Dagara Cultural History: Cardinal Peter Poreku Dery

Dery, Peter Porekuu:- The significance of Dery’s birth narrative is partly embedded in both his personal given name and family names and partly in the recent historical experiences of his kinship group and the Dagara people as a whole. The Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso of West Africa assign the personal name Dery to a male spirit incarnate who has already experienced a brief moment of human life and death at an early age. This happens when a male child of a couple dies before he is weaned. He is buried with a mark on his body and would be identified as the same individual if the next immediate child born to the same couple and after a few years, is also a male child and is carrying this mark. A similar process but within the context of the birth of a female child would produce a female spirit incarnate and the name Derpog will be assigned to the individual. Porekuu Dery was born into a kin and family group that had, over generations, maintained a great measu...

A DAGAO WITH THE DAGARA, A SISALA WITH THE SISALA "I have heard it said of me that "as for Archbishop Dery, he has no fixed identity. He has brothers and sisters everywhere, in Tizza, in Ko, in Zemuopare, in Konguol and even among the Sisala. He is related to everybody". For many, it is only a pious pretension on my part to try to appropriate the words of St. Paul who claims to be a Jew with the Jews and a Gentile with the Gentiles. But there is more to the matter than mere spiritualism. I grew up to learn from my elders that my people originally moved from Dagbong to Mossi country (Moo-tenga). How long they stayed there, I do not know. What I gather is that there was fission in the family after some time and a large portion of it moved away from there. They are said to have moved South. None of those of us still living remembers ever having been told the reason for the move from Moo-tenga. Was it due to a quarrel or some family disagreement? I do not know. As th...