffering as a result of the Japanese invasion, floods, disease and famine. Six years later, the Chinese government invited Lady Cripps to visit their country so that she could see what was being done with the money and express their gratitude for the work of British United Aid to China. Peggy went along as one of her mother’s traveling companions. Since the money was meant to be used to help all the Chinese, they both stayed with General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She visited the Communist "Liberated Areas" in Yenan, where Peggy met Chou En Lai and Madame Mao. On their way back from China, she and her mother traveled through Burma and India.
Engagement
As a result of her experiences in Jamaica, Russia, Iran, China, Burma and India, and her family’s friendship with people such as the Nehrus, Peggy, who was now in her mid-twenties, knew many people from many countries and also knew much more about life outside England, indeed outside Europe, than most of her contemporaries. This experience, along with her deep Christian commitments, led her to work for cooperation among peoples; and in the late 1940s she started to work for an organization called Racial Unity, which had been started by Miss Attlee, sister of the Prime Minister, as well as becoming active in the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches (WCC). It was through her work for Racial Unity, of which she was secretary in 1952, that she first met Joseph Emmanuel Appiah who was President of the West African Students' Union. Their friendship grew fast and in January 1952, he proposed and she accepted.
At the time, however, Stafford Cripps was extremely ill. In May 1951 he had been taken to the Maximilian Bircher-Benner clinic in Zurich (where Peggy had recovered many years before) and was eventually thought well enough to return home to the family home at Frith Hill. But in early January 1952 he was flown back to Zurich, where he died nearly four months later. As a result of this illness, Isobel decided that it would be best if the engagement should be kept secret. Then, once he died, custom required that the engagement not be announced for another year. In the meanwhile, Peggy’s mother suggested that she should visit the Gold Coast on her own, traveling out by steamship to see the country of her intended husband.
Ghana
Much to her surprise, Joe was already at home in Kumasi, when she arrived, having flown back urgently on the death of his granduncle, Yao Antony, whom he was to succeed as head of his branch of the nobility of the Ashanti people. She traveled to Kumasi on Christmas Eve 1952, where she was reunited with her fiancé, and met his family, for the first time, with him, on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Eve she attended the Watch Night Service at the Wesley Methodist Church in Kumasi, worshiping for the first time in the church which was to celebrate her funeral more than fifty years later. She also visited the campus of what was to be Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, then a one-year old teacher’s training college, for the first time; a campus where she was to send her children to primary school and where, at the age of 84, in the last year of her life, she received an honorary degree of doctor of letters, to her great delight.
At home
On her first trip to Africa, she traveled as far north as Navrongo, crossed the Volta and entered French Togoland, in the east, and traveled to Elmina in the west. There was much speculation as to what she was doing in Ghana, and because the engagement had not been announced, she could not explain the real reason for her visit. She told the Daily Graphic: "[As] a member of a political family in Britain, I am very interested in the people of the Gold Coast and in their political advancement." Together with her future husband's family she met many prominent Ghanaians, including the Asantehene, Mrs. Rose Aggrey (wife of the founder of the Achimota School Dr James Aggrey), the artist Kofi Antubam, paramount chief Nene Mate Kole, as well as such leaders of the independence movement as Kwame Nkrumah, Komla Gbedemah, Kojo Botsio, and Krobo Edusei.
The announcement of the couple's engagement in 1953 produced a firestorm of comment in Britain and around the world; and when Peggy Cripps and Joe Appiah were married at St John's church, St John's Wood, north London,[3] in June 1953, the occasion was front-page news in Britain, in Ghana, and many other countries and the event was one of the social events of the year.[citation needed] George Padmore, the West Indian Pan-Africanist was best man, deputising for Kwame Nkrumah, who was too busy as the new leader of Government Business to attend himself. Hugh Gaitskell, Stafford’s successor as Chancellor was there, as were Michael Foot, future leader of the Labour party, Aneurin Bevan, Lady Quist, the wife of the Speaker of the Gold Coast Assembly, and Krishna Menon, India’s ambassador to the United Nations. A Jamaican newspaper commented that there were "top-hatted and frock-coated British aristocrats... ex-Cabinet Ministers... as well as several Tory and Socialist members of Parliament." The real attraction, however, was the kente cloth worn not only by the bridegroom but by many of his relatives and friends. Coverage in newspapers around the world ranged from the hostile to skeptical to admiring.[citation needed]
Peggy and Joe Appiah took their honeymoon in France and returned to England where Joe was to finish his legal training at the Middle Temple.
Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah aka postmodern Socrates,son of lady Peggy Cripps Appiah and Joe Appiah in his teens with in traditional Akan dress.In November 2009, Forbes Magazine put Professor Appiah on a list of the world’s seven most powerful thinkers, selected by Princeton’s President. Norton published The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen in October 2010.
In May 1954 their first son, Kwame Anthony Appiah, was born (amid another flutter of newspaper publicity) and in November the young family arrived in the Gold Coast to begin their new life. During this period, while Joe was developing a legal career and beginning his life as a politician, Peggy focused most of her energy on her young family —- Ama was born in 1955, Adwoa in 1960 and Abena in 1962 —- and on working as a secretary and legal assistant in his law office and for his constituents, supporting her husband as she had supported her father. She learned to wear cloth, started attending funerals, and got to know her husband’s family and his father’s family as well. They built themselves a home in Mbrom, where their neighbors were Victor Owusu, another senior NLM politician, John Brew, and, across the street, Joe Appiah's father, J.W.K. Appiah and his wife, Aunty Jane.
For more than thirty years, beginning in the late 1950s, Peggy Appiah’s extensive library at Mbrom was made available to the children of the neighbourhood, who could come and read children’s books, and, as they grew older, the novels and poetry she had collected. Among her most prized collections were many of the volumes of the Heinemann African Writers' series. Other frequent visitors to the house included the traders who brought her the goldweights they had acquired on their collecting trips through the villages and towns of Ghana. She also took an interest in the education and welfare of a number of young people, who became part of her extended family, among them Isobel Kusi-Obodom, whose father died in Nkrumah’s prisons, and Dr Joe Appiah-Kusi of Seattle.[citation needed]
Politics
After Joe Appiah was elected to Parliament in 1956, prior to independence, Peggy Appiah continued to provide a secure home to which he could return from his political struggles, forget about politics, and rest in the bosom of his family. Peggy chose to join St. George's Church in Kumasi. She also worked with Dr. Alex Kyerematen for the development of the Cultural Center in Kumasi. She served on the Committee of the Children's Home, worked with the home for the Destitute in Bekwai, and in later years she became a patron of the Ghana National Association for the Blind. When her husband was imprisoned at the orders of Kwame Nkrumah in October 1961, she refused to leave the country and a deportation order was withdrawn when a front-page article appeared in the British press describing her situation.[citation needed]
Around this time her son Kwame was very ill. The following month, Queen Elizabeth II made her first visit to Ghana. While inspecting the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and President Nkrumah passed by the boy's bed. Since he had a picture of his parents displayed on his bedside table, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had visited Kumasi previously and had met Peggy Appiah, turned back, as he was leaving, to send his regards. President Nkrumah's reported anger at being embarrassed in this way -this was the husband of a foreign head of state sending a greeting to the wife of a man Nkrumah had in political detention — was reportedly one of the reasons that Kwame Appiah's doctor was deported.
The combination of her anxieties about her husband and her son put her under a great deal of strain, which was increased by the fact that she was pregnant at the time with her youngest child, Abena, who was extremely ill for much of her infancy. Nevertheless, she continued to maintain a stable home for her children and to work quietly for her husband's release, with the assistance of her mother, Lady Cripps, who was able to visit her son-in-law at Ussher Fort in 1962.
Lady Cripps returned to England with her sick grandson. Just before Christmas 1962, Joe was released from prison and allowed to return to legal practice. The anxieties of the final years of the Nkrumah regime were relieved in 1966, by the coup that ousted Nkrumah. In the years that followed, as her children were abroad at boarding schools and universities, and her husband was active once more in Ghanaian politics and as an ambassador for the nation, she stayed mostly in Kumasi, providing the base from which he could travel out into the world, secure in the knowledge that Peggy was taking care of things on the home front. She kept an eye on the properties he had inherited from his grand-uncle. Despite her family’s extensive political involvements, Peggy herself was not particularly interested in party politics. She supported her husband, of course. But her own contributions were through the wide range of social work she engaged in. Having learned Twi, the language of the Asante,she became interested in and knowledgeable about Akan art and folklore, as she acquired a major goldweight collection, began collecting and translating proverbs, and learned Ananse stories, many of them from her husband. For three decades, a visit to her house and her goldweight collection was one of the highlights of a visit to Ashanti for visitors interested in its art.
Lady Cripps walking with Young Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah, with Peggy Appiah holding her other daughter.
From the mid-1960s onwards, she began to publish a series of volumes of Ananse stories, retold for children, which became widely known in Africa, England and America and throughout the English-speaking world. Beginning with Ananse the Spider: Tales from an Ashanti Village in 1966, and followed by Tales of an Ashanti Father, she went on to publish the Children of Ananse in 1968, The Pineapple Child and Other Tales from Asante in 1969, Why There are So Many Roads in 1972, and Why the Hyena Does Not Care for Fish and Other Tales from the Ashanti Gold Weights in 1977. She also published a series of readers to help Ghanaian children learn English: The Lost Earring, Yao and the Python, Abena and the Python, Afua and the Mouse and Kofi and the Crow, as well as a series of novels for children and adults, including Gift of the Mmoatia and Ring of Gold, and two volumes of poetry. Some of her works are used as set texts in primary and secondary schools in West Africa.Perhaps, her most important publication, however, which was the result of nearly five decades of work, was Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan, a collection of over 7,000 Twi proverbs that was launched in Accra in 2001.
In 1985, she and Joe Appiah traveled abroad together to visit their friend Kamuzu Banda, President of Malawi, whom they had known during his period of exile in Ghana, to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of Malawi’s independence. They traveled widely around the country, before going on to stay with their daughter Abena, who was then living in Zimbabwe, and Ama, who was working in Angola. Later in the decade, they made a visit to Ama in Norway, where Joe was diagnosed with the cancer that claimed his life in 1990.
Final years
In 1990, a widow, Peggy Appiah never considered leaving Ghana, telling anyone who asked her when she was “going home,” that she was home already. She moved into a smaller house, which she built in a compound with a house for her daughter Abena, continued to work for her church, and went on studying Akan folklore. She visited her son and her daughters in the United States, Namibia and Nigeria, and was visited in turn by her children and sons-in-law, and her six grandsons, Kristian, Anthony and Kojo, children of Ama (Isobel) and Klaus Endresen; and Tomiwa, Lamide and Tobi, children of Adwoa and Ola Edun. In the house next to her, with her daughter Abena, were her two grandchildren, Mimi and Mame Yaa.
Awards
In 1996, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the MBE "for services to UK/Ghanaian relations and community welfare".
She was awarded an honorary degree by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 2005.
Last years
In 2001, Peggy Appiah visited England for the last time to celebrate her 80th birthday with the surviving members of her own generation in her family and her children and grandchildren, along with many nephews and nieces and great-nephews and nieces.
In the final years of her life, as she became increasingly limited in her movements, she continued to be the center of a wide network of family and friends, and a caring household led by her housekeeper, Ma Rose. As she wrote at the end of her autobiography, published in 1995: “I thank God for all He has given me and the happiness He has brought me."
Death
Peggy Appiah died on 11 February 2006, aged 84,[8] from undisclosed causes, at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi. She was buried at Tafo cemetery in Kumasi, where she had bought a plot for herself beside her husband's grave.
Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1511303/Peggy-Appiah.html
Thanks for this brilliant piece on Joe Appiah. Very enlightening and I enjoyed reading.
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